• Some Essential First Aid Items

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    Work can be dangerous. It does not matter what field; there are hazards at every job. There are the most obvious dangers on construction sites or assembly lines due to the heavy machinery, but even in an office, accidents can happen involving scissors, staplers, and such. Any use of tools creates a certain amount of risk. The best way to deal with the potential workplace mishaps is by being prepared. Every worksite needs to have a first aid kit so that if anything unfortunate does happen, it can be addressed quickly and efficiently. There are a few things that every great first aid kit should have inside.

    Gloves

    Gloves are an essential part of a first aid kit. It is impossible to be sure if a person's blood is safe, and in an emergency situation, there is no time to ask. A pair of gloves keeps that from being a problem. A few pairs of latex gloves will do the trick, but a lot of people are allergic to latex. Nitrile gloves can be a safer alternative.

    Bandages

    Bandages are given in first aid, and it is important to have a variety. Steri strips are a great alternative to stitches when attention needs to be given fast. You do not have the means to do stitches at home. Steri strips can solve the problem.

    Normal bandages of various sizes can help manage any minor cuts, burns, or scratches. A roll of extra gauze will help to manage any excess bleeding. It is important to have large-sized pad type bandage with soft padding. This size has many uses but comes in handy mostly for use as an eye patch. Fingertip bandages are good for minor cuts and slices, such as papercuts.

    Rubbing Alcohol

    It is important to have a fast-acting antibacterial agent to get into cuts right away, even if they are minor. An injury may not seem so bad at first, but infection can creep in and make a relatively minor injury into a big problem. 

    Not too long ago, people would still die of minor cuts because of infection that spread from the cut rather than the cut itself. The simple act of disinfecting an injury with alcohol before dressing it is the solution. Often, instead of liquid alcohol, a first aid kit will have single-use alcohol pads for disinfecting.

    Antibacterial Ointment

    Alcohol is good for a quick disinfecting but does not guarantee that everything will stay sterile. A thick antibiotic ointment, such as Bacitracin cream, will get deep into the wound and clean out lurking bacteria. It also has a comfort factor which makes it preferable over alcohol. 

    While alcohol burns as it is applied to a wound a cream cools and soothes. The ointment should not be used instead of alcohol, however. If both are available, the injury should be cleaned with alcohol first and only be smeared with the cream just before applying the bandages.

    Joint Wraps

    An injury is not always as obvious as an open wound. Sometimes a person just pulls their wrist or ankle out of place. Just because an injury does not get blood everywhere does not mean it is just as critical or painful. A first aid kit should have elastic joint wraps for just such an occasion. 

    A wrap helps to keep a dislocated joint in place by taking some of the pressure off of tendons with its elasticity. Applying a joint wrap can often even make a person feel better enough to get more work done, as long as the injury was only minor.

    Eye Rinse

    Eye rinse is usually just a simple saline solution, but it can prove to be the difference between keeping an eye or not. Any worksite that involves chemicals should have an eye washing station, but at least a bottle in the kit. A washout can keep chemical burns to a minimum. 

    It is also important to have a rinse at any job that may have particles in the air, such as sawdust or metal shavings.

    Tweezers

    Tweezers are an important item to have in a first aid kit as well. When dressing a wound, it is crucial to remove any foreign material before covering it. Tweezers are perfect for removing tiny splinters and shards.

    partnered post • cc-licensed photograph by DLG Images

  • finding arts & crafts in unexpected places

    One thing we talk about regularly is finding Arts & Crafts vernacular in what can only be called unexpected places. Sometimes the use might be inappropriate but still well-executed; sometimes neither. Reader Jean Emery wrote to tell us about her own experience at finding Spanish Colonial architecture in the last place you’d expect – upstate New York:

    This is a visual response to the post about transplanting or recreating the arts and crafts vernacular. I hope this picture comes through. I’m a fourth generation San Diegan transplanted to upstate New York and I’ve always taken a great interest in a group of about twenty or so Spanish colonial homes built in Albany, probably in the 1920s or so. They’re so California!  But, as you can see, they haven’t fared very well here. I would love to buy one, but they generally are in pretty poor shape, have been terribly re-muddled. The stucco doesn’t take well to repeated freezing and thawing, and the original windows weren’t at all energy efficient so have been replaced with ugly double-panes.

    Also, the new Stickley arts and crafts reproductions are big here in town because we’re near the manufacturer in Syracuse, but they just don’t have the soul and the patina of the originals. And American Bungalow has recently had some vulgar, expensive houses with customized woodwork run amuck!

    I’m not really sure what the moral of all this is. I do love these bits of Mediterrean architecture plunked down in the snow belt!

    Jean notes that one such home – 17 Rosemont Street in Albany (pics) – is for sale at an asking price of $178,900.

    Thanks for sharing these, Jean. We do love to see this kind of thing, so if other readers have pictures to share, please do send them in!

  • EcoTop: a truly green countertop material that you can afford

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    Regular readers know that I’m not a fan of modern architecture, but that I love modern materials – especially those that aren’t visibly avant-garde and can work in old homes just as well as new. That is, green materials – not just greenwashed products, but truly enviro-neutral or -friendly materials. One of my pet peeves is building materials that are recycled or recyclable – one or the other – but not both; many of these materials are lauded in the popular press for being "ecological," but aren’t really.

