Perfectly Kept House is the Sign of A Misspent Life

by Mary Randolph Carter
Perfectly Kept House is the Sign of A Misspent Life
Author: Mary Randolph Carter
Publisher: Rizzoli Publications
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2010-10-19
Genre: House & Home
ISBN: 0847833658
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For all those who choose to live "imperfectly" with the messy things they love, this book shows how to do so creatively, happily, and with considerable style ideas from leading designers. A beautiful and inspiring volume, A Perfectly Kept House is the Sign of A Misspent Life focuses on living well with everything that makes a house a home. If you have been influenced by the picturesquely cluttered studios of Pablo Picasso or Alexander Calder, or by the art- and book-filled house of Vanessa Bell, this unique style book will stimulate you with its creative ideas.This volume explores how real-life tastemakers (photographers, textile designers, fashion designers, writers, artists) integrate their life and interiors to live well with their passions, histories, conveniences, and inconveniences. In inspiring essays, Mary Randolph Carter muses on such key housekeeping concerns as clutter versus mess; open windows; and unmade beds. Combining practical tips with liberating philosophy—"Don’t scrub the soul out of your home"; "Make room for what you love"—this volume celebrates living beautifully and happily, not messily. Lavishly illustrated with intimate photographs of different living spaces, Carter exalts in the beauty of imperfection and in living perfectly in our "imperfect" homes. Life isn’t perfect—why should your house be?

The Perfectly Imperfect Home

by Deborah Needleman
The Perfectly Imperfect Home
Author: Deborah Needleman
Publisher: White Lion Publishing
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2012
Genre: Interior decoration
ISBN: 9781906417703
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The Perfectly Imperfect Home is a must-have guide to choosing the 80 essential items you need for furnishing and decorating your home, expertly written by Deborah Needham, founder of Domino magazine. Featuring original watercolour illustrations of decorators' own homes, the book sets out how to select everything from the big stuff (a doted-on bed, a couch that will last generations) to quirky accents (an interesting-looking chair, a mix of textiles on a table). It is often the individual pieces, from chairs to china, mirrors to vases, that help you to express your personality, add style and beauty to a home and make everyone in it feel comfortable, glamorous and well-cared for. The inspiring design and approachable tone of The Perfectly Imperfect Home puts it a cut above the competition. Witty and wonderful essays and quick-reference sidebars highlight each of the 80 essentials, offering histories, offbeat uses and really useful styling tips. Decorating a home can be intimidating, but here are 80 essentials that make it manageable and fun.

The Joy of Junk

by Mary Randolph Carter
The Joy of Junk
Author: Mary Randolph Carter
Publisher: Rizzoli Publications
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2018-09-25
Genre: House & Home
ISBN: 0847862100
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Best-selling author Mary Randolph Carter is back at it with a full-throated celebration of junk and thrifting. The Joy of Junk shows us how to live stylishly and creatively with the personally meaningful objects we love to collect for our homes. From the author who taught us that "junk" in not a four-letter word, and drawing on her years of experience as a passionate thrifter and collector, Carter highlights her favorite junking moments, revels in the thrill of the hunt and imparts many personal tips for finding treasures in flea markets, yard sales, estate sales, shops, on the web, or wherever you may find yourself. With her passion for self-expression and her personal approach to decor, Carter speaks to our desire to surround ourselves with belongings that bring beauty and meaning to our lives. Along the way, Carter interviews other designers and high-profile collectors--such as Lisa Eisner, Bunny Williams, and Mike Wolfe from "American Pickers," among others--revealing their favorite treasure hunts and showing us how they live with their collections. Inspiring and liberating, The Joy of Junk shows how we can integrate our passions and histories to live creatively and happily with the special and quirky objects that give our homes soul.

Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House

by Meghan Daum
Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House
Author: Meghan Daum
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2010-05-04
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0307593606
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From the acclaimed author and columnist: a laugh-out-loud journey into the world of real estate—the true story of one woman’s “imperfect life lived among imperfect houses” and her quest for the four perfect walls to call home. After an itinerant suburban childhood and countless moves as a grown-up—from New York City to Lincoln, Nebraska; from the Midwest to the West Coast and back—Meghan Daum was living in Los Angeles, single and in her mid-thirties, and devoting obscene amounts of time not to her writing career or her dating life but to the pursuit of property: scouring Craigslist, visiting open houses, fantasizing about finding the right place for the right price. Finally, near the height of the real estate bubble, she succumbed, depleting her life’s savings to buy a 900-square-foot bungalow, with a garage that “bore a close resemblance to the ruins of Pompeii” and plumbing that “dated back to the Coolidge administration.” From her mother’s decorating manias to her own “hidden room” dreams, Daum explores the perils and pleasures of believing that only a house can make you whole. With delicious wit and a keen eye for the absurd, she has given us a pitch-perfect, irresistible tale of playing a lifelong game of house.

American Junk

by Mary Randolph Carter
American Junk
Author: Mary Randolph Carter
Publisher: Penguin Putnam
Total Pages: 0
Release: 1994
Genre: House furnishings
ISBN: 9780670844005
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A guide to decorating the home using objects acquired at flea markets, auctions, and garage sales features before-and-after photographs, prices, a listing of auction houses, and tips on bargaining, cleaning, and camouflage.

This, That, and Everything

by Norma Nightingale
This, That, and Everything
Author: Norma Nightingale
Publisher: Inspiring Voices
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2013
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1462404529
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This, That, and Everything shares the true and often hilarious account of the starts, the stalls, the reverses, and the restarts of Norma Nightingale's life. It covers the whole range of her life, from childhood to becoming a grandma and beyond. In a memoir that is humorous and sad by turns, she recounts her life, which began as the sixth of eight children born into a Holdeman Mennonite family. Their way of life was to live in simplicity with economy and modesty including the way they dressed and how they conducted themselves, not drawing attention to themselves. She tells of her childhood growing up in central California on the property of the Gallo Winery, where her father worked. Her marriage at seventeen to Winston Nightingale, who was eighteen at the time, opened a new and exciting chapter in her life, first in California and later in Kansas, where her husband was offered a new job. She talks of her devastation at discovering that, after having three children, she had early stage cervical cancer. Happily, she survived and thrived in Kansas with her family. This, That, and Everything is the charming memoir of a woman who continues to live her life to the fullest, with love, hope, and a wonderful family.

Tell Me a Season

by Mary McKenna Siddals
Tell Me a Season
Author: Mary McKenna Siddals
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Total Pages: 36
Release: 2001-08-24
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 9780618130580
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Nature displays different colors to announce the seasons of the year and the time of day.

My Misspent Youth

by Meghan Daum
My Misspent Youth
Author: Meghan Daum
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages: 152
Release: 2014-12-23
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1250067693
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My Misspent Youth is an incisive collection that marked the start of a new millennium and became a cult classic, from the editor of Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed and the author of The Unspeakable An essayist in the tradition of Joan Didion, Meghan Daum is one of the most celebrated nonfiction writers of her generation, widely recognized for her fresh, provocative approach with which she unearths the hidden fault lines in the American landscape. From her well remembered New Yorker essays about the financial demands of big-city ambition and the ethereal, strangely old-fashioned allure of cyber-relationships to her dazzlingly hilarious riff in Harper's about musical passions that give way to middle-brow paraphernalia, Daum delves into the center of things while closely examining the detritus that spills out along the way. With precision and well-balanced irony, Daum implicates herself as readily as she does the targets that fascinate and horrify her.

Make It Your Own

by Anna Alicia
Make It Your Own
Author: Anna Alicia
Publisher: Hardie Grant
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2013-09-10
Genre: Handicraft
ISBN: 9781742705996
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HOME FURNISHING & DECORATION. Learn how to make brilliant homewares for your house. From homeowners to renters, we all seem to have one thing in common these days: we want our homes to reflect our personalities and look less like a shot from an interiors magazine. Gone are the days when flat-pack furniture and generic knickknacks ruled the roost. The modern abode is filled with old photos, trinkets, flea-market finds, and objects that have meaning. In Make It Your Own, Anna Alicia shows readers how easy it is to transform their homes into a wonderful living space. Anna's approach encourages readers not to be afraid to customize furniture and soup up store-bought glassware and china to create a very unique look. Create a stunning candleholder with an old bottle and some glass pens; update your tired bookcase with a chevron print by using some masking tape and a splash of paint; bake some super-stylish Swedish Christmas decorations.