October 2010

Vila, Bob, and Jane Davison. This Old House: Restoring, Rehabilitating, and Renovating an Older House. Boston: Little, Brown, 1980. Print.

I ran across this book on the library website while trying to find out what branches have subscriptions of the magazine called “This Old House”.  I had to put it on hold, because I fondly remember Saturday mornings watching the TV show on PBS in the late 80s and early 90s.  I must have seen re-runs of the show, since the book was published in 1980, and the show must have aired before that.  Seeing the pictures, though, I am quite sure I saw episodes featuring this house.

I read the whole book in a single sick day, unable to put it down.  It almost read like a mystery novel, trying to see how they would get the house done in time for the final episode of the season.  Although the pictures of the house as they purchased it didn’t look too bad to me, they uncovered the usual heartbreaking roof and porch rot, substandard plumbing retrofits, and insufficient joists that we all end up with when we buy an older house.

There are tons of pictures and floor plans, which make it a quick read.  Each chapter covers one episode, but is split into two parts (like the episodes, as I recall).  When they talk about the topics like insulation or heating and how they are going to handle it in the house, the second half of the chapter talks about it in more detail, which makes it more useful to the reader.  However, 30 years later a lot of that information is outdated.

Speaking of outdated… the kitchen they install is horrible by modern tastes, and the electric baseboards that they think are so wonderful stick out like a sore thumb in the final pictures!  Likewise, the picture of the original bathroom, where they say “it was just old enough to be obsolete, not old enough to be quaint” (p. 12)… well, 30 years makes a lot of difference, and I wish I had the tiles, sink and tub they demolished.

It’s amazing that they bought that house for $17,000 and thought they’d spend $30,000 renovating it.

Burnett, Frances Hodgson. Little Lord Fauntleroy. Penguin, 1995. Print.

Since I was given a copy of The Secret Garden at the correct age, I am of course a fan of Burnett’s.  However, scanning her other titles, I don’t recognize any that I read when I was young.  I had this on my bookshelf and picked it up recently when I needed something small to carry with me, and I’m not entirely sure I ever read it before.

It’s a typical Burnett story, with a hero so improbably good that it’s difficult to believe such a boy could ever exist.  Although it’s somewhat formulaic, even as an adult I found it an amusing, quick read, and even when things happened as I expected, I found it didn’t annoy me.

I’m not sure who I would recommend this to – I’m not sure if Burnett was intentionally writing for children, or whether these books would have been considered suitable for adults in her time.  The reading level comes in at 8.4, although I’m not sure I would recommend it to the Grade 8 boy who lives here.  I can’t imagine he would find it interesting.

I know that I have an old copy of Burnett’s The Shuttle, and a rare first edition of Captain January, which has the distinction of having been made into a Shirley Temple movie.

Ferriss, Timothy. The 4-hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich. New York: Crown, 2007. Print.

I read this book in August, in a hundred-year-old co-op apartment lined with books, on a day when I was too tired to traipse around New York City with my husband and son.  They left me there to flip through the thousands of books on offer in the home of our editor aunt and uncle.  This is the book that I read, practically in one sitting, from 10am to 4pm or so.

My husband and I have been working toward retirement for some time, and we’re down to the point where some smallish amount of work – measured in years rather than decades – is all that’s standing in the way.  While I was staring down a new school year at a new school coming up in a few short weeks, this book promised to answer my prayers.

I’m a big fan of his idea of finding an income stream that will pay the bills, leaving you free to pursue the things that really matter to you.  I’ve thought of it as having a basic pillow of savings to cover me from now until age 95, but I like the way Ferriss approaches it for younger folks – plan out the money you need for living expenses and the stuff you want to do for a few months, then find the money and do it.  He doesn’t let people think small, either – he wants you to think about giving up your apartment and living a dream somewhere else, and crunches some numbers to show that it’s not as far-fetched as you expect.

The second on outsourcing your life didn’t appeal to me, since part of what I want is the time to run my life the way I want.  However, the section on finding a “muse’ – the part that Get Rich Slowly said was the weakest part of the book – was the most relevant.  I needed the details in the book, so upon arriving home I put the book on hold at the local library.  It said “in transit” for a week, which never happens, and I spent that week trying to figure out whether this would be the thing that put me off, or the first in a series of amusing anecdotes in how I finally made it work.  I did finally get the book and review the details, and set up a “muse”.  A “muse”, by the way, is nothing like what you would think – it’s an online business that’s designed to be set up so that the nitty-gritty details like fulfillment and invoicing can be handled by third parties, once you get it set up and running.  My first five-day trial was a resounding failure, with not a single sign-up, but I’m currently one day into my second trial with a different online idea.

