">HomeOwnerNut

Seeking unique or unusual appliances such as wall-mounted fireplaces and outdoor steel fireplaces? Don’t begin your search at a home improvement store. For crying out loud, start by examining the list of recalled appliances at the Consumer Products Safety Commission. Yes, friends, it’s that time of the month to evaluate the latest voluntary recalls by manufacturers who should have pumped more time and energy into R & D and less into marketing.

Regular readers of this blog know how the Consumer Products Safety Commission (CPSC) spares homeowners the agony of buying products that blow up, catch fire or take out an eye. This March roundup of recalled items is unique: it includes both indoor and outdoor fireplaces that, well, give you more heat than you bargained on.

Fireplaces that sizzle

Sunjoy has issued a voluntary recall on some 20,000 U.S. and 400 Canadian versions of its Freestanding Steel Outdoor Fireplace. The CPSC has received reports of 14 incidences where the decorative powder coat finish on the outdoor wood-burning fireplaces caught fire.  Read more about the Garden Treasures Living fireplace.

Nailing the dismount

While we’re talking fireplaces, consider this month’s recall of some 6,000 Colin Cowie Gel-Fuel Wood Fireplaces. These unique appliances are wall mounted and the manufacturer has received complaints from more than 20 consumers that watched in horror as the plastic mounting screws bent in the heat and the fireplaces plunged from the wall. The Chinese-made fireplaces were sold on Home Shopping Network between October and November 2010 for about $250.

Is it safe?

If you’re one of the 63,100 consumers who have installed Stanley 6K and 7KC series Medium Duty Locksets, don’t buy a wall-mount fireplace!  Latches in these Stanley Locksets have a tendency to stick, with at least one consumer reporting that they were trapped in their house.

Feel the surge

Some 2,500 Sanus Elements Surge Protectors have been recalled due to shock hazards. Most were sold to consumers seeking protection for their home theatre systems. The recall is for model ELM205 low-profile power conditioners or surge protectors.

(Note to manufacturers: Just stop it!)

Wealthy, fashionable, well-educated people of old money occupied the fictionalized “West Egg” community in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.  Now the home that is said to have inspired the mansion of the novel’s Tom and Daisy Buchanan in New York’s Long Island village of Sands Point is about to be razed for the construction of five $10 million homes.

According to Yahoo Real Estate, the 25-room mansion is one of the remaining Sands Point homes that are going down to make room for new money dwellings.

I thought this apocryphal novel and its inspirational home would mark the perfect occasion to view the homes of other famed American writers and the architecture that framed their imaginations. The designs vary widely, except that most of the homes share a spacious quality.

Across the Caribbean and into the trees

Hemingway loved La Finca Vigia in Cuba’s San Francisco de Paula. He loved the open air designs and adjacent dock to the sea and his boat the Pilar that pulled against the moorings. He loved the palms that stood sentry to the whitewashed walls and thick wooden door. He loved to fill the house with books and the wood furniture, and the library was rich with leopard skins and lion skulls he had gathered in the first light of an African morning.  (See the finca photos at the Hemingway Society.)

The architecture of Rowan Oak

William Faulkner’s house at the end of an august drive of hackberry trees stands shimmering in the same august and lifeless air that cloaked the Mississippi countryside when slaves pushed their carts and pigeons strutted like majorettes in the fluid, smeared dawn-light beginning another peremptory false spring during the feud between northern brothers and Confederate sons.

The Edinburgh villa of J.K. Rowling

J.K. Rowling, the woman who wrote the four-million-seller Harry Potter series, lives along the banks of the River Tay near Aberfeldy, just a little amble from Edinburgh. Aberfeldy is abundant with arbors and angular hills. Read more about literary homes and locales at Novel Destinations.

The real Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald lived in his parents’ Saint Paul Cathedral Hill row house at 599 Summit Ave. He had retreated ignobly to Minnesota after, having found college much to his displeasure, met Zelda Sayre at a country club party in Alabama but could not support her hand in marriage.  It bears but little resemblance to the gallant mansions or wretched ash heaps of West Egg and lesser Long Island.