Who Lived in this House?


Book Description

Until comparatively recent times, both the Inupiat Inuit and the Koyukon Athapaskans spent the winter in wooden semisubterranean houses. For the archaeologist who excavates one of these structures, the shared traditions pose a difficult question: Who lived in this house? Three such house excavations in the Koyukuk River valley provide the basis for this fascinating study of ethnic identity and ethnoarchaeology along the Inupiat-Koyukon cultural interface.




Red House


Book Description

In her critically acclaimed, ingenious memoir, Sarah Messer explores America’s fascination with history, family, and Great Houses. Her Massachusetts childhood home had sheltered the Hatch family for 325 years when her parents bought it in 1965. The will of the house’s original owner, Walter Hatch—which stipulated Red House was to be passed down, "never to be sold or mortgaged from my children and grandchildren forever"—still hung in the living room. In Red House, Messer explores the strange and enriching consequences of growing up with another family’s birthright. Answering the riddle of when shelter becomes first a home and then an identity, Messer has created a classic exploration of heritage, community, and the role architecture plays in our national identity.




Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House


Book Description

From the acclaimed author and columnist: a laugh-out-loud journey into the world of real estate—the true story of one woman’s “imperfect life lived among imperfect houses” and her quest for the four perfect walls to call home. After an itinerant suburban childhood and countless moves as a grown-up—from New York City to Lincoln, Nebraska; from the Midwest to the West Coast and back—Meghan Daum was living in Los Angeles, single and in her mid-thirties, and devoting obscene amounts of time not to her writing career or her dating life but to the pursuit of property: scouring Craigslist, visiting open houses, fantasizing about finding the right place for the right price. Finally, near the height of the real estate bubble, she succumbed, depleting her life’s savings to buy a 900-square-foot bungalow, with a garage that “bore a close resemblance to the ruins of Pompeii” and plumbing that “dated back to the Coolidge administration.” From her mother’s decorating manias to her own “hidden room” dreams, Daum explores the perils and pleasures of believing that only a house can make you whole. With delicious wit and a keen eye for the absurd, she has given us a pitch-perfect, irresistible tale of playing a lifelong game of house.




Home


Book Description

Ever thought about all the people who lived in your house before you? Julie Myserson did, and set out to learn as much as she could about their often fascinating lives. house, an ordinary home, and ordinary people have lived in it for over a century. But start to explore what they did, who they were, what they believed in, what they desired and they soon become as remarkable, as complicated, as fascinating as anyone. Victorian terraced family house, of average size, in a typical Victorian suburb (Clapham) and she loves it. She wanted to find out how much those who preceded her loved living there, so she spent hours and hours in the archives at the Family Record Office, the Public Record Office at Kew, local council archives and libraries across the country. Like an archaeologist, she found herself blowing the dust off files that no-one had touched since the last sheet of paper in them was typed. detective hunt as, bit by bit, she started to piece together the story of her house, built in 1877, as told by its former occupants in their own words and deeds. And so she met the bigamist, the Tottenham Hotspur fanatic, the Royal Servent, the Jamaican family and all the rest of the eccentric and entertaining former occupents of 34 Lillieshall Road. The book uncovers a lost 130-year history of happiness and grief, change and prudence, poverty and affluence, social upheaval and technological advance. our front door lock, yet we rarely confront the shadows that inhabit our homes. But once you do -- and Julie Myerson shows you how -- you will never bear to part from their company again. This is your home's story too.




Story of the Girl that Lived in a House Made of Glass


Book Description

One night, in the Realm of the Moon, in the middle of the central plaza came and stood a house entirely made from transparent frozen glass. Behind its glass walls that are completely transparent and yet solid, lives a girl. She is a beautiful girl, and more beautiful inside. Many blink at her and call her to come outside to talk to her, to help her, even to take her with them if she wants, but she seems not to listen. She continues her life in an invisible universe where everything is transparent, almost unreal – unreal for those who believe only what they can see with their eyes. But how did she end up here? Many have said they love her and it is probably true as they stood behind her wall for days, even months trying to find the way to enter. Knights and princes, a poet and a painter, a wizard and an astronomer, the twin firewalkers, all make a try. Will there finally be someone to succeed in saving the girl?




Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House


Book Description

The “funny, charming, and shocking” true story (The New York Times Book Review) of one woman’s quest for the four perfect walls to call home. In this laugh-out-loud personal journey, acclaimed author Meghan Daum explores the perils and pleasures of believing that only a house can make you whole. From her teenage apartment fantasies and her mother’s decorating manias to her own “hidden room” dreams and the bungalow she eventually buys on her own, Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House “[chronicles] an obsession that threatens to upend sanity and bank accounts…. Daum has a rare gift in her ability to keep readers laughing through her own tears” (The New York Times Book Review).




Young House Love


Book Description

This New York Times bestselling book is filled with hundreds of fun, deceptively simple, budget-friendly ideas for sprucing up your home. With two home renovations under their (tool) belts and millions of hits per month on their blog YoungHouseLove.com, Sherry and John Petersik are home-improvement enthusiasts primed to pass on a slew of projects, tricks, and techniques to do-it-yourselfers of all levels. Packed with 243 tips and ideas—both classic and unexpected—and more than 400 photographs and illustrations, this is a book that readers will return to again and again for the creative projects and easy-to-follow instructions in the relatable voice the Petersiks are known for. Learn to trick out a thrift-store mirror, spice up plain old roller shades, "hack" your Ikea table to create three distinct looks, and so much more.







If You Lived Here


Book Description

Master of the cut and paste art technique, Giles Laroche takes readers on a storytelling journey around the world that celebrates the diversity of homes and the people who are shaped by them. Step into unique homes from around the world and discover the many fascinating ways in which people live and have lived. If you lived in the mountains of southern Spain, your bedroom might be carved out of a mountain. If you lived in a village in South Africa, the outside of your house might tell the story of your family. And if you lived in a floating green house in the Netherlands, you could rotate your house to watch both the sunrise and sunset. With intricate bas-relief collages, Giles Laroche uncovers the reason why each home was constructed the way in which it was, then lets us imagine what it would be like to live in homes so different from our own. Showing the tremendous variety of dwellings worldwide—log cabins, houses on stilts, cave dwellings, boathouses, and yurts—this book addresses why each house is build the way that it is. Reasons—such as blending into the landscape, confusing invaders, being able to travel with one's home, using whatever materials are at hand—are as varied as the homes themselves. List of Houses included: Dogtrot log house, based on dogtrots built in the southern U.S. Chalet, based on chalets built in the Austrian Alps. Pueblo, Taos, New Mexico Connected barn, based on connected barns common in northern New England. Cave dwelling, Guadix, Andalucia, Spain Palafitos (house on stilts), Chiloe Island, Chile Palazzo Dario, Venice, Italy Chateau La Brede, Bordeaux, France Tulou, Hangkeng village, Yongding, China Half-timbered houses, Miltenberg am Main, Germany Greek island village houses, Astipalaia Island, Greece Decorated houses of Ndebele, Pretoria, Transvaal, South Africa Yurt, based on yurts in Mongolia and other parts of central Asia. Airstream trailer, USA Floating house, Middleburg, the Netherlands Tree house, USA




A Punkhouse in the Deep South


Book Description

Radical subcultures in an unlikely place Told in personal interviews, this is the collective story of a punk community in an unlikely town and region, a hub of radical counterculture that drew artists and musicians from throughout the conservative South and earned national renown. The house at 309 6th Avenue has long been a crossroads for punk rock, activism, veganism, and queer culture in Pensacola, a quiet Gulf Coast city at the border of Florida and Alabama. In this book, residents of 309 narrate the colorful and often comical details of communal life in the crowded and dilapidated house over its 30-year existence. Terry Johnson, Ryan “Rymodee” Modee, Gloria Diaz, Skott Cowgill, and others tell of playing in bands including This Bike Is a Pipe Bomb, operating local businesses such as End of the Line Cafe, forming feminist support groups, and creating zines and art. Each voice adds to the picture of a lively community that worked together to provide for their own needs while making a positive, lasting impact on their surrounding area. Together, these participants show that punk is more than music and teenage rebellion. It is about alternatives to standard narratives of living, acceptance for the marginalized in a rapidly changing world, and building a sense of family from the ground up. Including photos by Cynthia Connolly and Mike Brodie, A Punkhouse in the Deep South illuminates many individual lives and creative endeavors that found a home and thrived in one of the oldest continuously inhabited punkhouses in the United States.