The Best House & Home Books 2024

1. How to Build Animal Housing - Paperback

With dozens of adaptable plans for sheds, coops, hutches, multipurpose barns, windbreaks, and shade structures, this guide covers everything you need to know to build safe and sturdy housing for your animals. Stressing the importance of evaluating your goals, planning ahead, and budgeting accordingly, Carol Ekarius helps you determine the best structure for your particular situation and offers expert advice on tools and construction techniques. Build a functional and comfortable house for your animals that they'll be proud to call home.

With dozens of adaptable plans for sheds, coops, hutches, multipurpose barns, windbreaks, and shade structures, this guide covers everything you need to know to build safe and sturdy housing for your animals. Stressing the importance of evaluating your goals, planning ahead, and budgeting accordingly, Carol Ekarius helps you determine the best structure for your particular situation and offers expert advice on tools and construction techniques. Build a functional and comfortable house for your animals that they’ll be proud to call home.

2. The Complete Guide to Sharpening (Paperback)

You know how frustrating it is to work wood with tools that are dull. All that is over. Tool expert Leonard Lee has consolidated a lifetime of study of sharpening methods, techniques, and devices into the most practical reference on the subject. In The Complete Guide to Sharpening, you'll discover the most effective ways to sharpen your tools-from chisels to drill bits. You'll get better edges than on most razor blades, and you'll learn how to shape them to cut better and stay sharp longer. In fact, Lee's simple principles and some basic equipment wil allow you to sharpen any woodworking tool you are likely to encounter.

The Complete Guide to Sharpening (Paperback)

3. Haircutting for Dummies

9780764554285

Haircutting for Dummies

4. Building Stone Walls - Paperback

Since 1973, Storey's Country Wisdom Bulletins have offered practical, hands-on instructions designed to help readers master dozens of country living skills quickly and easily. There are now more than 170 titles in this series, and their remarkable popularity reflects the common desire of country and city dwellers alike to cultivate personal independence in everyday life.

Since 1973, Storey's Country Wisdom Bulletins have offered practical, hands-on instructions designed to help readers master dozens of country living skills quickly and easily. There are now more than 170 titles in this series, and their remarkable popularity reflects the common desire of country and city dwellers alike to cultivate personal independence in everyday life.

5. House (Paperback)

In the New York Times bestseller House, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tracy Kidder takes readers to the heart of the American Dream: the building of a family's first house with all its day-to-day frustrations, crises, tensions, challenges, and triumphs. In Kidder's "remarkable piece of craftsmanship in itself" (Chicago Tribune), constructing a staircase or applying a coat of paint becomes a riveting tale of conflicting wills, the strength and strain of relationships, and pride in skills. With drama, sensitivity, and insight, he takes us from blueprints to moving day, shedding light on objects usually taken for granted and creating a vivid cast of memorable characters in the process. "The making of a house is a strange blend of dreams and mundane work, of heaven and earth, and Mr. Kidder has explained it."--New York Times Book Review

House (Paperback)

6. Storey Country Wisdom Bulletin: Build Your Own Underground Root Cellar (Paperback)

Since 1973, Storey's Country Wisdom Bulletins have offered practical, hands-on instructions designed to help readers master dozens of country living skills quickly and easily. There are now more than 170 titles in this series, and their remarkable popularity reflects the common desire of country and city dwellers alike to cultivate personal independence in everyday life.

Since 1973, Storey's Country Wisdom Bulletins have offered practical, hands-on instructions designed to help readers master dozens of country living skills quickly and easily. There are now more than 170 titles in this series, and their remarkable popularity reflects the common desire of country and city dwellers alike to cultivate personal independence in everyday life.

7. Build a Smokehouse - Paperback

Since 1973, Storey's Country Wisdom Bulletins have offered practical, hands-on instructions designed to help readers master dozens of country living skills quickly and easily. There are now more than 170 titles in this series, and their remarkable popularity reflects the common desire of country and city dwellers alike to cultivate personal independence in everyday life.

Storey Country Wisdom Bulletin: Build a Smokehouse (Paperback)

8. Easy-to-Build Adirondack Furniture - Paperback

Building Adirondack furniture is a time-honored craft. Sturdy and rustic, this furniture can be a beautiful addition to any indoor decor, although it's most often used to set the scene outdoors. There, the furniture is subjected to a lifetime of abuse. Yearly it moves from somewhere hidden away (probably dark and musty winter storage) to front-and-center on the summer stage. Now, hour after hour it is beaten on by intense UV light, drenched in driving rains, then fried again in the summer sun. Through it all, the furniture patiently endures--ever handsome, ever inviting, ever lasting. To survive summertime abuse and the semiannual ritual of being dragged into and out of storage, outdoor furniture must be sturdy, rugged, and well built--all qualities that epitomize Adirondack pieces. This bulletin contains instructions for building an Adirondack chair, matching footstool, companion side table, and Westport chair (an ancestor of the modern-day slatted Adirondack chair). Each project will take the moderately skilled carpenter less than a day to fabricate; for the beginner, maybe a weekend. Learn how to choose the right lumber and hardware, complete with instructions for table, footstool, and the Westport chair.

Storey Country Wisdom Bulletin: Easy-To-Build Adirondack Furniture: Storey's Country Wisdom Bulletin A-216 (Paperback)

9. Do Your Own Wiring 9780806984728

ISBN: 9780806984728 ISBN10: 0806984724 Contributors: Armpriester, K. E.,

Do Your Own Wiring (Paperback) 9780806984728

10. Granite Kiss: Traditions and Techniques of Building New England Stone Walls, (Paperback)

In this elegant, literate primer, a master stonemason imparts the fundamentals of building traditional New England-style dry stone walls, along with thoughts on the history, aesthetics, and philosophy of the craft of placing stone. In this eminently readable primer on the fundamentals of placing stone, Kevin Gardner distills 25 years of experience in building and repairing New England-style dry stone walls into principles and practices that are adaptable to a wide variety of designs and circumstances. In addition to directions on building basic stone walls, he also demystifies steps, wells, ramps, walkways, and may other forms of dry masonry. Gardner also discusses the philosophy behind the repair and restoration of old walls, and gives the beginning wall builder ways to think about the place of the stone wall within the landscape. Along the way, Gardner considers the mythology of the stone wall and its place in the New England imagination. And he explores the history, philosophy, and aesthetics of working with stone in a book that will bring as much pleasure to armchair craftsmen as it will valuable instruction to the beginning wall builder. Selected as one of 2001's Best Gift Books by The Times of Trenton, New Jersey; one of the 50 best nonfiction books of 2001 by the Christian Science Monitor. 22 black & white illustrations, glossary, bibliography, index.

Granite Kiss: Traditions and Techniques of Building New England Stone Walls, (Paperback) Author: Countryman Press ISBN: 9780881505467 Format: Paperback Publication Date: 2008-09-17 Page Count: 224