A Moving Story

I am officially a Brooklynite!

I moved lock, stock and barrel last Wednesday from the Manhattan apartment I’ve owned since 1992. Well, not quite lock, stock and barrel, because the movers couldn’t extricate my sofa from the building. Seems the moving men who detached the legs to get the sofa into the building four years ago stripped the screws so badly that it was impossible to remove them this time around. The chunky legs prevented the already-big piece from getting out the door. 

Dr. Sofa to the rescue! Yep, you read that right. Dr. Sofa. Two men took apart my stubborn sofa in about 30 minutes, trucked it to my new (1899) house in Brooklyn, then reassembled it in 20 minutes. Operation successful. And this was no lightweight Ikea DIY sofa. Dr. Sofa doesn’t take Medicare, so I had to pay $650 out-of-pocket. But I could never buy a sofa like it for that price.

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A Simple Solution to Making K-Cups Recyclable

Sometimes big successes
create big problems.

An up-and-coming designer gets so many orders for her new coat collection, for example, that she can’t meet the insane demand. A singer becomes an overnight sensation, and is so overjoyed by the attention and money, that she turns her back on her old friends from home.

The wild popularity of single-cup coffeemakers in the past few years (16 million households own one) is now responsible for generating 41 million used single-serve cups every day, which translate to 2.8 billion cubic
feet of waste
in our landfills every year.

While the individual components of the K-Cups that are used in the best-selling Keurig coffeemakers can be recycled separately, the plastic-aluminum-coffee-ground-and-paper K-Cup as a whole cannot. That’s a big problem!

Enter Recycle-A-Cup, an exciting new environmentally friendly accessory that uses cutting cartridges to split K-Cups into their separate parts so we can recycle the aluminum and plastic and compost the coffee grounds and paper filter. “You will be making a very positive impact on the environment by letting the organic coffee grounds decompose in the landfills,” said a spokesperson for Medelco, Inc., the manufacturer. Each Recycle-A-Cup is packaged with two replacement cutting cartridges. Replacements can be purchased at recycleacup.com and should be inserted once a month to ensure smooth operation.

I am a big fan of single-cup coffeemakers because I’m the only coffee drinker at home, so I was delighted to try out Recycle-A-Cup for the company and tell you about it. I religiously recycle paper and plastic and believe that all the little contributions we make to help the environment will surely add up and make a meaningful impact. The device is easy to use and it takes just a few tries to master the moves. Simply load the K-Cup in the clearly marked position; twist Recycle-A-Cup while pressing the cutting cartridge buttons, release the buttons, and voila! The top and bottom are separated and each piece can be properly recycled.

Many cities and towns recycle the low-grade, mixed flake resin from which the K-Cup is created. However, anyone who can’t find a place to recycle the cup shells, can reuse them at home, for arts and crafts, mini-pots for planting seeds, and organizing small items like paper clips, screws, picture hangers and nails.

Recycle-A-Cup is regularly $14.99, but the manufacturer is offering it to FabOverFifty fans for a special price of $9.99, including free shipping, when you order from now until September 1st, 2014.

Enter code 2sbr73 at checkout for your discount and free shipping!

Here’s the key to our homes

I instinctively loved decorating from the moment in 1968 I moved into my first apartment with my new husband.  I was 21 and we rented a studio in a tenement building on the Upper East Side for $135 a month. The roaches came for free.

We picked out our bed and dining table from the exquisite furniture department in Lord & Taylor, where my mother–in-law was fashion coordinator and benefited from a 40 percent discount. There I was, earning $105 a week and living in a decrepit building, but dining on a cherry table—real cherry.

Four decades and many apartments later, I’ve spent a fortune on furniture, decorative accessories, renovations, art work, antiques, fabrics, and goodness knows what else, to give personality to my homes. Choosing duvets and sheets became an obsession at one point, but it was a luxury climbing into bed. It also felt great when anyone praised my style.

Meryl is definitely a bag lady
Meryl is definitely a bag lady

Our homes are supremely important.   Whether we’re entertaining twenty or all alone in a cozy corner, engrossed in a book, our environment gives us a great deal of pleasure. We love to surround ourselves with objects that “speak“ to us, like the hallway of wonderfully framed family photographs in Catherine and Terry’s homes to the perfectly put together wall of artistic shopping bags that Meryl hung in her Florida getaway.

FOF women know how to transfer their warm and wonderful personalities to the places they live. I’ve seen it time and time again. No one does it better.