A classic bestselling resource for every household, Home Comforts helps you manage everyday chores, find creative solutions to domestic dilemmas, and enhance the experience of life at home. “Home Comforts is to the house what Joy of Cooking is to food.” —USA TODAY Home Comforts is an engaging and comprehensive book about housekeeping. It is a lively and readable guide for both beginners and experts in all the domestic arts. From keeping surfaces free of germs, watering plants, removing stains, folding a fitted sheet, cleaning china, tuning a piano, lighting a fire, setting the dining room table—this guide covers everything that people might want to do for themselves in their homes. Further topics include: making up a bed with hospital corners, expert recommendations for safe food storage, reading care labels (and sometimes carefully disregarding them), keeping your home free of dust mites and other allergens, this is a practical, good-humored, philosophical guidebook to the art and science of household management.
With The Hip Girl's Guide to Homemaking, it's possible and even convenient to create an inviting space for living and entertaining on a budget. From unique decor ideas to growing strawberries on your fire escape, Kate Payne shares fun, low-cost (and often free!) creative solutions that will make anyone feel more accomplished in minutes. Inside this savvy motivational guide filled to the brim with small-scale creative home projects, Kate's tongue-in-cheek tone will keep you tuned in to her much-needed advice. In three easy sections, you'll learn how to create a comfortable space while being time- and budget-conscious. Section One, Home-ify Your Pad, features quick, convenient ways to make your place cozier with low-cost, special touches to help you tap into and show off your inner artist. Section Two, Impressive Acts of Domesticity, teaches how to impress others (and yourself) with the gratifying pleasures of self-sufficiency—a first-time guide to cleaning, sewing, repairing, and other previously out-of-the-question tasks. Section Three, Life After Restaurants, frees you to release the take-out menu, avoid pricey bar tabs, and entertain others in the space you've so thoughtfully and gorgeously created. User-friendly "how-to" sidebars, illustrations, and tips and tricks throughout the book offer easy-to-follow recipes and do-it-yourself craft suggestions for making your home hip, comfortable, and inviting. Keep in mind that this is not your grandmother's handbook and it's not the kind of wisdom your mom knows how to impart. Modern women need a modern approach to domestic pleasures—a guide to doing household things on our own terms, because most of this stuff isn't as hard as we've been led to believe. Don't worry, she's not asking you to host Tupperware parties or iron your underwear. But as all beginning home keepers know, a sure fire way to feel bad about ourselves is to consult Martha Stewart. So ditch that 2-inch thick handbook, dust off your pots and pans, and join Kate on this journey to incorporating creativity and self-sufficiency on the home front.
For Cheryl Mendelson, laundering is the best part of housekeeping. It’s full of physical pleasures—the look of favorite clothes restored to freshness and beauty, the tactile satisfaction of crisp linens in beautifully folded stacks. Good laundering preserves things you love and protects your pocketbook. It doesn’t take much time or effort. What it takes is knowledge, and Laundry is the comprehensive, entertaining, and inspiring book on the art of laundering. Culled from the bestselling Home Comforts, with revised and updated information and a new introduction, Laundry is an indispensable guide to caring for all the cloth in one’s home: from kitchen rags to bedding, hand-washables, and baby clothes to vintage linens. Mendelson offers detailed guidance on when to disregard labels, removing stains, making environmentally informed choices, sewing, and storing clothing and fabrics. A much-needed antidote to the standard-issue how-to manual, Laundry celebrates the satisfactions of ironing, folding, and caring for clothes and linens. Both pragmatic and eloquent, Mendelson provides beginning and veteran homemakers with a seamless combination of reliable instruction, time-tested advice, and fascinating personal narrative. As a farm girl in Pennsylvania, Mendelson—who is a philosopher, lawyer, and professor, as well as a homemaker, wife, and mother—received a classic domestic education from her grandmothers, aunts, and mother. Laundry combines the best of the traditional lore they taught her with the latest in technical and scientific information. Writing with infectious love and respect for her subject, Mendelson is sure to instill in readers a newfound affection and appreciation for the art of laundering.
The ultimate guide to Christian homemaking advises readers on everything from meal planning to interior decorating, biblical womanhood to budgeting, serving as a comprehensive handbook for the woman and her home.
