Everyone around has been pushing: conserve, conserve, conserve! Save the environment. Be green. And you probably have done your share - you recycle; you take public transportation; and you switched to compact fluorescents but now you’re stumped. What else can I do, you ask?

Well, Home Magazine has undertaken to answer just that in their Good & Green Show Home recently produced at Grand Central Station in New York City. The G&G Show Home displayed the latest in environmentally friendly building products and home appliances. So before you go out there and buy appliances or renovate your home – consider the following.

Besides buying those energy-efficient appliances with the Energy Star label on it – consider these types of appliances. The inductor cooktop by Kenmore uses electromagnetic energy – which allows faster heating while using less energy than the conventional gas or electric cooktop. Also look at single drawer dishwashers if you don’t wash too many dishes. Single drawer dishwashers use up less water and consume less electricity.

If you are thinking about redoing the walls of your kitchen, consider using recycled glass tiles instead of ceramic tiles. These translucent tiles by Crossville are a beautiful way to dress up your kitchen walls and earth-friendly too.

If you want to do your part in saving the earth’s forests, take a look at engineered wood floors. Pergo makes its wood floors from 80% recycled wood waste materials. The installation process is also environmentally safe – no toxic glue is used – instead interlocking wood panels are applied.

Home Magazine did not overlook your outdoor space too. If you are thinking about building an outdoor deck for your home, Trex has come out with deck wood made from reclaimed wood and recycled plastic grocery bags – yes, grocery bags! These deck planks never warp, rot, or splinter and they do not require sanding and staining maintenance.
Many of the products used at the G&G Show House were auctioned off to benefit the charity, Habitats for Humanity.

Thanks to Alexia for that great take on LEDs. Anything that is not only green, but also allows one to feel like a diva in bed (or, really, anywhere) is okay by me.  

Me, I have not been feeling very diva-like, ever since getting that estimate from the electrician. In fact, I’ve been sitting here looking forlornly at the estimate, trying to screw up the courage to pick up the phone and call him, and tell him okay, come on over, break the bank. I’ll sell the cats, if I have to. Because I keep working backward, thinking, every time I come into the living room, that I really must get a new wall color, and that of course leads me back to the fact that first I have to take care of the dreadfully dull task of the electrical work. 

I don’t think I could get much for the cats, even though they are quite talented and cuddly, and very, very, large. If only cats sold by the pound.

Or their fur! Why is alpaca so damn expensive, but no one is interested in buying cat fur to make a fancy sweater from? 

Okay, back to decorating.  

Meanwhile, remember my friend Seddy’s sister, and how I paid her 150 bucks to come over and advise me about my place? I haven’t heard from her since. No, that’s not entirely accurate. First there was an email to a long list of people saying her email hadn’t been working, and then there was an email saying she was going to Mexico for a couple of weeks. I swear—I know it sounds like the oldest scam in the world, but she really said precisely this:

…we’re going to Mexico for the week.  Great deals to be had in the hurricane season.

Well, yeah. Especially when you’re taking my 150 bucks with you! 

Really, I do still trust this person, maybe mistakenly, maybe just because I love and trust her sister, who really is a very good friend. But now what? I’ve written to her once more, and she said she’d get in touch “early next week” which was like two weeks ago.

Do any of my readers have any advice about how to handle this? I mean, the whole thing was that I didn’t have time to do all the research on finding good ceiling fans and everything on my own. And now in addition to that, I’m working on hounding this woman who does seem like a lovely, if scatterbrained, talented, creative person. And I certainly don’t want to put a smudge on my friendship with Seddy by bitching about this situation with her.

I’ve always envisioned my life as if it were were a Broadway musical. People I greet will break out in song; I’d sing along in perfect harmony. A man worthy of Baryshnikov will take my hand and we’d dance through the streets. Lights will wink at me as if sharing a secret joke and transform into a rainbow of colors depending on my mood. Now it looks like if one of my dreams is coming true. About time!

L.E.D.s or light-emitting diodes are coming soon into your home and my home. They’ve been around for a while – found mostly in retail signs and the odd industrial toy. Sometimes I see them under the kitchen cabinet of a renovated gourmet kitchen. They still seem out of reach to me or just some flashy feature on a gadget.

