Showing titles in Home Design & Renovation

Your pathway to a sustainable, self-sufficient life is closer than you think... Acquire the skills to become a master homesteader, even if you're starting from scratch, or live in the middle of the city! Have you dreamed of living off the land, creating your food source, and fostering a life of resilience and sustainability? Is the idea of homesteading appealing yet filled with a million questions and doubts?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Transform your health, boost your vitality, and reconnect with the ancient wisdom of heat and cold – all without expensive treatments or medical interventions! Here’s a glimpse of what’s within this audiobook: The rich history of sauna and cold plunge therapy – how these practices have evolved from ancient rituals to modern science-backed therapies. A comprehensive guide to their health benefits, with detailed explanations of how sauna and cold plunges boost physical health, mental clarity, and emotional resilience.

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.

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?

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 today's throwaway culture, there's a counter movement growing that urges us to 'make do and mend'. The Repair Shop has brought this waste-conscious message to an even wider audience, with its regular viewing figures of seven million in the UK alone, cementing itself as a classic series in the vein of Antiques Roadshow. This new book concentrates on the show's much-loved experts. Each of the experts shares their own stories and their repairs, capturing in the process the magic and ethos of the barn.

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.

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.

In 2019, Sarah and her family upped sticks and moved to the West Country to embark upon a new way of life. It wasn't without its challenges, as Sarah embarked on transforming a semi-derelict former dairy farm. In The Simple Life, Sarah will tell the story of moving in search of a simpler life, sharing stories and experiences in everything from parenting and multi-generational living to work/life balance, friendships, nature and the environment, to her recent cancer diagnosis.

Transform your dream of a custom, budget-friendly barn home into reality with your own two hands! Envision a home that's more than just walls and a roof – a space that mirrors your dreams, resonates with your love for the countryside, and stands as a testament to your passion for creativity. This is the heart of a Barndominium, a concept that redefines rural living by blending the rustic allure of a barn with the comforts and conveniences of modern living.

What would the city of the future look like if we tried to build a better life from the ground up? And would anyone want to live there? Here, Des Fitzgerald takes us on an urgent, unforgettable journey into the future of urban life, from shimmering edifices in the Arizona desert to forest-bathing in Japan, and from rats in mazes to neuroscientific studies of the effects of our surroundings. Along the way, he reveals the deep-lying and often problematic roots of today's green city movement, and offers an argument for celebrating our cities as they are.

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.

With the coming of the first decade of the 21st century, One Place de l'Eglise had become rather derelict. The roof leaked, the mortar in the ancient walls was crumbling; a fertilizer bag stuffed a broken window. There was no electricity to speak of; the plumbing was a lead pipe in one room; the cellar doors had rotted. And there it stood. Shutters and doors firmly locked, the villagers of Causses-et-Veyran passing by to the church next door. Then, an impoverished—in his mind at any rate—Londoner and his wife went a little crazy and bought it. It was love at first sight.

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. 

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.