The book is organized into four parts, which are meant to flow into each other, but my biggest complaint is that the book is a big compendium of every good idea Ferriss has had in his life, more-or-less shoehorned in together.

I see now that there is an expanded and updated version from 2009, so perhaps I’ll revisit that later.

There is a good annotated bibliography, which he calls “Restricted Reading”, for some reason.

• Bieler, Peter, and Suzanne Costas. “This Business Has Legs”: How I Used Infomercial Marketing to Create the $100,000,000 Thighmaster Craze Exerciser : an Entrepreneurial Adventure Story. New York: John Wiley, 1996. Print.
• Burlingham, Bo. Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big. New York: Portfolio, 2005. Print.
• Dawson, Roger. Secrets of Power Negotiating: inside Secrets from a Master Negotiator. Franklin Lakes, NJ: Career, 2001. Print.
• Dlugozima, Hope, James Scott, and David Sharp. Six Months Off: How to Plan, Negotiate, and Take the Break You Need without Burning Bridges or Going Broke. New York: Henry Holt, 1996. Print.
• Gerber, Michael E. The E-myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do about It. New York: CollinsBusiness, 1995. Print.
• Kennedy, Dan S. How to Make Millions with Your Ideas: an Entrepreneur’s Guide. New York: Plume, 1996. Print.
• Koch, Richard. The 80/20 Principle: the Secret of Achieving More with Less. New York: Currency, 1998. Print.
• Komisar, Randy, and Kent L. Lineback. The Monk and the Riddle: the Education of a Silicon Valley Entrepreneur. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School, 2000. Print.
• Potts, Rolf. Vagabonding: an Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-term World Travel. New York: Villard, 2003. Print.
• Schwartz, David Joseph. The Magic of Thinking Big. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007. Print.
• Thoreau, Henry David, and J. Lyndon Shanley. Walden. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1971. Print.
• VandenBroeck, Goldian. Less Is More: the Art of Voluntary Poverty. New York: Harper & Row, 1978. Print.

Tremblay, Kenneth R., and Lawrence Von. Bamford. Small House Designs: Elegant, Architect-designed Homes : 34 Award-winning Plans : 1.250 Square Feet or Less. Pownal, VT: Storey Communications, 1997. Print.

This charming book was recommended to me, although I’m not sure where from – part of the reason I’m keeping track of bibliographic information in these entries!  This book is the result of a 1995 contest by Storey Communications to spark the creation of more internationally-architected small house plans.

Unlike the book of house plans I just reviewed where each plan had only one page, this excellent book devotes 4 or 6 pages to each plan.  What is provided depends a bit on what the architect provided – one or two have site plans, for instance, where the architect felt strongly about the orientation of the house on its lot.

There is an adorable clapboard farmhouse with wraparound porch that is only 1230 square feet – and they manage to fit three bedrooms and an eat-in kitchen into that!  The three designs chosen as the winners were a bit too “out there” for my taste, but I preferred seeing a smaller number of houses with good design, rather than the scatter approach of the home plan book I got off the library shelf.  There are an additional 21 designs that are of interest but not explored as fully.

No index.  There is a list of “Other Storey titles you will enjoy”, but no actual bibliography or suggested reading.

Edited to add:  LibraryThing suggests that I will like “More Small Houses” by Fine Homebuilding, so that’s going on my hold list.

Susanka, Sarah. Creating the Not so Big House: Insights and Ideas for the New American Home. Newtown, CT: Taunton, 2000. Print.

If you’re suspicious that I’m working my way through Susanka’s books in order, you’re absolutely right.  This book came out two years after the first book, no doubt capitalizing on its popularity.  There is an introductory chapter on the language of the not so big house, but I didn’t find it as useful as the concepts introduced in the first book.  Loyal readers will probably most appreciate the fact that she uses her own house to illustrate the first chapter.

The meat of this volume is the 35 house designs picked by Susanka to appear in the book.  There is information on how to contact the architects and order plans for each house.  I mostly disliked the outsides of the houses, but liked the interiors of almost every one.

My favourite was the “cottage community”, a whole street of 600 to 650 square foot houses in Washington State.  They are on Whidbey Island, making me suspect that there is some interplay between these houses and those of the Tumbleweed Tiny House Company (which makes a Whidbey model).  Also included is the 1999 Life magazine dream house, which Susanka’s firm was asked to design.

(No index or bibliography).

Bouknight, Joanne Kellar. All New Kitchen Idea Book. Newtown, CT: Taunton, 2009. Print.

I’m impressed with the Taunton “idea book” series in general, and this kitchen book was no exception.  The very first full-page kitchen pictured, on page four, I immediately took to my husband and said “this is the kitchen I want!”.  I chose this book simply because was on the shelf of our local library branch, and I am thinking ahead to gutting the kitchen in our farmhouse (which is a decent size – about ten feet square).

