Showing results for "memoir" in House & Home

Over half a century ago, John Rowlands set out by canoe into the wilds of Canada to survey land for a timber company. After paddling alone for several days, he came upon "the lake of my boyhood dreams", which he named Cache Lake because there was stored the best that the north had to offer-timber for a cabin; fish, game, and berries to live on; and the peace and contentment he felt he could not live without.

From one of Fine Homebuilding's best-loved authors, Larry Haun, comes a unique story that looks at American home building from the perspective of twelve houses he has known intimately. Part memoir, part cultural history, A Carpenter's Life as Told by Houses takes the reader house by house over an arc of 100 years.

A poet at heart, Amy Minato rejects her life of consumption in Chicago to go back to nature - specifically, to a commune in Oregon, where she rediscovers herself. She also cops occasionally to the pretentiousness of her mission, and laughs along with the listener at her attempts to be both environmentally friendly and sane, considering the fact that she’s moved in with a bunch of strangers in a remote locale.

74-year-old Derbyshire man Ken Smith has spent the past four decades in the Scottish Highlands, living alone in a log cabin nestled near Loch Treig, known as 'the lonely loch'. He has no electricity or running water. He lives off the land, fishing for his supper, chopping wood, and even brewing his own tipple. For the first time, Ken shares the story of his life.

Blending memoir and nature writing at its finest, Ingrained is an uplifting meditation on the challenges of working with your hands in our modern age, on community, consumerism, and the beauty of the natural world – one that asks us to see our local trees, and our own wooden objects, in a new and revelatory light.

Eve has a problem with clutter. Too much stuff and too easily acquired, it confronts her in every corner and on every surface in her house. When she pledges to tackle the worst offender, her horror of a "hell room", she anticipates finally being able to throw away all of the unnecessary things she can't bring herself to part with: her fifth-grade report card, dried-up art supplies, an old vinyl raincoat. But what Eve discovers isn't just old CDs and outdated clothing, but a fierce desire within herself to hold on to her identity.

Picking up from where Living the Château Dream ended, Dick and Angel recount the newest and biggest challenges they faced on the journey to transforming their once derelict and abandoned château in France's Pays de la Loire into a thriving family home and sustainable business.

In prose that sparkles with humour and warmth, Yates charts the heartbreaks and joys of a life spent navigating the chaos of the housing system. She exposes the issues underpinning the crisis, from the state’s neglect of social housing to the rental rat race, and the disproportionate toll these take on the most marginalized in society. Drawing on interviews with tenants across the country and the stories behind our interiors, she explores the unexpected ways we can fight back.

Like many Brits, Dick and Angel had long dreamed of living in France, but where others might settle for a modest bolthole in the French countryside, the Strawbridges fell in love with a 19th-century fairy-tale chateau, complete with 45 rooms, seven outbuildings, 12 acres of land and its own moat. Throwing caution to the wind, Dick and Angel swapped their two-bedroom flat in East London for an abandoned and derelict castle in the heart of the Loire valley and embarked on the adventure of a lifetime with their two young children, Arthur and Dorothy.

In January 2015, Dick and Angel Strawbridge embarked on the journey of a lifetime when they swapped their cosy two-bedroom flat in East London for a derelict château with 12 acres of land in the Loire valley. Where Sunday Times best seller A Year At the Château told the entertaining and heartwarming beginning of the family's French adventure, as they found their forever home and began to restore and renovate the dilapidated castle, Living The Château Dream is about the years of hard graft that followed.

Called "a veritable tree whisperer" by the Wall Street Journal, Peter Wohlleben is known across the world for his illuminating books about forests and how to help them thrive. Now, the German forester invites listeners into his home for the first time in Our Little Farm, describing the steps he and his wife, Miriam, have taken to live sustainably and in harmony with nature.

Shedding her possessions and stripping back life to the basics, Charlotte Bradman used the last of her savings to buy a campervan...a creaky, old van with no loo or onboard water. It was the best thing she ever did. Come along on this moving ride as Charlotte finds true stability and security, learning that all she needs is a recharging van battery, a dry bed, and an unspoilt sea view. Self-confessional, observational and darkly humorous, this is an engrossing and inspirational story of resilience and fortitude.

Welcome to The Barbizon, New York's premier women-only hotel. Built in 1927, New York's Barbizon Hotel was first intended as a home for the 'Modern Woman' seeking a career in the arts. It became the place to stay for ambitious, independent women, who were lured by the promise of fame and good fortune. The Barbizon is a colourful, glamorous portrait of the lives of these young women, who came to New York looking for something more. It's a story of pushing the boundaries, of women's emancipation and of the generations of brilliant women who passed through its halls.

Marine algae are the supreme eco-engineers of life: they oxygenate the waters, create habitat for countless other organisms, and form the base of a food chain that keeps our planet unique in the universe as we know it. In this audiobook Josie Iselin explores both the artistic and the biological presence of 16 seaweeds and kelps that live in the thin region where the Pacific Ocean converges with the North American continent - a place of incomparable richness.

Embrace the serenity of off-grid living with these essential skills and strategies for self-reliant, secure, and sustainable living. With the rise in government unreliability, international conflicts, and increasing natural and environmental disasters, the sense of safety and security offered by cities appears to be diminishing. All these have also created a growing demand and a dwindling supply of goods, especially food and medicine necessary for survival.

On her way home from a long day of teaching, Lisa realized she was failing in every aspect of her life. With her 40th birthday looming in the distance, she wondered when she would feel like a success. Her days started at five am: waking to get the kids ready for school, working as a teacher all day herself, and then arriving home around five pm just in time to start the housework.

Old houses share their secrets only if they survive. Trading the corporate ladder for a stepladder, Lee McColgan commits to preserving the ramshackle Loring House, built in 1702, using period materials and methods and on a holiday deadline. But his enchantment withers as he discovers the massive repairs it needs. A small kitchen fix reveals that the structure’s rotten frame could collapse at any moment. In a bathroom, mold appears and spreads. He fights deteriorating bricks, frozen pipes, shattered windows, a punctured foundation, and even an airborne chimney cap.

In her successful career as a travel writer, Southerden found herself staying in ever new and exotic locations, but while staying in a cabin in Norway, she had an epiphany about what she truly wanted for her life, ready to put down roots. With no prior building experience, Southerden decided to build a tiny house with her partner, Max, which tested an already unstable relationship. Over the year and a half of planning and construction of her tiny house, Southerden witnessed her new home coming together as her relationship was falling apart.

In this book, Eve O. Schaub, humorist and stunt memoirist extraordinaire, tackles her most difficult challenge to date: garbage. Convincing her husband and two daughters to go along with her, Schaub attempts the seemingly impossible: living in the modern world without creating any trash at all—for an entire year and, as it turns out, during a pandemic.

This is an audiobook for anyone who enjoys being transported to another life and lifestyle, or who is interested in bees, homesteading, small farming, animals, organic gardening, farmers markets, human nature, and the hilarity and hardship that goes with all that. Funny, moving, and engrossing, you'll be transported to a world where one family tries to keep it all together as they juggle a farmyard full of animals, thousands of tourists in the garden, a hundred backpackers in the house, millions of bees in the air, and their commitment to the environment and each other.