Right-Sizing Your Home: How to Make Your House Fit Your Lifestyle

Wonderful and Informative Read

This was a cover to cover read in the first day of having it. It provides wonderful insight on design and products to make your house a home. The chapters are designed by "zone" i.e. "Where You Cook", "Where You Relax", etc. that allowed me to find the exact information I was looking for to redesign that area. Also, the unique product insight and "Out of the Cabinet" ideas for storage and design where great.

I will and would recommend this book for others to read.

4 out of 4 people found this review helpful.

Spot-on advice for virtually any stage of life

What struck me most about Right-Sizing Your Home is its grounded approach to truly making a house work for you, and make it a lovely home, from a needs-based point of view. I have already implemented 2 ideas from the book (rethinking kitchen storage and being realistic about what dishes I use and don't use on a regular basis; have relegated the "company" platters to the laundry room). The brilliance of creating a pet-care station is just one example of the "Why didn't I think of that?" moments that I had reading this.

My husband and I also found the "think ahead" approach wise. Why wait until you're older and in need of easy-to-reach, safety-focused appliances, built-ins and fixtures? We've both seen parents struggle in homes not suited to their changing needs, and this book is helping us help them, while also planting the seed about what we'll need to consider - sooner rather than later.

The new products described and hailed here are amazing. Who knew there was cabinetry that can be raised and lowered at will? Bathtubs and showers that accomodate one's height, flexibility and preferences?

Best of all though is that my book is smartly written and does not venture into the pie-in-the-sky tips that some "advice" books promote. These are practical, thoughtful ideas that do not require a lot of money to implement.

4 out of 4 people found this review helpful.

A Lifesaver

Many years ago - in an earlier home - my husband and I joked frequently about passing our living room, then the dining room en route to the kitchen and garage. We often stopped to admire their elegance, yet hardly used them. If this sounds familiar, then read this thought-provoking book. Right-Sizing Your Home will help you to figure out how to maximize or make better use of space in your home, whether it is a room, a closet or just an unused corner. Traditional uses of space may no longer work for today's lifestyles. Even if you lack creativity, author Gale Steves will help you to find the answers via her mini "audits" that precede the various sections. The questions, tips and suggestions for trade-offs offered in this ground-breaking book will help you discover resourceful ways to make your space work best for you and to let you enjoy it more. The book is fun to read, easy to follow and also makes a great gift.

4 out of 4 people found this review helpful.

Fantastic resource for remodeling, new construction, or redecorating

This book is truly an achievement-- marrying form and function in one book, making it both beautiful and extremely useful at the same time! The exercises and questions are very relevant and useful and organized very well. I love how it covers lots of angles on lifestyle and preferences, even down to profiling the "secret napper's" bedroom and discussing kitchen design for those who entertain or those who don't. The hundreds of photographs both illustrate and inspire with fresh ideas for storage and design. Now is the perfect time for this book, since many people need to make adjustments in their homes for different ways of living. Well done!

3 out of 3 people found this review helpful.

Great for those who are remodeling/building a home

This book is filled with wonderful suggestions and design ideas for the home to fit YOUR lifestyle. This would be great for anyone remodeling their home- it asks questions about how you use spaces in the home and tailoring them to meet your needs.

Also- this book has excellent photography - great for design ideas and solutions.

3 out of 3 people found this review helpful.

Enlightening and Motivating

Too often our homes remain static because we just don't have a vision for how they can, and should, function better for us. Right-Sizing Your Home provides the vision along with the most practical, do-able advice in any book I have read in recent years. It gave me several "aha" moments that have motivated me to tackle some of my space and design re-do projects and moreover, it helps me smartly evaluate and decide which ideas make the most sense. If you want a home that works for YOU, this is the book that will help you achieve it.

3 out of 3 people found this review helpful.

Very Helpful Tool

I appreciated the layout of this book, it has many check lists to make it simple, author has thought of everything to make this painful process easier. Once I got into it, I actually started to enjoy myself and the benefits are tremendous, we can see what's in the hall closet again!

3 out of 3 people found this review helpful.

Right-Sizing Your Home (A must read if your planning to build, remodel or decorate)

This is the best book of it kind. Gale lays out the book in an easy to understand format. It's practical and provides hundreds of ideas and tips.

