Trading Spaces: Rooms For Living Book

Author Marni Jameson is a home design columnist, and her book, The House Always Wins, is essentially a collection of her weekly columns. The chapters are short, and placed in the proper order for designing and decorating a brand new home. Topics include: finding your new home; wall, flooring, countertops and cabinetry; furnishings; finishing specific use rooms; and landscaping. Advice is given in a humorous vein, and the reader can learn from the author's mistakes. Although the book contains some good advice, the format makes it somewhat difficult to read.

Each short chapter also contains what would be a sidebar in a newspaper column. Usually, such sidebars contain brief highlights or practical tips to supplement the main subject text. These sidebars, however, contain a lot of narrative information, such that both the main text and the sidebar are often continued over several pages. It is hard to keep track of two subjects over these pages, and the sidebar information could be more useful if incorporated into the main text or placed at the end of each chapter.

There is quite a bit of good information for people who are building or moving into a new home. For those who are fixing up an older home, the order in which renovation tasks should be done is helpful. However, there are quite a few bits of information that the average homeowner might never use, depending upon how "tricked out" s/he wants or can afford the home to be. All in all, this book is still a series of newspaper columns, an overview targeted towards the general public with helpful hints scattered throughout.

If you're considering redesigning your home, you might want to take a look through this book to develop an overall plan to progress logically through the work. It's possible that certain important details will pertain to the particular work that your home needs. I would recommend, after perusing this overview book, reading a few books that target your specific home projects as well.