apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

i'd love to hear what ideas you guys have. Also, how would you clean a heater/furnace yourself? Mine is covered with dust that must be 20 years old...i'm a little hesitant to touch it etc.. any ideas?

I have a wall heater in my apartment as well, and it served no purpose to me; I live in Florida. What I did was used peg board to cover it. I went to Home Depot, had them cut it to the sizes I needed, and built a box frame to slide over the heater. I used plastic electrical ties to hold the box frame together. It worked great for me, plus, peg board can be painted to match the room and it's light weight. No fuss!

You could put a console table over top. Or a shelf with some legs.

My wall heater is even bigger and uglier than this one! You can vacuum them out but turn off the pilot for this job. I am thinking some kind of cage made of plumbing pipe that's threaded to join together - the straight kind for the front and then some smaller curved pieces for the sides - it might look like a cool sculpture and could just be put in front and pulled away when you need to light the thing or turn it off. Right now I just avert my eyes.

i like the idea of hacking IKEA's HOL storage cube to cover radiators and heaters.

http://ikeahacker.blogspot.com/2007/07/radiator-cover-up.html

Well, there are numerous companies that make radiator covers, because this is KIND of like a radiator. Here in NYC there are several places that make them, but I think there are some on the web that will make them, too. Since most of them are custom anyway, there's no reason that you couldn't have one made for that particular shape that you have.

Meanwhile, I think that even with that, you'd probably want to use high-heat paint and paint it out black, so that if you have the radiator cover made with a metal grill, the white won't be glaring through it.