apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

Speaking of stimulus packages...

Business Week writes about how big box chains are trying to lure you into spending your stimulus checks in their stores. According to the National Retail Federation $42.9 billion is up for grabs and stores are figuring out different way to lure you into spending your stimulus check with them.

Sears and Kmart are both offering customers gift cards in exchange for their entire check! In return stimulus shoppers will get an extra 10 percent of credit on their card...

If I was a rich girl, nanananananana
See, I'd have all the money in the world, if I was a wealthy girl
The Dama TV wardrobe would be mine, all mine, if I only had all the money in the world...

And off we go again on our tech tour of this year's Small Cool spaces. Over the past week we've been looking at creative ways this year's Small Cool finalists have incorporated technology into their homes. Today we go to Mike and Nicole's apartment in Chicago...

Chicken coops tend not to bring thoughts of high design and innovation. The introduction of the Eglu in 2004 by British company Omlet changed the way urbanites think about raising hens.

With economic stimulus checks reaching mailboxes this week, we can't think of a better way to spend your 600 clucks -- we mean bucks.

Lets take a closer look at just how amazing the Eglu and the new Eglu Cube are and how you could soup it up...

As we continue with our look at the best tech in this year's Small Cool contest we go to Ginger's San Francisco loft where she's built a hanging shelf for her media center...

Not all media centers start off looking rad. Sometimes you need to get creative with that MDF unit and make it look a little less like college dorm furniture. Using contact paper can be a great way to bring some depth to that medium-density fiberboard...

It's official. We're in love. Please welcome our soul mate, the Fractured Fairy Tale.

Made by designer Thomas Wold, the piece is a wall unit made for his client in order to house their A/V equipment and books. "We wanted to grab the entire wall with a graphical design," Wold writes on his blog. "I suggested a design encompassing a series of separate boxes that would stack on top of each other so one could use the negative and positive for storage."

Warning: Stop reading if you're eating breakfast. A new study has found that your keyboard may be five times as filthy as a toilet seat. Yes, you could be typing away on the equivalent of butt germs! [via Treehugger]

A microbiologist swabbed keyboards in a typical London office and found 150 times the recommended limit of bacteria. The main culprit: eating at your desk. After the jump, five ways to clean-up...

This cord cozy reminds us of this week's earlier post on tangled electric wire lamps. Now if this cozy was made by the graffiti knitting gang, Knitta Please, you could consider it a work for art. But it ain't, so we ask the question...

If you haven't checked out the pads in Apartment Therapy's Small Cool 2008 contest we strongly urge you to. Hot damn there are some good ideas and some are on the tech front. We'll be posting some of the best tech set-ups found in the contest here. Today we start with New York's finalists Hilary and Tony in Brooklyn, NY.

Did you know that your current mattress may have polyurethane and formaldehyde in it. Not only are those harmful materials for the environment, they aren't the best chemicals to be sleeping on. Unless, you know, you're already dead and need to be preserved.

For those of use that want to rest green there's Keetsa, an eco-bedding company that not only makes green beds, it's designed their mattresses to have a smaller carbon footprint as it travels from their warehouse to your home...

As I continue planning my move from vertical to horizontal workspace I've been trying to figure out how I want to raise my computer monitor. This image from Monica, one of AT:SF's Small Cool 2008 entries, gave me an idea...

We have a love/hate relationship with Spring cleaning. It's definitely nice to purge your home of unnecessary clutter (trust us, you're never going to use that CRT monitor again). But the drawback of making executive decisions is that your eco-conscious takes a real beating...

We love Ikea hacks and this one may be the geekiest and easiest to date. How it was made after the jump...

When you have a home recording studio aesthetics tend to get thrown out the door. In order to properly sound proof your space you have to use ugly egg-crate gray foam or eighties looking acoustic panels, but there are other options...

If you've ever gone to a spa you've probably noticed that pebbles and rocks play a large part in the décor. There's something relaxing about carefully arranged rock gardens, so it makes sense that you would want to transfer that mood to when you're watching a movie...

This great DIY project comes to us via Design*Sponge. While the desk as shown seems to be used for storage and crafts, this could easily be modified to be an office desk or TV stand...

Etsy is a goldmine for gadget and geek accessories you didn't know you needed. Every month we'll be rounding up the best finds from craftsters from around the world.

This month we found a rad needlepoint laptop case, speakers made to look like Fender amps, a Karim Rashid-like TV and DVD stand, and a few things to help you boast your g33ky lifestyle...

Ah the doorbell, so little has been done to upgrade you since your invention by Joseph Henry in 1831. Your chimes tend to be startling, and occasionally annoying, your presence is all but hidden, yet you're one of the most important accessories of home life.

Let us toast your existence with a toast of a doorbell. Here, here...

We love video game systems -- the older the better -- but the more classic the machine the fuglier it is. That's why we're psyched to see this latest NES mod...

Bragging about your Dirt Devil goes hand in hand with drooling over two-ply toilet paper, in other words, it never happens. Appliances tend to get the shaft, hiding in pantries or closets until they’re needed, but take a good hard look at what makes up your average cleaner and you’ll find one of the most successful concepts in industrial design.

With the new, more compact, Dyson Ball, heading to stores this month we thought we'd give you some history on vacuum design...

Our recent survey on vertical and horizontal workspaces got us thinking, what if you're working in the wrong direction? Could this hinder your productivity?

My theory, based on my own office space, is yes. Above is my current home office situation. I live in a large studio apartment in Brooklyn that doesn't have much room for a workspace. I didn't want my office to take over my entire home so I converted a closet into a very small reporting station. This could have worked if I didn't work 10 to 12 hours a day on my computer. Being cramped on a 29.5 inch desk, that didn't even have enough room for my keyboard and mouse, led me to take my laptop anywhere but the "office"...

While it won't got to market for years, GE recently revealed that it had developed a cost effective way to make organic light-emitting diodes, which are used in some televisions, portable screens, and computer monitors -- and in the near future may be used to light up your walls. OLED displays beat out traditional LCDs in that they don't need a power sucking back light, but the mega benefit is that they can be printed onto almost any surface, including flexible surfaces.

DVICE talked to one of the GE researchers working to make OLED manufacturing so affordable you could wallpaper your entire home with the the material. While they're working on creating paper that can light up in different colors, their manufacturing technology could one day make it possible for you to change the scenery on your wall from a landscape of Lake Tahoe to the streets of Shibuya with the click of your mouse...