Product Description

Whether your home is small or large, an apartment in the city or a country cottage, it is a space that should be at once beautiful and livable. The key to that is managing the upkeep without feeling flustered. Until now, there has never been a comprehensive resource that not only tells how to care for your home and everything in it, but that also simplifies the process by explaining just when. With secrets from Martha Stewart for accomplishing the most challenging homekeeping tasks with ease, this detailed and comprehensive book is the only one you will need to help you keep your home looking its best, floor to ceiling, room by room.

In Martha Stewart’s Homekeeping Handbook, Martha shares her unparalleled expertise in home maintenance and care. Readable and practical–and graced with charts, sidebars, illustrated techniques, and personal
anecdotes from Martha’s decades of experience caring for her homes–this is far more than just a compendium of ways to keep your house clean. It covers everything from properly executing a living room floor plan to setting a formal table; from choosing HEPA filters to sealing soapstone countertops; from organizing your home office to polishing your silver and caring for family heirlooms.

Martha Stewart’s Homekeeping Handbook is organized for clarity and maximum practicality:

Room by Room covers the upkeep of the appliances, tools, furnishings, and surfaces found in each room, from the entryway to the kitchen, from the attic to the laundry room.

Throughout the House instructs the reader on the proper ways to routinely clean and periodically maintain everything in the home, including dusting, sweeping, vacuuming, polishing, scrubbing, waxing and much more.

Comfort and Safety focuses on techniques to ensure your home is running properly and safely, such as recognizing when to clean vents, fixing a leaky faucet, and eradicating pests.

A-to-Z Materials Guide provides an invaluable resource that explains the unusual materials that many favorite objects are made of–from abalone to zinc–
and how to care for them so they last.

Encyclopedic yet friendly, Martha Stewart’s Homekeeping Handbook is a seminal work–a must-have for everyone who wants a well-cared-for home that will endure for generations.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6091 in Books
• Brand: Martha Stewart
• Published on: 2006-10-31
• Released on: 2006-10-31
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 752 pages

Features

• 752 pages

Amazon.com Review
Martha Stewart's new home reference book is a must-have for many reasons, not the least of which is the fact that it's gorgeous. Printed on thick, glossy pages covered with subtle sepia photos and that perfect Martha-blue as an accent color, Martha Stewart's Homekeeping Handbook is a pretty and practical package for everyone: "all mothers and daughters, fathers and sons who have a room, an apartment, or a home to care for." Stewart's exhaustive handbook features a handy "how to use this book" introduction; a room by room guide with weekly, monthly, and seasonal checklists; tips for cleaning, creating a comfortable and safe home, and moving; and a guide for identifying and caring for materials in your home. Curious? Take a look at some excerpts below. You'll be sweeping and shelving your way to a happier home in no time. --Daphne Durham

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How to Use This Book: An Excerpt

When the first issue of Martha Stewart Living was published in 1990, I could not have begun to anticipate how wide-ranging our readers' homekeeping concerns would be. Since then, we have discovered new solutions to age-old problems, brought in experts to advise us on very specific questions about very specific?c concerns, and experimented with all the new (and not so new) home-care products. Over the years, I've brought these lessons home with me, too, which has made me more organized and made my homes better cared for and maintained.

Households are busy places, works in progress where there is always something needing immediate attention and always something more that can be done. With that in mind, I have organized this book to address the tasks at hand and also to address the "more that can be done" for when you have the time and the inclination go beyond the essentials.

It starts with the big picture--an examination of every room and everything you will find within each. The eleven chapters in the "Room by Room" section take you on a tour through the house, focusing on the surfaces and furnishings you might find in any room, and offering strategies for their care and maintenance. Starting with the kitchen, the central staging area in any home, these chapters open with practical space-planning advice, followed by the golden rules of organizing. This information is intended to help contain your belongings and make each room clutter-free and functional. Relevant homekeeping concerns particular to each room are explored in depth--so stain-removal basics appear in "Laundry Room," the best way to clean grout in "Bathroom," and easy sewing repairs in "Utility Spaces." The equipment essential to each room is also addressed, so if you are considering what kind of bathtub to install during a bathroom renovation or whether a gas or electric range would best suit your style of cooking, you will have the information necessary to make such an investment with confidence.

