3 comments about Your Naturally Healthy Home: Stylish, Safe, Simple.

1. This is great if you're not worried about reselling your home or if you're in a market that supports a lot of the kind of things they show in this book, but it's short on practical suggestions for folks who want to incorporate healthy ideas into a regular-looking house.



2. This book is an excellent. It is both a guide to bulding home, and at the same time a guide to the toxins in our home furnishing and ways to minimize our exposure. More and more people are concerned about the chemicals impregnated in the fabrics, woods, paints, and plastics we buy. For instance, many new carpets give off toxic fumes for the first month of installation. After reading that, I realized why I had a chronic sore throat right after we insalled our new carpet.

   It gives alternative materials to look for when buying bedding, shelving, wood stains, and other products. It talks about electric fields and why we should not put our bed on a wall with a power-box on the other side. It also lists which plants are best to purify the air.

   This is a must-have for people who are going to build their own home, and very helpful for people who are refurnishing their home or apartment. Many suggestions do seem centered on elaborate renovations, but even within those suggestions there is information about things such as wall-paints, furnature, and house-hold ventilation. Some of the ideas, like unbleached organic cotten towels are certianly more expensive than regular store-bought towels, but it is a trade off that you can make after reading the book and reviewing your budget.




3. I love this book. I love the information. I love the photos. After checking it out 30 times from the library, I knew I had to buy it.
   
   This is not written in the Ed Begley Jr. School of Green Living. It talks about ways to adapt your home to the local style, economy and ecology; a gentle reminder to live where you are - buy locally, live locally and you'll do the planet some good too.

4 comments about The Home Design Handbook: The Essential Planning Guide for Building, Buying, or Remodeling a Home.

1. This book looks at home design from a wholistic approach as well as up close and personal. It focuses on your hopes and dreams and the soul of your home to give you true satisfaction with your design. It includes such things as site, energy considerations, family's lifestyle, outdoors and indoors, and budget. With the guidance of this book you can plan to build a house from scratch or remodel an existing house to your taste and needs. Each room in the house is taken into consideration in detail, right down to the storage space, with photos and floor plans. Useful addresses and an extensive bibliography are given for your further exploration. This book is fantastic, especially because it gives you the freedom to custom design your dream house. Much of it is in the form of a workbook, with blanks to fill in. After going through all the forms, it will become clear to you what you need to do to achieve your goals.



2. We found The Home Design Handbook to be an excellent resource as we searched for our home. The questions and exercises helped us narrow down and prioritize what we wanted (and did not want) in our home. Even the information intended for those who plan to build or renovate a house, covered issues that we found important considerations for anyone buying an existing home. For example, we learned alot about what to watch for to ensure the house was more energy efficient, inside and out. We felt we were better educated buyers with this great book!



3. Most of the book is literally pages filled with questions about what you want in a home, with blank space to write in your answers. There are a few suggestions that all somehow end up pointing at similar designs. The filled out book would be given to an architect to start a design. Very good for someone who needs a formal structure to decide what is needed. If you've already throught seriously about what you want, this book will waste your time.



4. This book is an excellent guide to help navigate the hundreds of practical details involved in planning a home.
   Every chapter is well-written, and well- organized, with an extremely useful checklist at the end. For example, what about the selection of your vanity in the bathroom? Would you like it to be the age old standard height of 34"? Or would you prefer it to be shorter, or higher? This is a very useful question as the standard height of 34" for the bathroom vanity is not really a comfortable height for most people. My counters, both kitchen and bathrooms, are a height of 37# (I'm 5'5)which is a more comfortable height for me. The depth of my counters are 28" not the standard 24". If you notice your kitchen, once you have the toaster, blender, etc. out, there's little room left for much of anything else. So those extra 4 " in depth really give you a lot more space. Builders want everything to be standard because it's easier for them, but it's your house they are building, and better to get it the way you want it. Another useful question is "do you read in the bathtub"? I do, and that means when designing the bathroom I want a good reading light above the tub at the end where my head lays. Every chapter in this book ends with a great checklist of things you will want to take into account, and prepares you for the highly detailed process of planning a home. It's one of the best on the market, and I think one of most underated ones.