    Joel Klippert, a young man living just outside of Seattle, has really turned this specific market around. With a little help from some very talented research chemists and materials scientists, he’s created the very  first recycled, renewable and fully-recyclable countertop material. EcoTop, a successor to his extremely successful PaperStone product, is 50% pulped bamboo paper fiber and 50% recycled wood – sometimes called "urban timber," the structural wood salvaged from demolished buildings. He’s worked for years to find a non-petroleum resin that was UV resistant, so that he could avoid using only dark colors (the resin used in earlier materials had to be dark to avoid the yellowish cast that would develop over years of sun exposure). Now that he’s found that and reliable sources for his two structural ingredients, EcoTop can hit the market – in a range of colors ranging from white to black, with an enormous range of shades of green, tan, red, brown and gray in between. In fact, Joel says he can match any PMS (Pantone Matching System) shade that a client can specify, if the order is large enough.

    EcoTop is not only a beautiful, extremely durable and truly green material – right at home in any kitchen or bath, new or old – it’s also really affordable and easy to install, competitive with natural stone and significantly less expensive than concrete installations. If anything, I think that materials like this are even more apropos in an Arts & Crafts home than stone or tile: their makers take their responsibility to the outside environment just as seriously as their responsibility to the inside of your home, something that is much more in line with the tenets of the movement than nonrecyclable materials which, no matter how green their production process, end up filling a landfill when you (or, in the case of something like EcoTop, which will last generations, when some far off future owners of your home) are done with them.

    Note that this material is also available as an exterior cladding for large residential and commercial / industrial applications.

  • Small Houses and the Question of Need

    Carol Lloyd has a good article at SFGate (the San Francisco Chronicle‘s site) on extremely tiny homes:

    Down a rambling residential road on the outskirts of Sebastopol, the dream house sits like a testament to discriminating taste.

    This dream house is the love child of artist-builder Jay Shafer,
    who lovingly hand-crafted it. The stainless-steel kitchen, gleaming
    next to the natural wood interior, is outfitted with customized storage
    and built-ins. From his bed, Shafer can gaze into the Northern
    California sky through a cathedral window. In his immaculate office
    space, a laptop sits alongside rows of architectural books and
    magazines — many featuring his house on the cover. And from the
    old-fashioned front porch, he can look out on a breathtaking setting:
    an apple orchard in full bloom.

    But in an era when bigger is taken as a synonym for better,
    calling Shafer’s home a dream house might strike some as an oxymoron.
    Why? The entire house, including sleeping loft, measures only 96 square
    feet — smaller than many people’s bathrooms. But Jay Shafer’s dream
    isn’t of a lifestyle writ large but of one carefully created and then
    writ tiny.

    Read the whole thing.

  • stuff you can’t live without: Mag-o-Grip

    I don’t frequently recommend individual products here, but this is so incredibly useful for anyone who builds, repairs or otherwise tinkers that I had to mention it.

    The Mag-o-grip (not sure about the hyphenation) is basically a magnetic wrist-wrap that lets you keep nails, screws, nuts, bolts, drill bits and other useful metal things on hand. That’s it – so simple I’m amazed it hasn’t been around for 100 years, but I guess truly useful things are often this simple – and not really obvious until you see them. It’s available for about $15 from MDG Tools and various retailers. I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of having forgotten nails, nuts and heavy staples shred my shirt pockets and clog up the dryer lint trap…

  • Rest & Restoration: Volunteer Vacations at Historic Sites in Need of Some TLC

    Jamie Donahoe at the Heritage Conservation Network sends us the following note on their hands-on building conservation workshops. A number of photographs from recent workshops are available in a special Flickr set. Thanks, Jamie!

    If you had driven by the Francis Mill in Waynesville, North Carolina in July 2003, you might have stopped to take a photo of the picturesque but dilapidated structure nestled in Francis Cove. If you were to pass by the mill this summer, you would see a structure that’s neat and square, strong and weathertight. The difference: volunteers who joined a series of summertime hands-on building conservation workshops organized by Heritage Conservation Network in partnership with the Francis Mill Preservation Society.

    HCN, a Boulder, Colorado-based non-profit dedicated to the conservation of the world’s architectural heritage, specializes in recruiting volunteers to assist with hands-on preservation projects in association with local preservation partners. Volunteers spend a week or more at the site, working under the guidance of a technical expert.

    Back in 2003, with the mill in danger of imminent collapse, Tanna Timbes, great granddaughter of the man who built it and founder of the FMPS, contacted HCN and asked for assistance in saving it. Over the course of three workshops at Francis Mill, a total of 48 volunteers contributed more than 3,700 hours of labor, and that made all the difference.

    HCN volunteers are not necessarily experienced preservationists, with only half having experience in the field. Instruction and supervision are provided by the technical expert leading the hands-on work, and participants – of all ages – quickly find themselves replastering walls,
    documenting decorative paintings, shaping adobe bricks, chiseling mortises and tenons, or chipping out old cement mortar to replace it with lime mortar. The focus is on the use of traditional techniques and materials – the prescription for keeping historic buildings sound for many generations to use and appreciate.

    HCN has organized workshops at more than a dozen historic sites in the past four years. In Oplotnica, Slovenia, last year, volunteers worked painstakingly to discover the original decorative paint scheme of a 17th century chapel. The workshop, led by one of Slovenia’s foremost conservators, brought nationwide attention not only to the project but also to the need to safeguard Slovenia’s cultural heritage.

    HCN will return to Slovenia in 2008, when volunteers will help restore the oldest known vintner’s cottage in the Šmarško-Virštanj wine district; it dates to the 16th century and is in poor condition, much like the Francis Mill was four years ago.

    Volunteer opportunities this year include work at a Queen Anne style parsonage in Jonesboro, Illinois; the Old West town of Virginia City, Montana; and colonial and traditional buildings in Ghana. All still have space available and can also accommodate groups looking for a meaningful way to volunteer. Information about these and other opportunities to help build a future for the past can be found on HCN’s website or by calling HCN at +1 303 444 0128.