Real Estate
At home with fake furniture, mailbox cams and air-cleaning ceiling fans
By David S. Jones, Real Estate Center at Texas A&M
Aug 9, 2008

Real estate agents will tell you that a furnished home normally sells faster than an empty one. Of course, the furnishings must be tasteful and arranged so the home doesn’t appear crowded. But, in general, furnishings help the would-be buyer envision how their belongings would look inside the home.

But what if you have to move before the home sells? Spending thousands of dollars to rent furniture to make the home more appealing might not be an option. Now, however, a Dallas company says it can fill up an empty house with sofas, beds and tables — for less than $700.

How? The furniture is fake.

Fake Furniture Co. (http://www.fakefurniture.com/) has 14 pieces of full-size white cardboard furniture. The “furniture” is made from cardboard boxes and is easily (according to the manufacturer) assembled.

“If you can fold a cardboard box, you can make a cocktail table, a twin bed, a desk or a chair,” says the company website.

Accessories such as pillows, throws and bedspreads add realism to the furnishings. The website says fake furniture helps buyers visualize where the sofa goes or whether the king bed fits in the master bedroom.

Of course, you don’t have to purchase a whole house full of fake furniture. If you just want a king bed, for example, it’s about $115 (including shipping and handling). A double bed is $80, and a twin bed is about $70.

Fake furniture also can be purchased by the room. A master bedroom with king bed, armoire and nightstand is around $196. A dining room with table, chair and triple dresser-buffet is less than $140, including shipping and handling.

Faux furnishings are but one new idea in a seemingly endless stream of products for your home. The mailbox camera is another.

You probably are familiar with the wireless battery-powered camera system for monitoring infants, doorways and such around the home. But this new camera can operate for months on just one set of AA batteries, compared to around ten hours for other cameras using the same batteries.

“I came up with the original idea after observing my wife’s grandfather,” says MailboxCam inventor Scot Jerierski. “At 88 years of age, he would make several trips up and down the stairs of his apartment building each day to check for mail delivery.”

Jerierski’s invention allows a person to just look at a standard television set to see if there is mail in the box. The MailboxCam signal carries almost 300 feet. It sells for $199.95 and can be found at http://www.wirelessimaging.com/.

It’s estimated there are more than one billion ceiling fans circulating air in U.S. homes and businesses. But the blades are often loaded with dust, pollen, molds, smoke, animal odors and more. Now, however, it’s possible to clean the air while you circulate it.

The Purifan System is a self-contained, circular unit that takes the place of the paddles of a standard ceiling fan. It uses a three-stage filtration system, including a high efficiency particulate air (HEPA) filter to remove air contaminants.

The system can recirculate 2,000 cubic feet of air per minute. The air in a 20-by-20-foot room can be refreshed every 90 seconds.

The Purifan sells for about $360 and is available at http://www.purifan.com/.

For the record, I have not personally seen or used any of these products. Neither I nor the Real Estate Center endorses or recommends any product. We are just the messenger bringing news of interesting, but not necessarily useful or affordable, items for the home and office.