No comments about Materials & Skills for Historic Building Conservation.

No comments about Home How-To Handbook: Trim (Home How-To).

No comments about My Home Renovation: What you should know before you hire a home improvement contractor.

1 comments about 100 Bright Ideas for Bathrooms (100 Bright Ideas).

1. This wonderful book has 100 (that's right, 100!) bathroom projects that you can do in your own home! The projects are divided into five chapters: Modern bathroom, Family bathrooms, Natural style, Nautical style and Country style. Each of the chapters is divided into four sections: Done in a Day (big projects), Quick Fix (small projects), Good Ideas (small decorating ideas - use of soaps, knickknacks, things like that) and Get the Look (large/whole room decorating ideas).

   The projects themselves are great, each with a key that specifies how long the project is likely to take, the skill level required (difficult, medium or easy), materials needed, and step-by-step instructions. Accompanying all of this is a plethora of brightly colored pictures.

   This is a wonderful book! It has everything from major undertakings down to quick things that will take you very little time. As it has so very many great ideas, I recommend it to everyone. If you are even thinking of redecorating your bathroom, then I highly recommend that you get this book!

5 comments about Kids' Rooms: A Hands-On Decorating Guide.

1. Anna Kasabian has done it again! Her latest book will appeal to all pocketbooks and tastes. She offers a unique array of ideas from accents to basic furnishings in a concise, easy to follow style.The book is a wealth of creativity, practical and beautiful, to boot. The photographs are wonderful. The book even contains drawings by children of their dream rooms, which are both poignant and illuminating. Grandparents, this is the book you've been looking for. You can't go wrong. Best of it's sort.



2. If you have children and are considering redecorating their rooms, you MUST HAVE this book! The details and suggestions are wonderful. There are even lots of helpful hints and project ideas which are practical and easy to do. I have rarely found so many unique ideas on decorating children'ts room all in one place. Especially appealing is the use of "real" children using their thoughts, ideas and actual rooms. A book well-worth referring to over and over again!



3. Kids' Rooms: A Hands-On Decorating Guide by interior design expert Anna Kasabian is a very special and "user friendly" how-to guide for creating wonderful rooms crafted especially to meet the needs of children. Filled from cover to cover with a wealth of tips, tricks, techniques, and enhanced with full-color photographs of delightful, inspirational, and friendly room designs and colors for young people, Kids' Rooms provides practical inspirations for home owners and apartment dwellers, from creating safe and fun play areas for children of all ages, to soothing bedrooms for boys or girls, to babyproofing for an infant's safety. Kids' Rooms is an especially enjoyable and very highly recommended instructional guide for parents wanting to cherish ambiance, practicality, and originality in the decor of their children's rooms.



4. This book has nice color in rooms and will give you some good ideas whether you use paint or wallpaper.



5. I was hoping to receive a book full of creative ideas for my daughter's room. What I ended up with was a book full of blah rooms. It just didn't seem like a book that is meant to give ideas by showing actual rooms. The pictures that were shown were only of one side of the room. There is A LOT of writing--not something I look for in a decorating book! There were very few decorative painting techniques or theme rooms. Most of the pictures are of frilly, wallpapered, rooms with canopy beds. Many of the pictures featured rooms with built-ins (bookcases, or beds, or window seats). The majority of bedrooms I have ever seen do not have any of these items. The author seems to go on tangents for much of the book--sections such as "designing family spaces" where they tell you how to layout a kitchen, or "Outdoor play areas" where they tell you about swing sets...

No comments about How To Hire A Home Improvement Contractor Without Getting Chiseled: An experienced home contractor explains how to: find a contractor or architect, negotiate ... avoid the scams, get the most for your money.

No comments about Windows & Skylights: (Building Basic Series).

No comments about Houseworks: Guide to Understanding Your Home.