Customer Reviews

Home Decorating For Dummies

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Good,Solid advice on actually furnishing your home stylishly and comfortably instead of just fantasizing about the unaffordable and unattainable. I found a lot of helpful information to get me through each stage of a project. I really liked the way the authors wrote...very down-to-earth and friendly, unintimidating and real. I only wish there were loads of pretty pictures too!

After checking out many books from the library and pouring over glossy photos of rooms as large as my whole house, I felt more discouraged than inspired. If you can get past the name of this series of books, this particular "Dummy" book has all the same information about interior design as the books that cost three times as much. Get those out of the library and look at the photos for free. There are only a few photos of rooms in this book. It is mostly just the basics of what you need to understand very basic interior design concepts. Is everyone but me living in a house with 12 foot ceilings, rooms that are 400 square feet and windows looking out on the ocean!

This book isn't bad at all. I find myself picking it up when I'm trying to watch t.v. It has pretty good details about different things...fabrics, lighting, flooring, walls, etc. As another review stated, 'I wish it had more pictures', and I also wish it were longer. I really don't think it could have had any more detail though. It's well worth the money, no doubt. My next book will be "remodeling for dummies"....

Like all the "handbook for Dummies" series, this is good, basic, straight forward information for the novice, written in a very friendly, unintimidating style.

I decided to give this book as a gift, as it is a good introduction and starting point when in a quandary as to where to begin in the process. This was the first book I read on home decorating and it did give me some things to consider that I might not have thought of with the massive project of decorating, coordinating color schemes, lighting, etc. I went on to more in-depth books, which this wasn't one of them.

Good,Solid advice on actually decorating your home instead of fatasizing about the unaffordable and unattainable. I found a lot of helpful information to get me through each stage of a project. I really liked the way the authors wrote...very down-to-earth and freindly, unintimidating and real. I only wish there were loads of pretty pictures too!

I'm a fan of the "dummies" books. I loved Wine for Dummies, but this iteration falls short. With almost no color illustrations and a lot of dry reading that didn't really tell me much at all, I walked away feeling like I had wasted my time and money. Ultimately, you will learn the difference in different styles but very little about how to put it all together. I was looking more for a, "this is how you design a living room" and "this is how you design a bedroom" type of book. I know that design is pretty much whatever you want to do, but I wanted tips on why designers choose to do certain things more often and why they choose those things. For example, I tend to put my sofa and love seat at a right angle to each other with a rectangular rug in front of them and a coffee table on the rug. I'm told this isn't good design and the sofa should sit partially (or completely) on the rug, etc... I want to know why and how to do a better job of this type of design.

I DID learn one thing that stuck, diagonal patterns create the sensation of motion. There, I saved you $14. :-)

Home Decorating for Dummies is very informative, in fact so much so that I almost feel like I'm studying for class but in a good way. If you want to know how to design/decorate a room or every room in the house then you will be armed with all the information you need and more if you want to take to take your decorating to the maximum. Note that while the "Dummies" series of books are written for clear, concise and in-depth information in an easy to read format this is no easy read folks. You will have to put in some mental work here and likely some foot work as well as you gather samples for your design plan. So happy with this book because it covers anything you need to know about a good decorating plan and pulling it all together. I am just an amateur wanting to have a nicely designed home like I see on HGTV. Even if I can't make it look as wonderful as the diy or home improvement shows due to the practicalities of living at least I can be well informed and come as close as possible. I also bought a copy of this book as a gift for an aspiring decorator as a good place to start, they were quite pleasantly surprised.

I thought that this book could have been better. Some of my questions were unanswered. The book is almost too simple and I felt that it lacked some meat.