Furniture

This is the time of the year when you take a look at your patio or backyard and suddenly find it clamoring for attention.

Summer is almost here, it starts unofficially with the Memorial Day weekend, and then it is time to enjoy the weather outdoors. If you are feeling lucky, you may want to enter the "Restore Your Outdoors" Sweepstakes to win $15,000 in Ace Gift Cards for an outdoor makeover.

Ace Hardware and The Weather Channel paired together for the "Restore Your Outdoors" initiative to provide tips and tools to help homeowners tackle outdoor home maintenance tasks. Ace's Home Expert, Lou Manfredini and Ace's Design Expert, Julie Richard, provide easy to carry out suggestions. They tell you how to update and maintain your outdoor living areas to make your home more inviting, which brands to use, and how to use inspiration from the outdoors when choosing paint colors.

Makeovers are being hosted by Manfredini and Richard on The Weather Channel through the month of May. You can find more information on a "Restore Your Outdoors" tab on Ace and The Weather Channel Facebook pages. For more details and official rules on "Restore Your Outdoors," visit www.facebook.com/acehardware.

The chance to win $15000 in gift cards is part of it. ends at 11:59:59 p.m. EDT on 5/31/13. The use of the prize gift cards is not restricted to outdoor materials, but can be applied to almost any product at Ace Hardware.

Safe Kids Day is an initiative about preventing childhood injuries, and raising awareness.

Injuries kill more children than any illness. And while we don't think of our homes as dangerous places, many accidents happen at home. These can involve falling from bunk beds, getting trapped in moving mechanisms of motion furniture, and the biggest one of them all, furniture and TV tip-overs.

In the interest of preventing TV tip-overs, Hazz Design Consulting has come up with reVue, a TV mount design that would be easy to install. Not only that, it will also allow users to safely move the TV up and down, to optimally position it for interactive gaming, seated viewing, exercise, or videoconferencing. You can watch a demonstration video on their site.

To be able to get the design to production, Hazz Design Consulting has launched a crowdsourcing campaign on Kickstarter where you have to reach your full funding goal to receive the money. The campaign runs until June 16, 2013. If they reach their funding goal, the product can go into production by July.<.p>

Yes, we've been hearing about Emerald, and seeing it everywhere too. But what is the number one go to color in home furnishings?

The Furniture/Today and Apartment Therapy Consumer Survey, 2013 found that blue was the overwhelming favorite with 29% choosing it over other colors. Grays came in second, and greens third. Brights such as oranges, yellows and reds placed higher than neutrals such as brown.

The Pinterest pin that got the most votes for this High Point Market was a chair from C.R. Laine.

The Bradstreet Spool Chair from C.R. Laine, was upholstered in Zig Zag Onyx Linen fabric paying homage to ikat. The frame wore a finish that can be customized in any Benjamin Moore paint color. It can be seen here in a screenshot from Style Spotter Kelly Kole's Pinterest Board.

Trend setters and home fashion experts participate in the Style Spotters program to showcase products and trends at the High Point Market. The carefully curated Pinterest boards give a glimpse of new introductions.

The top Style Spotter for this market was Michelle Jennings Wiebe of Studio}M in Tampa, Florida, but the product that received the most votes on any of the Style Spotters' boards came from Kelly Kole of Kandrac & Kole.

If you've ever daydreamed about a robot assembling your IKEA furniture for you, know that it can happen. A team from MIT's Distributed Robotics Laboratory just designed one.

Gripper arms and a CAD file describing the piece of furniture help the bot put the furniture pieces together. A geometric reasoning system and a symbolic planner helps them work out where each part goes. You can watch one at work here assembling an IKEA LACK table.

Feel free to extrapolate from here, because the designers at MIT say they're working on software that can assemble more complex pieces of furniture.

JCP's new ad seems to be begging forgiveness for changes that did not resonate with its loyal customers. It seems some of them do feel vindicated.

Funny thing, though. While Myron Ullman, the new JC Penney CEO, is getting credit for the contrite ad, it was actually developed under Ron Johnson who got axed.

Johnson had tried to take the company in a new direction by changing how the merchandise and how the store looked and functioned. That irked loyal customers. The younger, hipper crowd that he'd tried to woo was too slow to warm to the brand. Doing away with sales didn't help either, even though JCP promised "honest" low prices year round.

Maybe given time it would have caught on. I, for one, was rooting for the changes, especially in the home department. But then not everything is being scrapped, even as some discontinued brands are being brought back in.

Will all this bring back customers? We'll just have to wait and see.

It is hard to think about Freud without his couch. He thought it important enough, because when he moved from Vienna to England in 1938, he brought it along with him.

When he died in 1939, his daughter kept his study exactly as he left it and the couch remained in its place. The home later became the Freud Museum.

Now for his 157th birthday, the Freud Museum is asking for £5,000 to repair this piece of furniture that has witnessed so much history. The couch is so precious that it can't leave the premises, and at present it hides its disrepair under rugs.

What prompted Freud to use a couch for his patients anyway? He observed that people felt free to break from their usual trains of thought when they were lying down, and this proved invaluable in developing his psychoanalytic theory.

Take a clue from Kristin Chenoweth when shopping for a new bed. Test it out.

Here she is at the Hastens Madison Avenue Boutique in New York, where she tested out a whole range of beds from the luxury bed manufacturer. She has reading material handy, and is dressed to stretch out comfortably. How else would you know if a mattress is right for you?

I'm told she ended up deciding on one of Hastens' newer adjustable beds.

Chenowith, who is starring in a new CBS series set to air this fall, is furnishing a newly bought apartment.

From May 1 to January you will be able to visit a HGTV HOME pop-up showroom at one of these 5 malls across the country.

• Phipps Plaza in Atlanta, May 1-June 4
• King of Prussia Mall in Philadelphia, July 1-August 4
• Tysons Corner Center in Tysons Corner, VA, August19-September 22
• The Shops at North Bridge in Chicago, October 7-November 10
• Santa Monica Place in Santa Monica, CA November 25-January 1, 2014. This will be a special holiday-themed store.

The HGTV HOME pop-up showrooms will feature eight vignettes incorporating the HGTV HOME Furniture Collection, HGTV HOME Design Studio at Bassett, and other offerings. The vignettes will feature different popular styles including Deluxe, Pop Art, Heavy Metal, Traditional Twist, Classic Chic, Flower Tower, The Softer Side, and Color Blast. You can check these out on Facebook, too.

At last week's High Point Market, gray seemed to show up everywhere. Even in kids furniture.

While there were plenty of colorful pieces too, gray could be seen in almost all categories from furniture to bedding. And when you think about it, it makes perfect sense.

Bright accessories and toys really pop against it, and as a child grows older, the furniture does not need to be discarded. It can be re-purposed or used with different accessories to change the look. Featured above, the new Sable finish from Berg Furniture.