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Organize Your Kitchen: Martha's Golden Rules

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About the Author
Martha Stewart is the author of many books on cooking, decorating, gardening, weddings, and other domestic arts, and is the founder of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. She lives in Bedford, New York.

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Customer Reviews

Big book to a clean house.
This is a seriously big book. It's well over 700pgs and is filled with every cleaning scenerio imaginable. The only negative I could think of was that some of the more basic infomation about cleaning might just get lost. But Martha Stewart is nothing if not thorough. So, to me, this is a must have in order to get that clean house. I highly recommend this one. I also recommend The Big Clean: How to Clean and Organize Your Home and Free Your Mind (Revised and Updated).

Time-Saver How-To For Just About Everything...
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There are few items like this one.

It is more or less a home companion on how to clean, maintain, do and repair most every item in your home. There is lots of wisdom like we used to pass down from generation to generation, before people stopped listening and families fragmented.

Newly marrieds, new home owners, kids leaving the nest for the first time to college or to live alone, and those wanting to get organized and stay organzied with their home chores and maintenace, will find this book valuable.

It is more than a reference work, although it certainly is that. I actually have enjoyed browsing through it for fun, not just looking for specific information.

Homekeeping Handbook Wasn't Handy Enough.
I was excited to recieve this book as a gift, as I enjoy taking care of my home and the things in it. However, I feel like this book went far beyond the scope of practical housekeeping. It has gotten good reviews on Amazon, but it is about 500 pages too long for my personal taste. I would never have bought it for myself, nor will I ever purchase it as a gift for anyone else.

The book is heavy and has a really cheap dustjacket that doesn't stay on, making the mere act of opening the book unpleasant. I, too, would have enjoyed color photographs. I don't think it was wrong of readers to expect something just a little more aesthetically pleasing-- it is from Martha Stewart, after all.

This book would have greatly benefitted from page tabs or subtle color-coding along the edge of the pages to mark the different areas of housekeeping the book adresses. At nearly 750 pages, it is really a hassle to have to juggle this five-pound book with its worthless dustjacket in the midst of my chores. Skimming through the index, finding the page, then poring over the information to find what I need to know takes far longer than opening this laptop and searching online for "mustard stain removal", etc. This book is so exhaustive that there have been a few times I've actually forgotten what I'm looking for before I find it.

The book is too broad and comprehensive in areas of little benefit to this reader. Perhaps much of it could have been put in another book altogether, such as a "Homebuilding Handbook" or "Home Renovation Handbook" For one example, Martha writes individual directions on how to clean no less than one dozen different surfaces of kitchen countertop, from laminated plastic to granite to zinc, along with the pros and cons of each type of surface, spanning at least six pages of the book.

On the other hand, when I wanted to know the basic maintenance and cleaning of my regular old coffeemaker,I was out of luck-there's nothing like that in this book. However, I now know the benefits and drawbacks of ten different materials one can choose for their kitchen sink. Ummm...thanks??

(PSST! Hey Martha: If a person invested the kind of money to put a marble countertop or copper sink in their kitchen, wouldn't they already know that it takes special care? Or maybe they are the same people you feel the need to tell "Don't let anybody smoke near your baby." (Page 303, Nursery Safety Guidelines.)

Now, I do not have kids, but I think everybody already knows this, Martha. Those people you see blowing smoke in their baby's face? They know, too, Martha, they just don't _care_).

In short, for me, this book was like a Roomba. It sounded like a good idea, but it was just all over the place. When it did focus on an area, it did so with such intensity that other more important areas were missed entirely, or barely touched on.

I wanted to like this book, but its just more hassle than it is worth. I'll keep relying some favorite housekeeping websites for quicker reference, and if I am absolutely not sure about something, I'll use this book as a backup (and flower press).

Homekeeping Handbook was just too excessive in all the wrong places for me.