Rosemarie Jarski, known for her many books highlighting the wit of the ages, offers up the perfect how-to guide, illuminating the darkest corner of the household with all those things our mothers never taught us. Domestic Bliss is Rosemarie's own unique and characteristically witty handbook that fills the gap left by the generation before us. The essential skills of how to keep your house from falling down around your ears are not taught in school, and our parents were so busy earning a living they had no time to pass on the wisdom the world sees as 'common sense'. Well, common sense is not so common as is commonly supposed. This hands-on, down-to-earth guide focuses on those household problems and challenges you are most likely to encounter in real life: how to cure a dripping tap, combat condensation, and unblock a sink. You'll also get to grips with a power drill, a plumb line, and a paintbrush. And find the answers to Life's little frustrations, like how to remove sticky labels, open supermarket plastic bags, and fit a duvet-cover onto a duvet without being swallowed. Many home references tell you how to do something, without telling you why. Rosemarie, though, asks 'What is the point of a detailed explanation of how to bleed a radiator if you have no idea why it's necessary?' This guide is different because it takes the time to tell you why a particular technique is needed or beneficial, giving you the background and Explaining the point of it all. Domestic Bliss is also different because it's a manual for all ages and sexes. We all have laundry to sort, stains to remove, dishes to wash, and heaven knows the essential techniques don't differ whether it's your boxer shorts or his. With clear and mercifully jargon-free directions, Ms Jarski offers more than tips and nudges, holding our hand through the process of putting up drywall, shining our shoes, braiding our hair and creating a beautiful table for a dinner party. Step-by step instructions are enhanced, wherever necessary, by line drawings, so you can see at a glance what to do. Rosemarie's indispensable manual helps us with: Getting Organized, Home Laundry, Sewing, Cleaning, Interior Design, Painting & Decorating, Home Matters, D.I.Y, Food & Drink, Style & Grooming, Scarves & Ties, Home Office, Leisure Time, House Plants & Flowers, Entertaining, Gifts & Wrapping, Christmas, Packing a Suitcase, Conversion Charts. Domestic Bliss is your guide to daily living, offering a thorough grounding in the practical skills everyone should know how to do. The aim is to demystify and simplify. Where other household manuals leave you feeling daunted and inadequate, this guide instills you with the confidence and enthusiasm to get stuck in and have a go as you sweep, shine, and stitch your way towards Domestic Bliss.
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From “Silicon Valley’s Martha Stewart” comes a new manifesto for the modern homemaker in the digital age. Over the past three generations, the rules of homemaking and our very notions of what a homemaker is and does have radically changed. We are still a nation of makers, but we are crafting and creating beyond the home, in both the analog and digital worlds. And in the next ten years, “making” and “homemaking” will evolve further. Tomorrow’s women will find themselves actually manufacturing everything from decor to clothing, from right inside their homes. In Homemakers, Brit Morin, founder of the wildly popular lifestyle brand and website Brit + Co., reimagines homemaking for the twenty-first century. While today’s generation thrives in the virtual world, they like to work and create in the physical world. Morin inspires you to combine the best of analog and digital, to help you reconnect with your inner creative child-the one who used to love to draw, to build, and to play-to make your home a more creative, functional, and beautiful place. Full of captivating, colorful spreads, step-by-step DIYs, tips, and unique ideas, Homemakers explores a range of domestic skills room by room in a house, from cooking advice in the kitchen to health and beauty tips in the bathroom. Simple, beautiful, and stylish, it offer ideas for creative living to encourage and enable the digital generation to make.
It is intended that women be happy and successful in their homemaking. Being a homemaker is a divine appointment and is a woman’s greatest calling. It should be rich in the rewards of joy, satisfaction and accomplishment. All too often, however, women feel confused, distraught or bored with their role as homemakers. They frequently dread each day, live for the time when their children will be raised so they can be released from it all, or they escape from their responsibilities to their home and family and return to the business world. Other women do enjoy their homemaking activities but find their work consumes most of their day and there is little time for other interests. Many women are wonderful homemakers and managers but are eager for new ideas and skills to make their homemaking even more effective and satisfying. To all of these women, this book offers a practical guide to happier homemaking. It recalls to mind the significance of homemaking and gives their attitude a lift. When the suggestions concerning order and efficiency, methods and approaches are applied, coupled with the workable plan which systematizes the routine duties, women will find their interest in homemaking greatly increasing and that there will be time to get their work done and enjoy creative activities, family fun and personal development. This is not just a book on how to keep house; it offers a way of life which will bring joy and satisfaction to the homemaker and rich, happy experiences to every family member.
Lavishly illustrated with over 300 photographs, Making Your House a Home includes chapters on Chaos to Calm, Making the Most of What You've Got, and Be a More Considered Shopper, plus expert advice on how to avoid needless stress and expense.