Their prices have come down and soon colored lights will twinkle and light my path. Just a few years ago, they were $150 a bulb and they didn’t emit even a true white light – now they’re $60 a bulb. Pricey, yes, but it’s dropping fast. What’s all the hoopla about L.E.D.s? They’re energy efficient - they last 50,000 hours(!) and do not emit carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. They’re green, baby! And they’re just what the hyper-environmentally-aware individual wants. On top of all that efficiency, they can be formed into any geometric shape, a sculpture, a panel and embedded behind walls, into fabric, furniture, anything. They also come in a full spectrum of colors. That’s flexibility!

Personally, I want a headboard to my bed that haloed the diva in me in romantic lights. Rose for romance, purple for passion. I also want my hallway to the rest of my home to be sprinkled in LED footprints so as I glided across, they would announce my entrance in technicolor. Finally, an entrance worthy of Broadway!

I have —- drumroll — an estimate from the electrician. 

If I had kids, I could just about put them through college for the price of the electrical work I want done. Or even for the price of some of the electrical work I want done. Or even for just doing one little part of it, like the kitchen. 

The thing that really sends the estimate through the roof is the switch from a fuse box to circuit breakers. Here’s a photo of the decrepit fuses:

The electrician did mention that, ahem, this fuse box is not up to code. At least he had the grace not to break into hysterical laughter or ask whether I was aware that the fuse box was  installed around the time my grandmother was born.

And me, what do I know about circuit breakers and fuses anyway? I know what circuit training is, because I do a little of that at the gym, in my continuing, grueling effort to stave off the ravages of time.

And I know that “the green fuse” is a quote from Dylan Thomas.

Actually, if you look at the poem (and you should! My god, we don’t get nearly enough poetry in this world) you will see it is not unrelated to the topic of age.

Oh, god, even talking about circuit breakers and fuse boxes would be better than this conversation, or I guess it’s really a monologue. If you’re interested, here’s some information about this fascinating topic.

The only way I can get through this kind of information is to remember that ultimately, getting this deadly dull and disastrously expensive work done will lead to a better wall color in the living room. 

Maybe there is one called “green fuse.”  

So, great. I now have a plan for the electrical problem, and just have to wait for the guy to send me the estimate.  

Meanwhile, my friend Seddy came by for lunch and mentioned, more than once, that her sister is starting an interior design business. I mean, she mentioned it enough that I realized it was like when someone offers you a breath mint—you should always accept, even if you don’t want a breath mint right then, because the person may be trying to tell you something.  

So I took down her number and called Seddy’s sister. She is a woman of action; before I knew it, we had an appointment and then she was at my door, having lugged up a couple of beautiful cloth-covered file boxes, each one, it turned out, filled with wallpaper samples, and decorating magazines, and paint chips. 

She was here for like three hours, taking photos, as I, shame-faced, showed her around my apartment. Now I am thinking maybe I could just go back to California where I went camping with my brother last year and set up a tent permanently in Point Reyes and forget all about wall color and fabric. I mean, look at the view from a campsite: 

Not that she didn’t have good ideas—the problem is that she had great ideas, great, expensive, time-consuming, utterly overwhelming ideas.  

The thing is, some people are just born with an eye for making a place look pulled together. And then there are the rest of us shmegegies.  

But I’m already in, having ponied up the initial fee—and I have to say, she must have been giving me a break on the fee, because it wasn’t as bad as I’d feared. So now I have to see what ideas she comes up with. I mean, she says she’s going to look up everything for me, from new ceiling fans to a proper light for the front hall.  

And that way, I won’t have to listen to my brother sing his camping song every morning. (Around the family, we call him “Songhound.”)

The electrician showed up. He was a nice guy.

He’s worked in my building, in other apartments, so he knew what was what, and he was reassuringly calm about the whole thing, telling me not to worry, except about that mess by the phones, which he was careful not to step too near, treating it kind of the way you would a dead skunk in the front hall.

He was reassuring, except he kept using the frightening phrase, “that’s really gonna costya.” Of course. Now he wants me to make a list of the outlets I would like and which ones I would like to disappear (ie those boxes and the mysterious Electricity to Nowhere cords, so I did.

FRONT HALL

Get rid of one box outlet
Add 4-outlet where there is a 2 near kitchen door

KITCHEN

Get rid of 6-outlet thing attached to wall by microwave
Move outlets to behind stove and fridge
Make the two 2-outlets into 4-outlets, and lower down on wall

DINING ROOM

Get rid of box outlet
Make 2 into a 4

LR

Get rid of box under A/C
Make 2 into a 4

STUDY

Make two 2-outlets into 4s, and add one near the wall facing the garden

BR

Get rid of boxes
Two 2 s to be made into 4s

Once I made my list, it didn’t seem like so much.

