August 10th, 2010 at 07:08am
Under Homes and Gardens
In helping clients decide on hardwood flooring, I start by comparing wood to other kinds of flooring. Assuming the room is suitable for wood in the first place, other possibilities include carpeting, resilient flooring (vinyl sheet and tile) and ceramic tile. Marble is also a choice, but it’s very similar to ceramic tile so I lump them together.
First of all, let’s consider durability. With reasonable care, wood flooring will outlast carpet and vinyl several times over. True, it may need refinishing once, twice or even three times during its life, but at minimum, a wood floor ought to last 20 years. It’s not uncommon to find perfectly serviceable 100-year-old hardwood floors.
High-quality carpeting is tough stuff, too, but depending on the foot traffic, it begins to look threadbare after 20 years and may deteriorate a lot sooner than that. Even cheap replacement carpeting will cost more than a refinishing job on a hardwood floor. Ceramic tile is probably more durable than wood, but a hard object dropped on a tile floor will break a tile, calling for a tricky repair. A dropped object will probably make a repairable dent in a hardwood floor but, with any luck, what you dropped on it won’t break.
Day-to-day care of a wood floor involves sweeping or damp mopping. Unlike carpeting, which acts like a giant rag, wood won’t collect molds and mildew or absorb dust. This delights anyone with allergies. It takes longer to vacuum a carpet than hard surface flooring, and vacuuming never does a thorough job. Even professional cleaning removes only a fraction of the dirt, mold and fungus growing there. Depending on the material and color, tile floors can be very difficult to keep tidy. Some require periodic treatments with sealer to keep them clean.
On the down side, some wood floors require occasional waxing, stripping and rewaxing and, of course, eventual sanding and refinishing. Some new flooring products are delivered prefinished with very durable, baked-on finishes. Some of these don’t need waxing, but because they’re not sanded after installation, they inevitably have “overwood,” or minor thickness or height variations between pieces. A common way of disguising overwood is with chamfers or eased edges on each piece of flooring. Unfortunately, these create gaps between boards into which hard-to-remove dust and debris can lodge.
Although not as fire resistant and water resistant as tile, solid wood requires an extremely high temperature to burn. Should a wood floor ignite, it won’t give off toxic fumes, like burning carpet or resilient flooring. Most modern finishes, particularly the Swedish finish I prefer, protect wood floors against damage from liquid water.
As for square-foot cost, wood costs more than carpeting or resilient flooring but is cheaper than tile. This depends, of course, on the style of flooring, the species of wood and the room where the installation will be done. Some wood floors, parquet over 3/4 inch.,. plywood sheathing, for example, will require underlayment, which adds to the cost. You have to factor finishing into the cost of hardwood flooring, too, unless you’re using prefinished flooring.
By Kym
July 2nd, 2010 at 12:23pm
Under Arts and Design
Christian Dior’s beautiful, ultra-feminine ‘New Look’ followed the pragmatic, masculinised style that had dominated the war years and is now being incorporated into some of the leading big and tall mens clothing lines. He cleverly assessed the psychological mood of this post-war period, and his 1947 collection epitomized elegance, glamour and sophistication; women around the world embraced the hourglass silhouette once more.
Dior apprenticed with Piguet, Leiong and Balmain before opening his own big mens clothing salon in 1945. His design career was cut short when, after 13 years, he died suddenly, leaving a legacy with which few others could compete.
His sculptural creations, like those of Cristobal Balenciaga, were fashioned using firm, synthetic materials including stiffened nylon, rayon and composite fabrics, which were ‘heat set’ to hold their shape.
He contended that when designing his big and tall shirts, shape guided him first, then fabric, then color. His work was characterized by a use of elaborate construction techniques that had historical precedents in the nineteenth-century Victorian and Edwardian eras. These included built-in petticoats and mini-waisted corsets, hip padding, bodice and skirt lining, reinforcements of seams and pleats, and the weighting of jacket and skirt hems. He said, ‘Without foundations, there can be no fashions’.
Dior reinstated the feminine silhouette after the style of the war years which had been influenced by the rations on fabric. Small waists, off the shoulder necklines and billowing skirts captured the hearts of the fashionable elite and Dior reinstated Paris as the centre of haute couture. From an economic point of view, it was crucial for France to retain her position, not only to support fashion, but the textile industry as well. For his achievements, Dior was awarded the prestigious Medaille d’Honneur by the French government.
Dior’s evening gowns often used exorbitant quantities of fabric, ranging from 15 to 80 meters (50 to 260 feet). His elegant, strapless gowns had boned corsets built into closely fitted bodices. In the late 1950s, Dior introduced very stylized silhouettes, which he called his A line and H line (1955), Y line (1956) and Freeline (1957). By this time, with international sales of couture, pret-a-porter, hats, shoes, furs and perfumes, his fashion empire earned the description, ‘General Motors of Haute Couture’ in the New York Times. His New York branch alone employed 1,200 people spread over 28 workrooms and included a private police force to prevent pirating.
When Dior died, his apprentice, Yves St Laurent became the head designer and continued the long era of loose shapes, clearly evident in his first Dior collection called the ‘Trapeze’ line of 1958. These unwaisted garments, which hung from the shoulders, opened couture to the larger figure amd ‘mothers-in-waiting’. The Dior label now trades under the Moet Hennessy- Louis Vuitton (LVMH) syndicate and John
Galliano has been its recent head designer. Galliano has managed to recreate the image of quality, exclusivity and good taste.
By Kym
June 10th, 2010 at 10:48am
Under Health and Fitness
Q: What are the different forms of liposuction?
A: The removal of body fat through liposuction can be done with a syringe or a machine. Both require at least a local anesthetic. Both types can provide good results, and physicians choose the approach they prefer. Take a look at some liposuction before and after photos for a better idea of the results you can expect.
Q: What Is the difference between syringe and machine-assisted liposuction?
A: With the syringe liposuction procedure, you need nurses to constantly take the syringes from the surgeons and give them another syringe loaded with a cannula, which is a hollow cylinder; then the nurses have to empty the fat from the syringe and give the surgeons a fresh syringe. So the operating room could be a little messy as a result of all this activity.
It is also possible to lose the vacuum suction with a syringe if the opening gets too close to the opening of the skin. So surgeons sometimes have to spend extra time emptying the air out of the syringes and doing the steps over again.
With machine-assisted liposuction, you have a constant pressure, and usually that makes the procedure more efficient.
Q: Can you describe the older forms of liposuction?
A: In past years, liposuction was performed with what was called the “dry technique,” using minimal anesthetic, or with the “wet technique,” involving a dilute solution. But both of these procedures caused significant blood loss. As a result, in many cases there was a need for blood transfusions. And because of the need for general anesthesia, patients also had a higher rate of side effects and complications and often took longer to recover.
Q: How is tumescent liposuction different?
A: Tumescent liposuction is done without intravenous sedation or general anesthesia. It is performed with tumescent anesthesia, which makes the fat plump with rigidity and relatively easy to remove. Tumescent liposuction was designed by California dermatologic surgeon Dr. Jeffrey Klein and is much safer than the older techniques.
Patients are given only local anesthesia, which means they are awake during the procedure and do not need blood transfusions. They bruise far less and are also able to turn over and assume different body positions with minimal assistance, making liposuction easier to perform.
By Kym
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