Product Details
The House Always Wins: America's Most Trusted Home Columnist's Guide to Creating Your (Almost) Perfect Dream Home

The House Always Wins: America's Most Trusted Home Columnist's Guide to Creating Your (Almost) Perfect Dream Home
By Marni Jameson

List Price: CDN$ 26.95
Price: CDN$ 19.61 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $39. Details

Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Ships from and sold by Amazon.ca

11 new or used available from CDN$ 0.75

Product Description

More than 7 million readers of Marni Jameson’s weekly home design column have already discovered how Jameson entertains and inspires, while imparting well-researched and personally validated DIY advice. Now, in her first-ever book on home improvement, she offers a compulsively readable, zanily humorous, yet also completely practical guide to a headache-free home makeover for everyone decorating a new house or updating an old one.Jameson has designed, built, and decorated three homes from the ground up. In The House Always Wins, she brings us along as she decorates, furnishes, and landscapes her current home. Though rooted in her own experience, this is no navel-gazing memoir. Rather, Jameson is like a favorite sister who has learned it all the hard way and is now here to prompt and inspire you to figure out your own personal style, make a design plan, and create your (almost) perfect dream home-one step at a time. With Jameson as our guide, we navigate through the seemingly endless maze of choices and decisions every home improver faces: wall color, flooring, cabinetry, window treatments, furniture, bargain hunting, home accessories, rugs, kids’ spaces, special purpose rooms (like the garage and guest, laundry, and mud rooms), landscaping, outdoor living spaces-and that’s just to start. Along the way, Jameson injects insights into the relationships and realities that dog every home improvement project. She also pauses to share hard-won secrets and money-saving tips distilled from her own redecorating experience and from interviews with dozens of renowned home-design experts.For anyone dealing with budgets, time constraints, unreliable contractors, a cheap spouse, kids, and pets-and who would appreciate having someone to commiserate with about the unattainable perfection featured in glossy magazine spreads-The House Always Wins will comfort (it can always be worse), inspire (who knew?!), and be absolutely indispensable.

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #1138833 in Books
  • Published on: 2008-02-22
  • Original language: English
  • Dimensions: 1.12" h x 6.37" w x 8.98" l, 1.30 pounds
  • Binding: Hardcover
  • 320 pages

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Readers gain the benefit of Jameson's experience—along with laugh-out-loud anecdotes—in this informative home-improvement guide. Jameson, a home improvement columnist, has consulted for, at various times, a $100-an-hour interior decorator on what knickknacks to place in the space between the kitchen cabinets and the ceiling; an interior designer to artfully rearrange her bookcase; and a Christmas tree decorator to fill her home with holiday spirit. She shares what she learned from them, as well as her own experiences designing, building and decorating three homes from the ground up. And, like most of us, she's had to complete her home while dealing with money shortages, time constraints, a skeptical husband and wisecracking kids. With real-life in mind, Jameson talks her readers through design basics such as finding a personal style, then moves through every room in the house and the yard, always maintaining a sense of humor and a scrupulous talent for detail. She even exposes the tricks design magazines use to create those envy-inspiring rooms, and dishes dirt on how home design shows cheat to create their masterpieces on time and under budget. Even readers with no immediate designs on redecorating their homes will find Jameson interesting and amusing. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review
"Marni Jameson chronicles, in her self-deprecating manner, the process of building, decorating and landscaping her Colorado dream home, one agonizing decision at a time. The book is a compelling mix of humorous anecdotes and useful information."--"Calgary Herald"

"This author...is smart, seasoned, savvy and unwilling to settle for anything less than 'just right.' In the end, the true test of a home-design book is whether it propels the reader to action. Jameson propelled me to stop midway through her book to rearrange my furniture. And I've got plans. Big plans."--"Los Angeles Times," 5/11/08

"By detailing real-life scenarios and experiences, Jameson shares her point of view in a humorous yet straightforward fashion... the funny interactions with her spouse, irritated neighbors and others provide enough color for you to keep turning the pages."--"Orlando Sentinel," 5/11/08

About the Author

Marni Jameson is a journalist and syndicated columnist who writes regularly for the Los Angeles Times (for which she has written more than 200 feature stories), Woman’s Day, Family Circle, Fit Pregnancy, and other national and regional magazines. Her syndicated weekly home design column appears in more than 30 newspapers throughout North America. Though not an interior designer by profession, she is a serial home improver who has built and decorated three homes from the ground up. Jameson lives in her current home improvement project in Castle Rock, Colorado, with her amazingly tolerant husband and two daughters.