Eric, I am bookmarking this site. It has the most comprehensive info and definitely allows "what works for me" rather than following the crowd in standard design. Great information, great writing. A lot of cost saving revelations without going on the cheap.

Anyone else reading this should head over there. I would enjoy hearing feedback too.

I had just posted about this site in the "bon ami/ barkeepers friend" thread. Lots of fun info about the history of kitchens and even the prices of food.

I just read and article on Arts & Crafts architecture that was wonderful. debrak, is this what you were talking about? It has a lot of information about the history or A&C kitchens, food prices, and so on. I like the writing style, informative without being ponderous. I try to teach my students how to write like that, but its an uphill battle.

I own an American Bungalow, so the historical information was very interesting to me. Today I'm going to climb into the attic to examine the rafters and see if my house is a Sears kit house.

But even if you don't live in an old house, you will probably find the article fascinating.

Here is a link that might be useful: Arts & Crafts Houses

OMG.

I'm not getting anything done with all these fascinating articles!
These have such historical detail. None of the shallow, too-often-reproduced, commonly known info.

I love it!
I want to bungalow-ize my home, since it's in a raw state. I'm looking for someone at least to draw what's in my head, but can't even find that. In the meanwhile, I collect information and pictures...!

Christine

Eric,

Thanks for the link. I went over and got some very useful info on windows, and am looking forward to browsing the rest of the site, too.

I agree, it's not the trite, scraped-from-other-sites stuff - someone put a lot of thought into the writing and how generous he/she is with their knowledge and experience.

Thanks for the link - happy new year.

Kris

Great site, thanks! Real information, not a sales pitch.

I can see myself spending a lot of time going through the information on that site. Already found a couple articles there that would be excellent for people planning kitchen remodels:

How to Measure Your Kitchen (very nice explanations with diagrams)

and

Mise en Place: What we can learn from commercial kitchens. (lots of bits and pieces we know, but its all put together in one spot with reasons and comparisons why some things work or don't work)

After getting "lost" on the website for 2 hours, I'd say you are right. Tons of great information!

I wish I had read the mise-en-place article before doing my kitchen. I would have lowered my upper cabinets. This looks like a great website. thanks for linking it.

Just thinking...that if starcraft counts hits on their web site they will be getting very excited with all the activity. Yes, Eric-E, thats what I was reading. I found the site googling "craftsman style backsplash".

I have been doing a lot of research on the web in preparation for remodeling by craftsman bungalow. There is so much information on this site that it should have shown up in one of my searches. But I think I've figured it out. In search results the air articles seem to always start with "StarCraft Custom Builder..." If I'm looking for information on faucets or kitchen design ideas, I'm certainly not going to open a link described as "StarCraft Custom Builders". Starcraft's web designer should do a little more to make the site look more relevant in web search results.

Anyway, I'm glad everyone seems to have found the site useful. If anyone is planning any remodeling, this is the probably place they should start. I just finished the article on restoring windows. I can't say I understood all of it, but it certainly was well written and contained a lot of information.

I just read the article there titled "Off the Wall Kitchens: Living Without Upper Cabinets" and the information there about storage options is amazing.

The article talks about 30" deep base cabinets as opposed to the standard 24". That 6" can turn into huge amounts of storage. Drawers can be made deeper and then there's the option for a 16" deep upper cabinet, instead of just 12".

Its got me rethinking my dream kitchen, that's for sure.

Eric --

If you google "Sears archives," you will find a catalog of all the kits Sears ever marketed.

If you google "Arts & Crafts Society," the url that reads .com rather than .org is a site by and for afficianados, with Q & A on restoration of houses, among other things.

Finally, there is relevant info in The Old House forum on gardenweb, including a recent one on Sears houses that has some useful info on identification. Posted there are before and after photos of my retirement account project. I had identified it as Sears' Americus from the archives, but I only found the labels affixed to the back of the baseboards.

Best wishes for a gratifying adventure. I'd do it again in a second, but I would have to sell this one to buy anything else.

Here is a link that might be useful: Sears kit house thread.

honorbiltkit,

I'm just getting started with this kit house identification business. My neighbor, who is smarter than I am about such things, took a look at a label on the old bath sink I have stored in the garage and concluded that I may have an Aladdin (sp?) kit house.