Okay, so the painting thing was a total disaster.

But before I can do anything about the paint, what I really have to attend is the electrical problem, which I should have taken care before painting anyway.

I know, this may not seem a little bit like calling a veterinarian when your sink is stopped up, but if you knew about the electrical situation here you’d know this makes more sense than calling, for example, a painter. Or a decorator.

The thing is, my apartment is in a building that was built in 1924. And the wiring hasn’t been updated since—or, no, that’s an exaggeration. And it’s worse than that. The wiring has been updated, several times, by several different people, each apparently less competent than the last. There are wires encased in metal tubes running along the baseboards, not neatly buried in the wall the way a person would like. There are boxes sticking out for the outlets, like this:

There are odd wires stapled to the wall that end in a plug dangling from an outlet, like this:

What is this? It’s like the Electricity to Nowhere. And with all this, there aren’t very many outlets, so when I got the Broadband internet hooked up, the front hall area looked like this.

So I called the electrician and now he’s coming tomorrow, at last.

Man Decor writes that style is subjective, and boy is this ever the truth. There is very little that everyone would agree upon when it comes to style and decor: I mean, just look at the popularity of plaid sofas. Or for that matter, look at how happily some men are in their bachelor pads. One of my great hopes for the Stylehound blog is to discuss these differences, and to try and determine if there is anything universal about what looks good—but the joy is in the process of discovery, not necessarily in the answer.

Okay, so I returned to the apartment after the painting extravaganza, and voila—clearly it had been kidnapped for a guest appearance on “Miami Vice.” Or it was taken over by the Ladies’ Decorating Society and Drum Corp of Boca Raton.  And I’ve never even been to Florida. I have nothing against Florida. I’m sure it’s great. 

The surprising thing is that I hate the peach and love the blue. The blue, remember, was a last-minute switch, a sudden turn into a color I thought was about the most cheerful I’ve ever seen in my life. And coming into the hallway for the first time today, I felt my heart lift. Hooray, hooray for turquoise! 

Then I looked around the corner into the living room, and my heart sank right into the hardwood floor. GAK. 

Well, see for yourself. Here’s the hall, first in white:

And then, in the new blue:

You’ll note that I also asked the painter to build a partial wall, which restored the original. Great, great blue. And I love the little curved bench against the blue. But look:

GAK. The peach doesn’t even show in this photo as being as terrible as it truly is. In reality, the peach with the blue recalls a dreadful color combo from the early 1990s called “seafoam green and peach.” YUCK.

But it’s done. The painter, who is from Jamaica, loved it and said it reminded him of home.

Maybe I’ll invest in a few asparagus ferns or potted palms and put up a sea-shell curtain in a doorway.  

I think I need professional help. 

I’ve only been living in my current apartment for about six months, and it’s clear that I’ve got to do something about the paint color. Not to mention the radiator covers, the electrical outlets, the a/c or ceiling fan situation, and the fur accumulation (thanks to 30+ pounds of cats shedding all over everything). 

But I’m starting with the paint. The apartment now is white. Good old, boring, dreadfully dull white.

You know how for the past several years the popular colors—at least for amateur decorators like myself—have been rich reds and golden yellows? I love those colors, because they make me feel warm and happy and cared for.

But enough, already with warmth and happiness. I want something cool and modern, sleek and lively.  

So I’ve found myself a painter, who comes well-recommended and doesn’t charge so much that I won’t be able to afford the paint itself. And I’ve made my choices, after a good deal of agonizing—a pale, pale peach for the living room and, in a surprise last- minute switch, a turquoisy-blue for the front hall.  

When I stopped on the street at a dress sale recently (another advantage to living in hot, sweaty, smelly New York City is that there are frequently people selling fabulous little summer frocks, right there on the street) one of the women shopping claimed that her mother had been the first “personal shopper” and was the instigator of that particular profession. Well I don’t know about that, but she also said that turquoise is a color that looks great on anyone, as it complements any skin tone.  

I didn’t fall for it, even though I did pick up a great little brown, orange, and beige number. 

And in terms of wall color, I don’t know. Turquoise seems awfully risky. 

We’ll see how it turns out.