The Home Design Handbook: The Essential Planning Guide for Building, Buying, or Remodeling a Home [Paperback]

June Cotner Myrvang (Author), Steve Myrvang (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 15, 1992

This uniquely practical guide will help guarantee that the home you build, buy, or renovate will perfectly suit your needs, desires, and lifestyle.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

The Myrvangs, owners of a Seattle architecture firm, have created a book that will help novices navigate the area of home design. Design is important to anyone building, buying, or renovating a house since a home is typically one's largest investment, and once it is built one must live in it. Readers are given a series of questions which are designed to help sort through the tremendous amount of detail involved. Checklists of items that typically need consideration in every home, both interior and exterior, are covered. This is not an essential purchase, but is recommended for public libraries with active building and renovation collections.
- Jonathan Hershey, Akron-Summit Cty. P.L., Ohio
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"An extraordinarily useful workbook for anyone planning a remodel or new construction project. The Myrvangs have taken a commonsense approach to everything from selecting a building site to figuring out what you want in your living spaces."-Seattle Times/Post-Intelligencer

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Holt Paperbacks; 1st edition (April 15, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805018336
• ISBN-13: 978-0805018332
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.8 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,480,690 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars thinks of everything - very personalized!, August 10, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Home Design Handbook: The Essential Planning Guide for Building, Buying, or Remodeling a Home (Paperback)

This book looks at home design from a wholistic approach as well as up close and personal. It focuses on your hopes and dreams and the soul of your home to give you true satisfaction with your design. It includes such things as site, energy considerations, family's lifestyle, outdoors and indoors, and budget. With the guidance of this book you can plan to build a house from scratch or remodel an existing house to your taste and needs. Each room in the house is taken into consideration in detail, right down to the storage space, with photos and floor plans. Useful addresses and an extensive bibliography are given for your further exploration. This book is fantastic, especially because it gives you the freedom to custom design your dream house. Much of it is in the form of a workbook, with blanks to fill in. After going through all the forms, it will become clear to you what you need to do to achieve your goals.

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent reference for home buyers!, September 26, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Home Design Handbook: The Essential Planning Guide for Building, Buying, or Remodeling a Home (Paperback)

We found The Home Design Handbook to be an excellent resource as we searched for our home. The questions and exercises helped us narrow down and prioritize what we wanted (and did not want) in our home. Even the information intended for those who plan to build or renovate a house, covered issues that we found important considerations for anyone buying an existing home. For example, we learned alot about what to watch for to ensure the house was more energy efficient, inside and out. We felt we were better educated buyers with this great book!

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Book - Don't Plan Your Home Without It., June 19, 2005

By 

Baazumi (New York City, NY) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Home Design Handbook: The Essential Planning Guide for Building, Buying, or Remodeling a Home (Paperback)

This book is an excellent guide to help navigate the hundreds of practical details involved in planning a home.
Every chapter is well-written, and well- organized, with an extremely useful checklist at the end. For example, what about the selection of your vanity in the bathroom? Would you like it to be the age old standard height of 34"? Or would you prefer it to be shorter, or higher? This is a very useful question as the standard height of 34" for the bathroom vanity is not really a comfortable height for most people. My counters, both kitchen and bathrooms, are a height of 37# (I'm 5'5)which is a more comfortable height for me. The depth of my counters are 28" not the standard 24". If you notice your kitchen, once you have the toaster, blender, etc. out, there's little room left for much of anything else. So those extra 4 " in depth really give you a lot more space. Builders want everything to be standard because it's easier for them, but it's your house they are building, and better to get it the way you want it. Another useful question is "do you read in the bathtub"? I do, and that means when designing the bathroom I want a good reading light above the tub at the end where my head lays. Every chapter in this book ends with a great checklist of things you will want to take into account, and prepares you for the highly detailed process of planning a home. It's one of the best on the market, and I think one of most underated ones.