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

The average rating for The House Always Wins: America's Most Trusted Home Columnist's Guide to Creating Your (Almost) Perfect Dream House based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-06-01 00:00:00 Bindia Puri In The House Always Wins: Create the Home You Love-Without Busting Your Budget, author Marni Jameson takes readers through the process of creating a home by sharing her own home-ownership experiences. She shares the struggle of creating a stylish and inviting home that is functional for her family, offering up what she learned from her mistakes as well as advice from the pros. The result is an entertaining read than first-time home owners will find helpful as a guidebook to creating and maintaining a home. Although Jameson is an award-winning nationally syndicated home design columnist, her stories humanize her and demonstrate that even people who deal with home design for a living are prone to the same issues run-of-the-mill folk face in appointing their homes. She details agonizing over the multitude of different floorings available to choose from at the home design center, as well as the disaster of fly-by-night landscapers taking off with her money after creating a giant sink hole in her yard. Like any contractor, Jameson begins with a foundation, building her book from initial decisions a homeowner must make that can be expensive, time-consuming, or down-right impossible to change. For example, location is key, and it does not matter how richly appointed an interior is if you hate the city you live in, and that is not easily changed. Similarly, finishes like flooring and cabinetry are very difficult to change, but at the same time can have a huge impact on what you can do with a space, so they need to be chosen carefully. Once you've got a backdrop to work with, she brings in furniture, providing insight into buying quality pieces that will work for you without getting ripped off. Finally, she discusses accessories and other finishing touches that make a room feel warm and inviting. She even provides information for holiday decorating and specific-purpose rooms. And all of this keeps in mind the fundamental process of determining one's own personal style and keeping it in mind so as not to be swayed by fads or styles that may look great in the showroom, but ultimately will not appeal to the homeowner over time. The book does lack a level of specificity. I found myself from time to time thinking, "ok, I see this is something I need to look into, or watch out for, but how do I do that?" However, given that it covers such a broad range of topics, this is a minor shortcoming. One book cannot possibly cover in depth each and every topic Jameson addresses. This is not so much a how-to book, but a general overview of what a homeowner will need to know and/or learn in order to be successful in creating a pleasing environment. In other words, it might not have all the answers, but it helps you figure out what the questions are and where to start looking for answers. Overall, this was an enjoyable, quick read that provided a considerable amount of useful and interesting information about choosing a house and appointing such that you get a functional end product you are happy with. I would certainly recommend it to anyone just starting on the process of creating a home. 2009 © The Beehive All Rights Reserved

Review # 2 was written on 2016-07-01 00:00:00 Allan Rose 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.