Everything Must Go Part II: Books

January 12, 2015

...the first steps on Kondosans’ path to a tidy house is to go through one’s books. We managed to accumulate more books than our shelves could hold. An untidy and anxiety producing book pile had developed in the living room. It was time for a book cleansing. But let me first state our rule about buying books. My gym is mere steps from the Los Angeles Central Library from which I can easily access over 6.2 million books, movies, CDs and downloadable...

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Book Review: The Urban Bestiary

Mrs. Homegrown

October 10, 2013

Animals, Reviews

8 Comments

...no-kill polemic. I’ve perhaps put too much emphasis on the aspects of the book which focus on management and co-existence. The great majority of the book is about the animals themselves. Imagine you had a friend who was a naturalist who could explain the mysteries of the familiar yet unfamiliar wildlife which flit and shuffle through your backyard over a nice cup of coffee. Someone who could offer you an introduction to their world, and a chance...

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Cool Tools: A Catalog of Possibilities

Mr. Homegrown

January 29, 2015

Reviews

7 Comments

...also a lot of stuff that fits into the fantasy category: fun to read about but I’ll probably never do. I’d include igloo making, boat living and camouflage here. But you never know . . . And, thanks to Cool Tools editors Elon Shoenholz and Mark Frauenfelder, you’ll find a few Root Simple reviews tucked into Cool Tool’s 463 pages. And, yes, one of the first items mentioned in Cool Tools is a book on decuttering, perhaps as a caution to use Cool To...

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A Homemade Mattress?

Mrs. Homegrown

March 15, 2013

Design, Domesticus

164 Comments

...the wool. It took her about 6 hours to fill the mattress. 3) Here is a webpage, in French, showing the mattress making process. Lots of useful pictures. I have to run it through Google Translate for more clues. 4) Do not fall for the eHow result if you search for how to make a wool mattress. It gets off to a great start by recommending you use glue, rather than stitching, to construct your mattress tick . (They call the tick a “fabric sheet pouch...

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More Thoughts on Thinning the Library

Mr. Homegrown

January 16, 2015

Domesticus, Tidying up

16 Comments

...m wrong about that). Bookcrossing.com I had to resort to Wikipedia to grok Bookcrossing: Bookcrossing . . . is defined as “the practice of leaving a book in a public place to be picked up and read by others, who then do likewise.” The term is derived from bookcrossing.com, a free online book club which was founded to encourage the practice, aiming to “make the whole world a library.” The ‘crossing’ or exchanging of books may take any of a number o...

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