Thanks for the input. I will give these sites a look see. I also remember something associated with a magazine about how to investigate a house's history. I think it was the "Arts & Crafts Homes and the Revival" website.

Thank you, Eric, for an informative link. Lots of good stuff. I've bookmarked it and will look again...and again.......
B

I read once that 24" because standard because plywood is 48" wide, so they could get more cabinets out of the wood that were they bigger.

Then, the way they're shrinking wood (a 2x4 isn't!) they'll probably start shrinking plywood soon, too.

Grrrr...

Wow, now I just need more hours in the day. Bookmarked. Thank you Eric-E!

Well, first, thank you Eric-E for posting the link. And, thanks to all who e-mailed us or put comments in their ratings report to alert us to what Eric had done.

I'm sorry that we simply do not have the time or resources required to answer everyone's questions individually. We are a remodeling company, not a research service. But, here are answers to the most frequent questions we received over the past 24 hours:

1. We designed the website to be as informative as possible because we prefer working with smart, informed clients.

The more a client knows, the easier our job becomes. When we design a kitchen or bathroom for you, it is your kitchen or bath, not ours. We already did ours. We are merely the technicians who have to somehow get in touch with the ideas and mental pictures you have in your head and get them down on paper (or in the modern world, into a CAD file). That translation is a whole lot easier if everyone is speaking the same vernacular. The best way for you to learn the language is to, in effect, become a minor expert on designing kitchens and baths. For that you need resources, so we decided, rather than answering the same questions over and over again, we would just provide the resources.

We don't try to be the only resource. This forum, for example, is a great resource. Just from a quick survey of the threads it's clear that many of the questions that are being asked here are very smart questions, and show that forum users are being creative and innovative in their own designs. What we try to do is fill in the gaps. If no one is talking about kitchen ergonomics, or how deeper cabinets can be used effectively in a kitchen, or why is makes no difference whether you use porcelain or ceramic tile, then we write about it. Hopefully, if nothing else, it will get some discussion going.

There is also the issue of compatibility. Our approach to period sensitive and economical design, in line with the design philosophy of Sarah Susanska of Not So Big House fame, simply does not fit everyone. Rather than spending hours and days on a design just to find out that we are just not a good fit, our clients can read all about how we do things even before we get started, and make the decision early whether we would work well together.

2. Sorry, we do not, for any price, bribe or inducement, remodel anything outside of Nebraska.

You are certainly welcome to move to Lincoln where unemployment is under 4% (which is a major concern, it's usually under 2%), and there is no crime or grime to speak of. If you do, we will be delighted to work with you on a new kitchen, bath, addition, deck, garage or whole house update. But get settled first. Tour the only Art Deco capitol building in the world, take in the amazing Lincoln Symphony at the Leed Center, and certainly go to a Husker football game -- a ritual no one should miss out on. Get used to living where neighborly is consider natural, where there are over 100 city parks, and where, if your newspaper gets lost in the snow, the guy that brings you the replacement just might be the managing editor. Then we'll talk.

But even though you foolishly insist on living someplace that is not Nebraska, we can still help you with a comprehensive, computer aided, three dimensional design for your kitchen or bath, provided your house was built before 1966 and you intend to fit your update to the style, theme, tenor and decor of Your Old House. If your heart is set on a colonial kitchen in your Craftsman house, please go elsewhere. In the digital age, whether your designer lives across the street or across the county really no longer makes a different. It's all electronic, now. In fact, only one of our staff designers actually lives in Lincoln. The rest are spread all over.

Our cabinet shop in Beatrice, NE can also provide you with the cabinets, trim, moldings, and accessories required. We specialize in reproducing old trim and moldings, and in period cabinetry and furnishings. We will work with you or your designer, and your local contractor to make sure everything works out.

We also know a lot of like-minded remodelers in other places and may be able to steer you to someone in your city. But we will under no circumstances actually go there. We've been there, and we like it here better. No offense intended.

3. We have three articles in the hopper to be published in the next quarter:

"Pantry Perfection" -- all about how to design efficient pantries and fit them into your kitchen no matter how small;

"The Greener Kitchen" - how to design and build an ecologically responsible kitchen, and

"The Toxic Mold Myth" -- how the mold scare became so completely overblown as to border on complete insanity.

And, we are constantly improving on and expanding existing articles, so just because you read it once, does not mean you should not read it again.

