No comments about Build Your Own Home for Less Than $15,000: An Essential Guide to Every Phase of Building Your Own Home.

No comments about Bathrooms: Planning and Remodeling.

No comments about Stone Landscaping (Better Homes & Gardens).

1 comments about Wear Analysis for Engineers.

1. Good general discussion of tribology. Excellent methodology for doing wear analyses. Obviously written with design engineers in mind. Clearly written.

No comments about Getting the Builders in: How to Manage Homebuilding and Renovation Projects.

No comments about Fallingwater Aid (Architecture in Detail).

4 comments about Build Like a Pro: Painting and Finishing.

1. When you look at the cover of this book, what does the largest photo show? A man painting an interior wall of a room. And what is the book title? Painting and Finishing. And the first bulleted caption line on the cover is "Painting the interior or exterior of a house." The second bulleted caption line is "Choosing finishes for kitchens and bathrooms." So, does this book discuss strategies and techniques for efficiently painting a home's entire interiors, including walls and ceilings? No. Does it discuss the new paints for painting plastic laminates or stains and paints for concrete floors and counters? No. Does it discuss scaffolding if you are "blessed" with exceedingly high ceilings in large rooms or address when it makes sense to spray paint rather than roll walls and ceilings? No. This book is devoted exclusively to discussion of painting or finishing wood, that is, solid and composite woods or wood veneers used in moldings, cabinets, furniture, siding, decking, and decorative items.

   While a great deal of interior and exterior decor in better homes is composed of wood, this book is marketed as a general painting and finish book for the home, not as a book for one material in the home. Nowhere on the front or back cover, is this book labeled as what it is: how to paint and stain new or old wood surfaces. And although I already know how to use a paint roller, I bought the book to help me plan how to paint two complete home interiors. Not just the trim and the cabinets. The professional advice I expected to find simply is not there because this book is being presented, in my opinion, as something it is not.

   If what you need is advice on painting wood, I think there are better, meaning more detailed and more creative, books available. For instance, "The Painted Kitchen", by Henny Donovan (Firefly Books, 2000) demonstrates a wide range of styles and techniques for painting kitchen cabinets and Annie Sloan's "Inspirations In Painted Furniture," (Collins and Brown, 1999) is both inspiring and an excellent technical reference for painted furniture.

   Michael Dresdner's book delivers a great deal of solid, basic, technical information, it is well written, and it is well illustrated, but it is also very limited in scope. He covers tools of the trade, oil-based versus water-based products, work area preparation, clean up, and safety thoroughly. He provides some nifty tips on preparing wood for finishing as well. Unless that's just what you need, however, I recommend you keep browsing.




2. The title is misleading. Interior painting is barely touched upon, exterior painting content is basic at best. Staining and finishing sections are rather rudimentary.

   Typos abound. Some sidebars are repeated three times.

   I've never been disappointed by a Taunton book until this one.




3. I like Tauntons press books alot. So when I went to find a book on painting I looked for thier book on painting.
   Most of Tauntons Press books go into more advanced aspects of what ever they are refering to. This book is more suited for the slow 2nd grader. It mostly deals with outside painting and staining.
   nothing at all on how to roll inside walls. This is the WORST book that I have ever bought. This book does not even come close to Tauntons Press normal quality, Shame on you Tauntons...



4. The Taunton Pro books are usually quite good, but this one is an exception. Even the bullet points on the front are misleading "Painting the interior and exterior of a house." When I think interior, I think walls, but evidently they mean every other surface EXCEPT walls! LOL.
   
   I also wondered if the author had a contract with BIN. I don't mind if you mention that you like BIN products the best, but to waste valuable photography space on showing a BIN display and cans of paint seems a bit of a waste to me.
   
   The section on floors had several diagrams with arrows going in various directions to show sanding patterns (page 74-75). There was not a clear explanation of which sanding pattern you should use and I came away from reading that section even more confused. The section on Kitchens and Bathrooms was also incomplete. It started out telling you how to prepare the old cabinet surface, how to choose the right primer, then "next to painting, the easiest way to change the look of kitchen cabinets is to recolor them" and goes into staining. It NEVER talks about painting the kitchen cabinets! (page 24-27).
   
   Even the "In Detail" callouts were incomplete! On page 27, there is a short paragraph on Mixing Glazes. It talks about clear, water based glaze base, then talks about getting a paint chip and having the store make up a quart. The mixing instructions are "When mixed with enough glaze base, one quart of paint makes 3-4 quarts of glaze." That's it!
   
   I found the instructions incomplete and not up to the regular Taunton level of quality in their books. Do not waste your money on this book.

4 comments about 100 Turn-of-the-Century Brick Bungalows with Floor Plans.

1. The sketches and floor plans are a little hard to read by modern standards, as all are hand-lettered, and the designs are a little light on bathrooms, to say nothing of garages, compared to contemporary homes. But the homes are very Picturesque nonetheless, featuring plenty of faux thatched roofs, chimneys, eyebrow dormers, arched entryways, porches and so forth.



2. It is interesting to compare the home plans in this book to the homes of today. The houses in the plans are smaller and most only have one bathroom but they have a charming details that is hard to find in the oversized "McMansions" that are being built today. Unless you are planning on faithfully recreating a house from the early 1900's this book is probably going to most useful as a source of inspiration and good ideas.



3. As my husband and I look toward retirement, we are dreaming of the kind of house we will be looking for, or building, when we move. I have always loved the bungalow style for its coziness and nostalgic feeling. This book is full of bungalow concepts, all drawn from a magazine-sponsored contest in the early 1900's for plans for a brick bungalow for $3000. If you buy this book, be sure to get out your magnifying glass so you can read the designers'/architects' comments -- they are very funny! One said that if you think you can actually build a brick bungalow for $3000, you should plan on a thatched roof! I love this book and have perused it, and dreamed over it, many times. I have lots of ad-hoc bookmarks (like, corners torn from the newspaper or discarded mail!) stuck in at floor plans I like. There is a brick marketing "story" in the back of the book that is wonderful of its type.



4. This book is great. Break out the magnifying glass, some of the printing is really small. My only complaint is the house plans are from people mostly on the east coast, so they don't quite fit what people from the west coast would call "Bungalows". There's really only 1 plan in there that looks like a California bungalow. But, the book is full of creative plans that would be very comfortable small homes.

No comments about Great Kitchens.

1 comments about The Anatomy of Architecture: Ontology and Metaphor in Batammaliba Architectural Expression.

1. This by far the best research I have read on the subject of architecture. Suzanne Blier takes a holistic and scholarly approach. The writing is clear with excellent references that have proven very helpful. The photography and illustrations are informative. Anyone with a serious interest in West African art, sociology, language, religion and architecture in general should read this book.