With summer winding down, we turn our attention to home improvement projects that our wives have been reminding us about throughout the summer. Rather than lift a hammer, we booted up, logged on and linked up in an attempt to educate and amuse ourselves. These items caught our fancy.
Think pink
Toledo-based Owens Corning Inc., the $3.6 billion building products supplier, uses the Pink Panther as host at its new website. The Pink One guides guests of the Owens Corning site (http://www.owenscorning.com) through a neighborhood where they can access practical information on home improvements, repair and maintenance, plus, of course, Owens Corning product information.
The Panther, minus the Henry Mancini music, leads surfers through a number of sites including: The Front Porch, a home improvement question and answer center where guests can “talk with fellow Owens Corning neighbors,” exchange information and tips, and seek expert advice and solutions on home building, repair and maintenance problems. The site also features the Coffee Table, where guests can read through a virtual stack of magazines offering how-to tips. Around Your Home offers a detailed, illustrated look at how a home “works” and helps homeowners anticipate any problems they may face. Panther Place offers guests an opportunity to join the Homeowners Club, gaining priority access to tips and advice, special promotions and Owens Corning news.
Wood on the web
For the truly serious home improver who’s looking to be very cost-efficient, Wickes Lumber Co. has created a website (http://www.wickes.com) that includes, among other items, weekly updates on commodity wood products. Aimed mainly at contractors, “The Wood Market Information” page will help you understand factors that influence wood prices, which in turn may help you sharpen the timing of lumber purchases.
A satellite TV fix
Home & Garden Television (HGTV), the fast-growing network available to 17 million satellite subscribers nationwide, announced it will add 400 hours of programming as part of its 1996-97 season. There’s a fair amount of gardening and interior design-type fodder among the 15 new series, 24 first-run specials, and new episodes for 18 existing series, but also plenty for the home improver. We like the sounds of some of them: “Location, Location, Location” takes viewers through the range of real-life experiences involved in buying and selling a home. The show is hosted by Tyler Mathisen, executive editor of “Money” magazine. “Urban Gardening with Mesach Taylor,” starring the “Designing Women” and “Dave’s World” actor who has, say the press materials, “experienced the horticultural challenges of living in a big city.” Our heart goes out to him.
CD-ROM remodeling
Books That Work recently announced what it claims to be the first Internet-enhanced 3D home and interior design CD-ROM for consumers. “Visual Home” (about $60 retail) contains a library of more than 2,000 three-dimensional models of furnishings and appliances and 1,000 material textures. If that isn’t enough, the new Visual Home website (http://visualhome.com) offers free model and material collections from home furnishing manufacturers. Users can download these models and materials onto their own PCs.
Multicom Publishing offers “Better Homes and Garden Remodeling Your Home,” which integrates advertising information from home products manufacturers such as Andersen Windows, GE Applicances and Thomasville Furniture with a three-dimensional CAD program for PCs. The CD-ROM, which retails for about $36, also includes remodeling ideas, costing worksheets, a project workbook and a showcase of more than 100 remodeled homes selected by BH&G editors.
Hardware
The web site of the American Hardware Manufacturers Association, which debuted at the National Hardware Show in Chicago earlier this month, still has a few bugs to work out. Our attempts to check out new products met with repeated instances of pictures covering text and vice versa. Still, the site (http://www.ahma,irg:80/index.html) does offer a plethora of product and manufacturer information.
For hardware and home improvement products, check out the Build.Com site (http://www.build.com), operated by an Internet marketing services company that specializes in the home and hardware businesses. In addition to product lines, information on “virtual deals” on building products and links to building trades professionals with web sites, the Build.Com site offers a hip rating system: A lava lamp next to a listing deems the site to be “very cool,” while links with hammer icons next to them have been rated from good (one hammer) to “full of content and impressive to behold” (three hammers).
———-
Don Hunt and Brian Edwards write about technology related to buying, renting and fixing homes. They can be reached via e-mail at hitekhome@aol.com, or hitekhome@iserv.net, or you can write to them: The High-Tech Home, Chicago Tribune, Your Place section, 435 N. Michigan Ave. 4th Floor, Chicago, Ill., 60611.
