Showing titles in Home Design & Renovation

If imagining a life of energy independence by harnessing the sun's power to light your home excites you, this book is for you! Discover how to achieve energy independence through off-grid solar power with this modern, updated guide. Learn how anyone, regardless of technical experience, can understand and implement off-grid solar power. Whether you’re a hands-on DIY enthusiast or an eager beginner, this book is tailored for you.

In the decades before the First World War, the owners of the nation’s stately homes revelled in a golden age of glory and glamour. Nothing lay beyond their reach in a world where privilege and hedonism went hand-in-hand with duty and honour. This was a time when the ancestral seats of ancient nobility stood side-by-side with the fabulous palaces of Jewish bankers and Indian princes, when dukes and duchesses mixed with aristocratic society hostesses who had learned to dance in the chorus line and self-made millionaires who had been raised in the slums of Manchester and Birmingham.

Critical Path is Fuller's master work - the summing up of a lifetime's thought and concern - as urgent and relevant as it was upon its first publication in 1981. Critical Path details how humanity found itself in its current situation - at the limits of the planet's natural resources and facing political, economic, environmental, and ethical crises.

We may have learned how to use a scientific calculator in school or read a periodic table, but what about lessons on unplugging the sink or changing a light bulb? Musician, influencer, mother of three and stepmother of two Myleene Klass shows us how she builds independence and resourcefulness in her children in this guide to over 100 of the most vital skills, challenges and scenarios that school didn’t prepare us for.

When it comes to truly finding out who you are and what makes you tick, there is one thing that needs no online subscription to a cloud-based server with a password you keep forgetting. That, my friend, is a shed. Your shed is your refuge. It's the place where you go when you need a break from this mad, crazy world. Once you're inside the four walls of your shed, you can do whatever you like. You're the king in there.

What will it take to restore balance to our world, repair past injustices, and support future generations' survival? Looking deeply into the web of life that created and supports us, and drawing inspiration from diverse cultural traditions and perspectives, spirited thinkers Michael Pawlyn and Sarah Ichioka propose a bold set of regenerative principles with potential to transform how we design, make, and manage our buildings; infrastructure; and communities.

You can use this book to design a house for yourself with your family; you can use it to work with your neighbors to improve your town and neighborhood; you can use it to design an office, a workshop, or a public building. And you can use it to guide you in the actual process of construction.

With this updated edition of his earlier book, A Place of My Own, listeners can revisit the inspired, intelligent, and often hilarious story of Pollan’s realization of a room of his own—a small, wooden hut, his “shelter for daydreams” — built with his admittedly unhandy hands. Inspired by both Thoreau and Mr. Blandings, A Place of My Own not only works to convey the history and meaning of all human building, it also marks the connections between our bodies, our minds, and the natural world.

Many of us dream of a renovation project, but few would be brave enough to take on a 8,200-square-foot, 30-room, 5-storey Georgian mansion on only a shoestring budget. But that's exactly what Greg Penn did, buying the near-derelict Admiral's House and embarking on an ambitious restoration plan. In this inspirational, informative book, Greg tells the story of his remarkable home, its journey to restoration and the deep history the house and surrounding area offer, alongside snippets of advice, budget-friendly tools and hacks and an exploration of each room as he's unlocked history.

Throughout her life, Sarah Beeny has been obsessed with the idea of home. From her childhood growing up in a countryside cottage to renovating her very first flat in London to restoring a stately home in Yorkshire, she has never been afraid of the hard work needed to turn a house into a home. Now, in her most recent adventure, Sarah and her family have moved to a former dairy farm in Somerset to build the home of their dreams.

Do you walk in a room to organize and find yourself paralyzed and overwhelmed? Do you find yourself spending money on organizing solutions that don't work? Organizing isn't easy. And having ADHD doesn't make it any easier. But it doesn't have to be impossible.

On the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, the epic story of an enormous apartment building where Communist true believers lived before their destruction. The House of Government is unlike any other book about the Russian Revolution and the Soviet experiment.

With the appearance of Grunch of Giants, R. Buckminster Fuller consummates his literary canon, his panoramic lifetime survey of all aspects of the responsibility of human beings for their own destiny. This book is a modern allegory - his long-gestated myth-of the villainy of capitalism and the fecklessness of classic economics. For Fuller, the academic discipline of economics is irrelevant since it derives from an invalid assumption of scarcity.

Castles in the Air is a beautifully written, autobiographical story of rescuing an ancient mansion. Gwydir Castle was inhabited by ravers and rats until Judy Corbett and her husband Peter Welford found and acquired this 500-year-old house mouldering in the foothills of Snowdonia. Despite the toads, strange smells and squatters, they decided to mortgage themselves to the hilt to bring the castle back to life.

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.

The story of the Stuart dynasty is a breathless soap opera played out in just a hundred years in an array of buildings that span Europe from Scotland, via Denmark, Holland and Spain to England. Life in the court of the House of Stuart has been shrouded in mystery: the first half of the century overshadowed by the fall and execution of Charles I, the second half in the complete collapse of the House itself. Lost to time is the extraordinary contribution the Stuarts made to the fabric of sovereignty.

It is ordinary homes, not grand public buildings or the mansions of the rich that have all the best stories. The rises and falls, the shifts in the fortunes of neighbourhoods and whole cities are here, tracing the often surprising journey one single house can take from elegant dwelling in a fashionable district to a tenement for society’s rejects. Packed with remarkable human stories, it is a phenomenal insight into living history, a history we can see every day on the streets where we live.

Real Life Organizing offers clutter-free storage solutions and advice that can help you create a Pinterest-worthy home on a small budget: Learn how to organize your home, simplify life, and have more time for the things you love.

As the sun set slowly on the British Empire in the years after the Second World War, the nation's stately homes were in crisis. Tottering under the weight of rising taxes and a growing sense that they had no place in 20th-century Britain, hundreds of ancestral piles were dismantled and demolished. Perhaps even more surprising was the fact that so many of these great houses survived, as dukes and duchesses clung desperately to their ancestral seats and tenants' balls gave way to rock concerts, safari parks and day trippers.

Today, we’re constantly being bombarded with pictures of perfection, so it’s easy to think that there’s something wrong with you. But what if instead of comparing yourself to all the people who have bigger houses, more money, more friends, more sex—in other words, things you can’t control—you could re-focus on the things you can do something about?