Eric, to address your note about how we appear in search engine results, I have asked our web manager about that, and he is looking into it. Thanks for alerting us to the problem.

Thanks again to all,

Jim Edgar,
Managing Partner
StarCraft Custom Builders

Thanks for all the great information, Jim, I sort of got lost in your website earlier today. Great ideas for ways to save money on a kitchen redo (angling a base drawer unit across a corner -- why doesn't anyone seem to do that?). I ran across your faucet reviews a few months ago but hadn't realized there was so much more on your site. We have found that infrastructure updates (the stuff you can't see) will eat up a lot of the kitchen budget in our older house. That's OK though... I will be happy knowing that the dips in the floor are stable and that the wiring and plumbing are sound. So anyway, I was especially interested in the descriptions of US architecture through the decades and I also appreciate the writing style... especially the instance where the author called out a grammar error in a quoted passage (use of "their" instead of "his or her") by writing "sic" afterward. ha!

I always use (and refer others to) Starcraft's version of the NKBA "rules." Starcraft explains and amplifies those guidelines in an instructive way.

northcarolina

Oh lord! We have so many typos on our pages that I'm loath to criticize anyone else's grammar. Where did you find the elitist "sic"?

Angie DIY

Thanks for the kudos. Actually, NKBA explains the guidelines very well, you just have to pay $300.00 for the class.

Have you seen our updated Illustrated Rules of Good Bathroom Design? We just finished the update over the Xmas break, adding a lot more information on storage and ventilation guidelines.

HonorBiltKit,

Turns our our town has an official Preservation Specialit as part of the planning department, and he's working today. He took a look at the photos of my house in the assessor's file (now that's scary), and concluded that mine is not a kit house. He even know who had built it and sent me pics of other houses built by the same builder. All very interesting. So that's that. I am officially not a kit house owner.

Shucks!

Haha! It wasn't elitist grammar at all (though please don't comb through my forum posts) -- it's just nice to see someone acknowledge that "their" is not in fact a possessive singular pronoun, no matter how often it's used that way. Yeah, "his or her" is clunky too. Not a perfect language, English.

It was on Faucet Reviews page 2, Peerless, Warranty:
"[T]o the original consumer purchaser ... for as long as the original consumer purchaser owns their (sic) home."
Only a fellow grammar-OCD person would have put in that "sic" so it made me smile. (Probably I need a life...)

Thanks xoldtimecarpenter for such a fantastic resource, and thanks Eric-E for sharing such a rare find. Definitely to bookmark and refer to often.

northcarolina,

Ok, turns our we clipped that from a vendor's website. The vendor's OCD-grammarian web master must have inserted the (sic).

I'm more than a little OCD about the English language, myself. It ain't perfect, but it's 'way ahead of any other. A professor of language at the U told me once that English has about 5 times the words of any other Indo-European language, which is why we can be so exact and so colorful in our expressions.

Anyway, use the word "less" when you should have used "fewer" and watch for the blast from my Sister-Mary-Bienevenuda's-Fifth-Grade-Grammar catholic school past.

xoldtimecarpenter: another thing to keep in mind is that your google ratings may be hurt (now or in the future) because your pages do a form of 'keyword stuffing' which is explicitly against google guidelines (in your search term listing section). They auto-detect when a site does this and your site pages can end up with worse rankings than they would without it or may even be removed entirely from google search results. Their algorithms to detect this change all the time (i.e. you could wake up one day and your site could be gone from google because they pushed a change). It's not worth it to risk it.

See Google guidelines about this here

So pleased you responded to us. And hope the "powers to be" know we wanted to hear from you. I can imagine the number of questions that are asked. Although you have given enough information that I personally wouldn't be able to figure out a question at this point.

The entire site has so much information and great to have a place to go that doesn't tout business every other line of writing. On the other side, I would be visiting in a minute if in NB. Great stuff you have shared throughout and will be going back numerous times to read your updates and regroup my ideas. Plus I wouldn't be surprised if you didn't get suggestions from this group for subject matter.

Your direction for the information was right and you got it right. All the information allowed me to be me and not steered towards what has to be. Along with what should be, code wise. I don't think there is a place to go with the amount of information and creative possibilities which are put together for reaching so many levels of reading/thought in design for our reaching to get there.

I spent 2 hours reading. If you have time, enjoy us too. There are many here with wonderful results through many roads in getting there.

