Product Description

"Real Simple: The Organized Home" is a practical, inspirational guide to streamlining your home and creating a more peaceful and productive life in the process. Building upon the incomparable world of the magazine, it provides valuable step-by-step advice on everything from organising kitchen shelves and cleaning out the refrigerator to setting up a versatile living room and creating a peaceful bedroom. A celebration of the liberating pleasure that comes from a clean, well-organized living space, "Real Simple The Organized Home" will help readers find the time for the things that really matter-making it the perfect gift for anyone who wants to do a little and live a lot. It includes rich advice on choosing room essentials, from furniture, window treatments, pillows, and DVD players to dishes, clothes hangers, candles and plants. Practical and imaginative solutions for new uses of old objects are provided.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #390920 in Books
• Published on: 2006-04-11
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

From Publishers Weekly
With its seductive images of pristine closets, dazzling sink faucets, impeccably organized refrigerators and clutter-free bookshelves, the Real Simple world beckons to readers everywhere. The photos inside this luxuriously straightforward guide to straightening up one’s house make organization into an art form: nicely arranged pillows on a sofa become a palette of bright color blocks; towels piled atop a hamper turn into an inviting display; and compact discs line up to form vertical bisectors on a horizontal rack. Using a combination of photographs and sketches, the editors explain how to spiff up every room in the house, and even go so far as to give instructions on organizing one’s organizational spaces (such as drawers and medicine cabinets). Inspiring and comprehensive, this guide should appeal to both compulsively ordered and chronically messy homeowners.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Customer Reviews

Long on style, but could use more substance
"The Organized Home" is as beautifully presented as it would like its readers' homes to look. It's lavishly photographed and nicely arranged, room by room, and there is even a ribbon marker attached. It's all very stylish. Where the book falls short is on substance. Some of the photographs could use better captions to help make their statement, and a lot of what is being said is so self-evident as to hardly be worth filling up a book with. One topic that does bear repeating (and is repeated in this book with a vengeance) is the necessity of de-cluttering your space -- go through your closets, drawers, cabinets regularly and toss whatever you haven't used in the last year or so. You'll be surprised at how much junk you've accumulated. There's also a shopping guide at the back, including internet addresses, listing sources.

Speaking of space, this is really the book's weakest point: "The Organized Home" reads like it was written for readers living in suburban McMansions. How many singles living in the city have laundry rooms, family rooms, storage rooms, or even separate dining rooms? There needs to be a lot more in here about how to organize in a limited space. The book talks about displaying all your small appliances if you have a lot of counter space in your kitchen, but what if you live in an apartment where the kitchen is so small that you can spread out your arms and touch walls? Maybe that could be the topic for a separate book. As far as this one is concerned, it's a beautiful volume, but its lack of attention to small spaces has limited its overall usefulness.

Disappointing
I like the magazine, but I was disappointed with this book.

I found the treatment too superficial to be useful. Unlike the magazine, pictured products aren't identified, and all items in areas aren't covered completely. For example, I wanted to see something on ironing board storage in the laundry area, but there was nothing on that. Also, they assume you have a lot of optimally configured space. For example, broom and mop storage was handled by assuming you had a separate closet just for cleaning supplies. If I had such a closet, I wouldn't have thought I needed this book.

Skip the book and spend the money on a magazine subscription instead.

Ideas not Actions
This book is full of beautiful pictures of organized homes. There are a lot of great ideas, but very little instruction on how to actually organize your house or cut clutter. A good book for someone who is trying to make their home more efficient and nice looking, but does not have a clutter or cleaning problem.