It would be interesting to compare this to the original edition, ten years earlier in 1999.  Kitchens and bathrooms seem to have the most variation in style from year to year, and it seems to me (or am I just getting older?) that the swings are getting bigger and shorter all the time.  When I find a picture in an older book that I like, I know the odds are good that I will still like it in the future.

Getting back to the book itself, the chapters are a somewhat odd, mixed bag; “style and layout”, “the kitchen island”, “dining and work spaces”, “cabinets”, “open shelves and pantries”, “countertops, backsplashes and sinks”, “appliances”, “floors, walls, and ceilings”, and “lighting and windows”.  Really, though, the book is an excuse for big, often full-page, colour photos of beautiful-looking kitchens.  I liked seeing a dining alcove entirely lined in bookshelves – that’s my kind of kitchen!

There is no index, which is fine in a book of this type (how do you index 200 pictures of kitchens?).   There are only two books listed in the references section, but they look to be good ones:

• Calloway, Stephen, Elizabeth C. Cromley, and Alan Powers. The Elements of Style: an Encyclopedia of Domestic Architectural Detail. Buffalo, NY: Firefly, 2005. Print.
• McAlester, Virginia, and A. Lee McAlester. A Field Guide to American Houses. New York: Knopf, 1984. Print.

Encyclopedia of Canadian Home Designs: 371 Home & Cottage Plans. Vancouver, BC: Home Planners, 2000. Print.

This is an odd type of book I haven’t seen in a while – I guess since the advent of the internet.  It’s a newsprint book of house plans, with a few random magazine articles stuck in the front and a tear-out order page to buy home plans.  It was on the shelf at the library and I borrowed it to look at small house plans.

Since theirs start at 1200 square feet, and the very first plan in the “Homes Under 1200 Square Feet” section has 1,371 square feet, they obvious weren’t thinking the same way I was.  I was surprised that I had seen so many of the plans on the internet already – so a lot of the ones you see online have been around for at least 10 years, which in retrospect shouldn’t surprise me.

Here, for instance, is the plan from page 34.  This one is actually a quite cute two-bedroom clocking in at only 920 square feet, well-laid out and I think quite livable.  I’ve seen this designer online and like the style of them.

There are also a few garage plans at the back.  All in all it was a fun waste of half an hour to leaf through, confirming that most home designers don’t really know any more than I do about layout out a floor plan.

Moore, Christopher. Practical Demonkeeping. New York: Avon Books, 1992. Print.

I borrowed this book from a friend upon leaving his house one night, facing a long subway ride home with no reading material.  I read the first chapter of this, then it languished in my borrowed books pile for months until I picked it up again.

It’s a reasonably funny book – I’m not surprised now that I look at the cover and see that the front quote is from Carl Hiaasen.  It reminds me of the style of Terry Pratchett, not that I’ve read a ton of his books.  It’s a fantasy novel set in modern time and place (in the US), about a guy who conjured up a demon 70 years ago and how things finally come to a head when he finds a woman he’s been searching for who can help him send the demon back to hell.  There are subplots about the members of the small town who end up mixed up in it, knowingly or not – of course there’s an undercover cop working on a drug bust, a cross-dresser who goes online (using a modem – scratch that about it being “modern time”), and various romantic entanglements.  I am most likely to remember the guy who owns the bait and wine shop, who is an unwilling hero if there ever was one – content to sit by the fire in his jewel of a cabin and drink a bottle of wine each night.

I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this, but it was a light read that was easy to put down.  LibraryThing recommends the authors Tom Robbins (not fantasy, but otherwise similar), Robert Rankin (very similar), Neil Gaiman (not usually funny), and Jasper Fforde to people who like the book.  I hadn’t made the Fforde connection, but I suppose his books are fantasy too.

Methley, Violet M. Fourteen Fourteens. London: Thomas Nelson, No Date. Print.

This is an old hardcover book that has been in my collection for years.  It’s a quick, un-challenging read that I can be done with inside of an hour.  It’s a typical English school-girl book, full of plucky, spirited girls getting into scrapes.  The wrinkle is that all the girls are fourteen years old and named Margaret – but there is a reason for that, revealed along with the solution to a “mystery” that the girls mostly make up themselves.

It’s a sweet book written for girls, but hardly a classic.  I like the description of the girls, the school/house, and their teachers.  Although there is no date, I would guess from the descriptions that it’s from the 1920’s.

Oddly, the cover of the book gives the author’s name as “Methly”, although the cover page says “Methley”.  A search of the InterWebs seems to confirm “Methley”.