Thanks and success in your endeavors.

emagineer,

Users here should absolutely feel free to suggest article topics. Most of our articles were written after client suggestions. We welcome any suggestions, kudos, remarks, criticisms, observations, notes, or corrections -- especially corrections to our ever-present typos.

zartemis,

I'm not really sure what you are talking about, but here is the response from our web guru, who does: "....Keyword stuffing is the practice of repeating key words or phrases over and over on a web page in an effort to influence search engine rankings. There are "blackhat" and "whitehat" versions of it. The most reprehensible blackhat practice is to stuff keywords in such a way that they are not visible to the reader, but are noticed by search engine robots. One of the usual ways of doing this is using hidden text. For that reason, most search engines simply prohibit hidden text (although there are some entirely ethical ways of properly using hidden text -- and, in fact, Google uses it on its web site). Another blackhat practice is to load a site with keywords unrelated to the site's content.

In the whitehat version, keywords are used in the normal flow of text in such a manner that they help convey content and do not result in a negative experience for the user.

Blackhatting is considered unethical SEO behavior, and we don't do it. Whitehatting is a common method of improving search engine rankings and is a major tool in every SEO's toolbox. When we suggest text changes to you from time to time, the usual purpose of the change is to include a word or phrase that we think better describes the content of the article to search engines. Because search engine robots do not read text the way people do, sometime the changes can seem a little awkward to your readers, but that's one of the consequences of using search engine robots that are, all things considered, rather stupid. White hatting can be overdone, however, and too much of it crosses the line into blackhatting. Where that line is no one is absolutely sure, but we try to stay far away from it.

If you offer search term assistance to your readers, then you are necessarily going to have to present words and phrases for their consideration that are in the form of some kind of list. Provided the words are, in fact, relevant to subject of the main article, the list itself is an appropriate and proper web page content. We do, however, structure search terms lists in a manner that we believe makes them invisible to search robots, so they cannot possibly influence search rankings.

None of the search terms are actually in the body of the HTML code used to generate your web pages. They are all created on the fly by a JavaScript routine when the reader loads the page. This process has two purposes. First, the words are not visible to search robots, and second, it allows us to change the search terms without revising the HTML code. We also place the terms in the head of the document (this is the part not visible to the user) in such a manner that they are not noticed by search robots. We use a non-standard meta tag "searchterms", which we are pretty sure the robots ignore. I say "pretty sure" because search engine providers go through a lot of trouble to keep the exact process by which their search robots work a closely guarded secret. When we first started doing this the search terms were in the "keywords" tag, which is a standard tag, and which some older search engines still use to determine rankings. Some of your older documents may still be using the "keywords" tag. We are making the change over to "searchterms" as time permits.

We have tested the rankings of your site with search terms displayed and not displayed (I'll bet you did not know we can switch sections of each page on an off for testing purposes), and the presence or absence of search terms appears to make no difference to your page rankings. Either way your site is on, and usually at the top of, the first page in both the local and organic sections of the search results of the three main search engines in your Lincoln, NE market area.

As to whether offering search term suggestions on a website is proper, take a look at the bottom of any Google search. See the words "searches related to ...". These are Google's search term suggestions, and if Google does it, it cannot be all that sinister.

Anyway, bottom line, while your informant was obviously well-intentioned, he or she did not have all the facts. We do not engage in unethical practice, and certainly do not keyword stuff.

By the way, it's nice that you are finally paying a little attention to how the technology works."

If you need more information, please drop me a note at staff@starcraftcustombuilders.com and I'll see if I can't get you two guys together.

I can't resist the plug for Nebraska. :-) Hoorah!

My husband and I moved here 10 years ago from the Washington DC area (and us having grown up in Philadelphia and South Carolina). Packing up and moving to an "unknown town" in "flyover country" changed our lifestyle for the better. Lower cost of living, relaxed atmosphere and still all the "culture" that you want. ...and remodeling guys who's goal is in life is to get paid for an honest good days work. (Grin.)

dainaadele,

I really like the "get paid" part.

Belated welcome to Nebraska.

Wow. That is a great website. I'll be driving through Nebraska in June, and I'm looking forward to it a great deal more than I was before this thread came up. I need to find an interesting spot to spend the night. I welcome suggestions from Nebraskens!

These folks may have an idea or two on interesting places to stay: Nebraska Torist Office.