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House & Home | - 3 items found in your search |
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Kaufman, Margo This Damn House: My Subcontract With America
Villard Books 1996 0679428402 / 9780679428404 Hard Cover Fine Fine 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall
Fine condition. NO remainder marks or price clippings. Price inside dustcover: $21.00. NO writing, marks or tears inside book. Tight spine, clean pages. 213 pages. Illustrated. Synopsis Martha Stewart, go to your room. Margo Kaufman, whose pixie-with-a-machine-gun style has kept newspaper and magazine readers laughing out loud for years, now portrays the mind-numbing, gut-turning, wallet-emptying free fall of home renovation. This cautionary tale does for architects what The Hot Zone did for viruses.... Margo Kaufman and her husband, Duke, live with their pugs in one of the nation's landmark neighborhoods: Venice, California. Steps from the ocean, dotted with canals and weekend bungalows, Venice is a great place to visit but a difficult place to live in - especially if you've got a house like theirs: dark, dank, and depressing. From their search for an architect to refinancing to dealing with contractors, subcontractors, and sub-sub-contractors, This Damn House! is the story of a young couple trying to make their dream house come true. From nefarious tile saleswomen to the wonders of shopping at IKEA for Heinrik the ottoman and Paolo the doorknob, from the inner workings of refrigerator bins to the mysterious difference between paint on a sample chip and paint on your wall, to the trials of communicating with workers who speak more languages than a UN delegation - all are reupholstered in Margo's trademark wit and charm. If Tim Allen has you up and rarin' for a renovation, don't touch that power drill before reading This Damn House!
Price:
4.28 USD
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2 |
Staten, Vince Did Monkeys Invent the Monkey Wrench?: Hardware Stores and Hardware Stories
Touchstone Books 1997 0684832747 / 9780684832746 Trade Paperback Fine 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall
Near-new copy - Appears unread. NO remainder marks or price clippings - Tight spine - Bright pages. 238 pages. - NO writing, marks or tears inside book. Illustrated - From the Publisher Vince Staten, a man raised in a hardware store is offering not only a tour of that mechanical mecca but answers to the questions that have plagued humankind from time immemorial as well. Here, you'll finally discover whether or not the Swiss Army knife is really Swiss. You'll find the answers to essential questions like if cement is 7,000 years old why isn't the entire planet paved? Can you cook a duck in duck tape? Did monkeys invent the monkey wrench? And is there anything that Super Glue won't stick to? Yes, in this book you'll discover the secret history of all the things that hold your house together, and where all the tools that you ever dreamed of having came from. From The Critics Publishers Weekly "The hardware store is to the average man what the dress or hat shop is to a woman," we are told here, but even men who are not average, and women too, will enjoy this compendium. Staten (Can You Trust a Tomato in January?) grew up working in his father's hardware emporium in Tennessee, but here he focuses on the shop of Ronnie Matthews in Winfield, West Virginia, after pointing out that a hardware store is not a do-it-yourself discount outlet or a home improvement center, but rather a place where customers can socialize or buy a single nail if they want. There is etymology in these pages (the monkey wrench was not invented by Charles Moncke or laborer "Monkey" White or monkeys), there is history (the ancient Egyptians invented locks) and there are dozens of amusing anecdotes. The reader will learn such interesting minutiae as the fact that 90% of Americans call duct tape "duck tape." There are also some clever sketches, and it all adds up to fun.
Price:
2.50 USD
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3 |
Zimmerman, Jean Made from Scratch: Reclaiming the Pleasures of the American Hearth
Free Press 2003 0684869594 / 9780684869599 Hard Cover Fine Fine 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall
Like-new condition. Appears unread. NO remainder marks or price clippings. Price inside dustcover: $25.00. Number line: 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1. Tight spine, bright pages. 266 pages. NO writing, marks or tears. Synopsis In this stunning celebration and reappraisal of the importance of "women's work," acclaimed journalist Jean Zimmerman poignantly addresses the tug that many Americans of the twenty-first century feel between our professional and private lives. With sharp wit and intelligence, she offers evidence that in the current domestic vacuum, we still long for a richer home life -- a paradox visible in the Martha Stewart phenomenon, in the continuing popularity of women's service magazines such as Better Homes and Gardens, Family Circle, and Ladies' Home Journal -- whose combined circulation of over 17 million is nearly twice the combined circulation of Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report -- and the booming business of restorations, where onlookers get a hands-on view of domestic life as it flourished in past centuries. This book is about the ways home traditions passed from one generation to the next -- baking a birthday cake from scratch, cherishing family heirlooms, or discovering the satisfaction of piecing a quilt -- sustain our souls, especially in our ever more processed, synthetic world, where we buy "homemade" goods and fail to see the irony in that. Made from Scratch tells the story of the unsung heroines of the hearth, investigating the history of female domesticity and charting its cultural changes over centuries. Zimmerman traces the lives of her own family's homemakers -- from her tiny but indomitable grandmother, who managed a farm, strangled chickens with her bare hands, and sewed all the family clothing, to her mother, who rejected her country upbringing yet kept a fastidious suburban home where the gender divide stayed firmly in place, to her own experiences as a wife and mother weaned on the Women's Movement of the 1970s, with its emphatic view that housework was a dirty word and that the domestic sphere was to be fled rather than cherished. In this book Zimmerman questions the unexamined trade-off we have made in a shockingly brief time span, as we've "progressed" from home-raised chickens to frozen TV dinners to McNuggets from the food court at the mall. What is lost when we no longer engage, as individuals and as a community, in the ancient rituals of food, craft, and shelter?
Price:
5.00 USD
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