3 out of 4 people found this review helpful.

Before life changes to your home, a must read for empty-nesters.

This book,with excellent photos and numerous suggestions, gives the empty-nester reason to reconsider jumping into the next phase of living. A treat to read, well organized, and comprehensive. Gale Steves has presented a gold standard reason to evaluate right-sizing for all the right reasons, the reservations we have in changing our outside environment because the inside atmosphere is stale or now the wrong size. A must read before you make that move.

3 out of 3 people found this review helpful.

make your home reflect how you want to live

We live by so many other peoples rules as it relates to our daily lives. This book guides you in how to make your home be the one place where you can have exactly what you want. Right Sizing takes you on this journey and helps you reshape your thinking on this subject. The author helps you open your mind and allows you to think about how you would REALLY like your house to function to really make you happy. The new rule of how you use your house is that there are no hard and fast rules. It becomes what is best for your lifestyle. A book like this was long over due!

3 out of 4 people found this review helpful.

A Comprehensive Approach to Rethinking and Remaking The Spaces You Live In

Here is a book that can save your life or, at least, the rest of your life in your home.
First, author Gale Steves inspires the homeowner to look around his or her living spaces with fresh eyes and an open mind. What spaces are underused or misused? How do you really want to live at home?
Then, a series of worksheets lead the reader step by step along the path to change. These steps are thoroughly explained, for instance, not just urging you to measure your rooms but telling you precisely how to measure. Large color photographs of completed projects show just how rewarding the process of right-sizing can be.

3 out of 3 people found this review helpful.

Great Design

I have not even read the book yet but I had to comment on the wonderful design. I have spent my career working with graphic design and I fell in love with this design. It has an easy flow, great graphics and a wonderful use of color. As a visual person it will be a joy to read.

3 out of 3 people found this review helpful.

Not down-sizing or up-sizing, but right-sizing!

I love the upbeat tone of this book. The author has somehow secretly looked through my windows to see the problems of my home. She realizes that I need to manage my space better. I like her message of "improve, do not move". Whew! not a great time to move. Would rather do much more with what I have so that my space works better. But how, where to start?

Every chapter has some helpful hints and even more useful illustrations and diagrams. For example, this is the first time I have seen a design book touch on issues to consider if you are too tall or too short. Her novel solutions for the long-legged make me want to rush out to buy them. But how to find these things? Then, I discovered that Steves even helps me here. In the back of the book are innovative sources for things she has discussed. I hate books with pretty pictures that leave me only dreaming about how to make them happen in my house. She leads the way and makes right-sizing seem easy enough for a non-professional to accomplish.

Great book, very helpful!

2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

A "Must Have" Guide for Optimum Home Space Use

This book has been an immediate and invaluable tool in figuring out the optimum use of the available rooms and spaces in our retirement home. Believe me, it's worth ten times its cost, and more if I'd have had to hire a design consultant. We moved to a lakeside home several hundred miles from most of our family. Consequently, we need to look at our home from the perspective of year-round visits from kids and grands, other summer guests, and lots of entertaining. I immediately put the author's advice to work in analyzing the most convenient use of space of entertaining areas, and the comfort and efficiency of each space available to us and our guests.

Overall, what is really great about this book is that you don't have to own a home to find it useful. The majority of the advice translates to any place anybody lives -- for homeowners and renters. Throughout the book, I kept mentally transferring the author's brilliant suggestions into the place where I live. That is rare. So many home design related books seem to apply to someone else's sets of issues, and don't remotely meet my needs. This book is the exception. I recommend this to everyone with a roof over their head who wants to create the most comfortable and efficient space possible.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

This book will change my attitude toward my home.

Like a lot of us, I have good intentions about making changes in my home. I know that I should clean out and remove the clutter but somethiung always intervenes. This idea-filled book may alter the way I handle this problem. Written in clear language, it will lead me from chaos ro clarity, one closet or corner at a time. The handy worksheets define my needs, and the five-step method to getting control of my house seems written for me. It seems to manage my excuses and help me forward to my goals of better living. Thanks, Gale Steves, for defining right-sizing. My home and I intend to beenfit from your words.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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