Feeling your way
New book advocates an emotional approach to interiors

Some interior designers publish books that bombard readers with exhausting lists of dos and don’ts and overly specific how-to guides. World-renowned designer Benjamin Noriega-Ortiz turns this method around with his open-ended guide to home decorating, Emotional Rooms. Instead, Noriega-Ortiz encourages readers to concentrate on themselves—how they personally want a room to feel when they walk in.

Don’t cry: It’s just a great-looking living room.

While Emotional Rooms is heavy on room romance and light on theory, it is nonetheless inspiring. The book begins with Noriega-Ortiz’s autobiography (he started his career with hall-of-fame designer John Saladino and has since worked for author Laura Esquivel and rocker Lenny Kravitz) and focuses on how the places he’s lived—Puerto Rico, Europe, and NYC—have influenced his style. This cosmopolitanism allows Noriega-Ortiz to dismiss hegemonic design theories and concentrate on people’s emotions. Here’s a sample: "If you want the room to feel calm and serene," he advises, "make sure you repeat one color as much as possible."

These essays take up fewer than 20 pages, however. The other 150 are rich photographs that let the reader walk into each room and feel its mood. Sometimes Noriega-Ortiz’s overloaded style combinations are a little much, but his concept is hard to argue with. It’s just his personal style coming through, he would say, and his book is simply a nudge to help you tap into your own.—Carianne King

Housework in a vacuum
Suck it up, skip the new purchase, and revive your old vac

The disposable household is so last century. Use it up or wear it out. Don’t toss that conked out vac in the landfill (that’s where it goes after you kick it to the curb). It’s so clunky. It lasts so long.
 

Vacuum cleaner seen better days? Don’t toss that old friend; you can have it repaired locally.

If the suction fades, cease operation and check the brush rollers to make sure no hair or other stringy substances are interfering. If they’re operating smoothly, and there’s no obvious clog in the pipe, it’s probably a belt.

If you keep vacuuming with the belts off kilter, their burning rubber can ruin your carpets. Bad suction: Stop. Take the thing in to a shop that specializes in maintaining machines. With even more moving parts, sewing machines repay regular maintenance as well.

One local option: the franchised Vac & Sew City in Rio Hill Shopping Center (975-6888), which Terry and Roger Sparks took over a little more than a year ago. Terry does the vacuums and Roger does the sewing machines. A basic tune-up on a vacuum—replace the belt, clean the roller brush, lubricate the bearings—runs $28.95. A sewing machine tune-up is a bit pricier at $69.95, but all those clutches and gears need adjusting, cleaned and oiled to continue operating at their best.—Cathy Clary

By the Numbers

68

That’s according to a Kaiser Family Foundation study, which also found that many of those plugged-in kids can access cable while lying in bed. If parents put TVs in kids’ rooms, they’ll face challenges in keeping their young ones from becoming couch potatoes—kids watch an extra 1.5 hours daily if they have their own sets—and the necessity of keeping a 9-year-old from secretly tuning into late-night Oz reruns is a concern for lots of families, too. What to do?

If your offspring are going to commune with the cable box, make sure there are limits to what they can see.

The company that’s cornered the local cable market, Comcast, offers a Family Tier in some markets (a package of kid-friendly channels like Nickelodeon and National Geographic) but not, at this point, in Charlottesville. However, you can still put the kibbosh on your kids’ access to whatever you think is inappropriate (even if it’s just the sight of a suspiciously skinny starlet that, you might reasonably worry, could damage your daughter’s self-image). The main way to do this is with Parental Controls, with which you put locks on specific channels, program ratings or titles. You yourself can still watch whatever you want by entering a PIN and bypassing the locks.

Then there’s the V-chip, contained in most TVs made after 1999. The principle is similar to Parental Controls, but you’ll activate and program the V-chip through the TV itself, not through the cable service. Either way, it’ll be a bit of programming that, no matter how bewildering, you probably shouldn’t ask your kids to help with.—Erika Howsare

Save it
With a drought warning in effect, here’s how to stem the tide.

We’ve had a low-flow year. If this is what you see as you’re brushing your bicuspids, you might think of conserving.

It shouldn’t be news to anyone by now: 2007 has been a distressingly dry year, and both Albemarle County and the City of Charlottesville have declared drought warnings as a result. Seems like a good time to offer some suggestions for minimizing water use around the house.

The washer, toilet and shower are usually the biggest water hogs indoors, so:

• Only wash full loads of laundry.
• Take shorter showers, and save the water you’d otherwise waste waiting for the shower to heat up. Then use it to water plants.
• How can we put this delicately? Only flush if you, um, need to.

There are some other, smaller places to save:

• Use your dishwasher, if you have one, and only run it when it’s full.
• Don’t just stand there with the water running while you brush your teeth.
• Look into low-flow showerheads and devices that make your toilet more efficient (and see September’s Green Scene for a great tip on where to get these items).
• Put some food coloring in your toilet tank to check for leaks; if, without flushing, the color shows up in the bowl, you have a leak worth fixing.—E.H.

Rummage around

Good news for thrift-store junkies and felines alike: A new store offers great deals to benefit homeless pets.