Clutter

Peter Schroff has never had a problem living life to the fullest. For 16 years, the set designer and installation artist turned his orange-and-green bungalow in Venice into an exuberant showcase of leftover props and knickknacks, a place where deer antlers covered the kitchen ceiling, surfboards doubled as shelves and geisha bobblehead dolls danced under gyrating hula lamps.

It looks as if television networks have embraced an idea that record companies still find difficult to accept: Giving away your product -- temporarily, anyway -- can be a great promotional tool. In recent weeks, the season premieres of Showtime's "Fat Actress" and Bravo's "Project Greenlight" were made available for online viewing on the day of their television premieres and for a week thereafter.

Judd ABRAMS says he is a clean freak, the kind of person who has valued order since he was a kid. But when his fiancee, Nicole Sassaman, met him a year ago, Abrams' collections of old guitars, cameras and tribal masks were scattered throughout his Malibu bachelor pad. One night, a few weeks into their relationship, he asked her for home improvement ideas. After all, she is a contractor who specializes in finding hidden space in the tightest of condos.

Peering through binoculars from her beachfront landing, Donna Hilbert counts the huge cargo ships lining the horizon. "That's 34, 35.... ," she calls out. Her gaze hasn't even reached an aqua-hulled barge and a dozen freighters amid three oil islands and cranes outside the nation's busiest harbor.

Want to clear some space in your overcrowded garage? Easy. Stow your motorcycle -- or anything else weighing up to a ton -- on a shelf that tickles the ceiling. That's the idea behind Loft-It, a "garage elevator" from HyLoft USA, which allows you to free up an extra 192 cubic feet of garage space by storing motorcycles or other heavy objects up to six feet in the air.

The Little Amsterdam sits incongruously in the rolling expanse of Sonoma County farmland, a low white building adorned with a Dutch windmill -- a "fake" windmill, Tom Waits' assistant has specified in her directions. The restaurant's interior looks like something Waits himself might have had a hand in decorating. Besides the clutter of farm implements and copper cookware and sombreros, antique radios sit gathering dust, and an old-fashioned curved bicycle horn hangs in one corner.

Californians have a constitutional right to go fishing. That sounds like a slice of paradise, but it's actually a small part of a big problem, a state government slowed to near standstill by its own rules and restrictions. Article I, Section 25 of the California Constitution declares: "The people shall have the right to fish upon and from the public lands of the state and in the waters thereof .... " Section 25 was adopted by the people Nov.

Your feature and photos depicting "decorative and intimate" exterior decorating ("Out Under the Sky," July 29) brought one thing to mind -- the ambience of Fred Sanford's junkyard. Terry Schauer Sherman Oaks

On the afternoon of April 24, Ryan Price walked out of her mother-in-law's Santa Ana home to her car. What happened next would launch Price into a three-month legal tiff involving her family, City Hall and the 1st Amendment. Attached to the windshield wiper of her silver 2000 Acura Integra was a traffic ticket. Price looked up and down the residential street in bafflement -- she had not parked near a stop sign, a fire hydrant or in a red zone.

The Engs kids wanted to play inside. Invite friends over, hang out in the middle of the action, watch TV. Their parents were fine with it, but something was stopping them: the house. Their lunky two-story was a maze of dead ends that trapped tag players. It had nappy pink carpeting that gobbled toy pieces, monster-size furniture that jumped in the way and a one-car garage that prohibited bikes. Their parents weren't too happy with the house in Cheviot Hills, either.