The plumber is here and the pipe that’s leaking is a big one — basically, it is the main pathway water takes when leaving our home. I’m going to guess that this is going to cost us a pretty penny. Ah, the joys of home ownership! To take my mind off of the coming bill, I’ve been window shopping for a bed to put in the upstairs guest room once we’ve actually renovated the upstairs. I’ve narrowed it down to three:

I’ve always loved daybeds, as impractical as they are for grownup people like myself. If I could get a giant version of this bed from Sachi Organics, I’d be happy.

Felt upholstery and thick seams make this bed (available at Design Public) feel more like a big comfy pillow…or so the theory goes. I like it because it’s blue.

This last one — from The Kids Window — pretty much speaks for itself.

Can you guess which one The Beard prefers?

I love niche blogs. Back when Manolo for the Home was just getting off the ground, I posted about a blog devoted entirely to faux bois and another that concerns itself with nothing but Ikea hacking. I just recently came across another such blog — this one a tribute to ugly mailboxes.

Where I live, no one keeps a roadside mailbox. All of ours are attached to houses or porches, and some people even have slots in their front doors, as I’m led to believe is quite common in England. My father, mother, and grandparents all receive their mail in regulation-height boxes located on the very edge of their properties so the mail person needn’t get out of their truck. Now and then, jerky teens with driver’s licenses whiz by with bats and knock them over. Perhaps this is simply one of the perils of suburban living?

A certain Tim Morris wrote about suburban mailboxes, and I found his description of the average specimens to be apropos.

I began to look at everyone else’s mailbox on my walks. Were they as nice as mine? Did they have the E-Z Up construction? How did the neighbors manage to attach those foot-thick oblong cedar braces with the provided “Self-Tapping Wood Screws”? I certainly hadn’t been able to do that. Mailboxes were worth another look.

There are two kinds of mailbox: the ugly, and the hideous. Ugly mailboxes consist of a rounded steel box mounted on a plain length of pipe. Hideous mailboxes try to look like they are not mailboxes. Or rather, they try to look like mailboxes that are attractively shaped unlike mailboxes. No one wants to camouflage a mailbox so well that they hide its purpose completely. In this respect, mailboxes are like lamps. You know the lamps that purport to be coffee grinders, clocks, Chevrolets, Elvises, objets d’art, cigar boxes, stumps of petrified wood . . . each one with a lightbulb coming brazenly out of the top of it. So it is with hideous mailboxes. They flaunt their obvious disguise of their own obviousness.

The mailboxes I like least are the ones embedded in the chests of half-sized concrete manatees. It’s a Florida thing, I think. What did the ugliest mailbox you’ve ever seen look like?

We’ve all looked at something in a shop or in a magazine and thought to ourselves, “I could do that!” In fact, I think so highly of my crafty skills and home improvement chops that it’s rare for me to look at a project and think, “I couldn’t do that.” But when illustrator Christoph Niemann decided it was time to renovate the bathrooms in his Berlin home he and his wife Lisa threw themselves into the project in a way I have neither the time nor the patience to match.

The couple began by breaking down images they liked into mosaic form to find the inspiration they needed. They tried a lot of combos before settling on Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box for the shower, Judith Samen’s Die Fettecke for the tub, and a NYC subway theme for the kids’ bath.

Sound like a lot of work? All is not lost! There are plenty of places that sell colored tiles — like Amazon, of all places — and you needn’t create a perfect masterpiece of art and practicality. Let’s say you’d optimally like to mosaic-ify a beach scene in your bathroom. Instead of knocking yourself out trying to recreate your favorite vacation pics, grab a bunch of tiles in colors that strike you as beachy, like so:

And put together a casual, abstract design using either whole or broken tiles. That’s the nice thing about DIY — it doesn’t have to be perfect to be perfect, if you catch my drift. Trust me when I say that while you may always see the one off-kilter tile, the people in your life will almost always see the 99 tiles that are placed just right.

If you’re in the market for some place to put down roots and you have a little scratch to toss around, you have a couple of choices. For example, you can buy an existing house or buy a plot of land and have someone build a fresh house to your specs. When you want to make sure you’re as abso-posi-lutely eco-friendly as possible, it’s time to take a pause. After all, it’s not about living in a geodesic dome or digging out an earth house anymore! Today’s “green” homes — the ones that use less energy, are built using fewer resources, and contain a lower volume of nasty chemicals — look just like their neighbors.

Well, most of the time. This eco-house in the Cambridgeshire countryside is pretty unique, inside and out.

But back to the topic at hand! I know I’ve heard a lot of people say that it’s better for the environment to drive a well-maintained used car than to buy a new hybrid, though I don’t know how valid that is. I’ve been trying to figure out whether that same maxim applies to houses as well. Is it better for the environment to buy an older house that’s already been built and then do what you can to retrofit it for eco-friendliness, or is it better to start from zero (either knocking down an extant house or buying a piece of land) with a new house that meets every criteria for greenitude right from the start?

On one hand, there are plenty of things you can do to greenify your home without having to build a new one. On the other hand, there are plenty of sustainable building materials you might use to create a home that is unobtrusive within its environment. The overall expense aside, how does using a previously untouched piece of land fit into the equation?

I’d love to hear your take on this because I haven’t come to any real conclusion yet and my (admittedly spotty) research hasn’t gotten me very far!