Our Books

Making It: Radical Home Ec for a Post-Consumer World, by Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen

This book, written by a husband-and-wife team of die-hard DIYers, will leave you thinking you can take on the world and win.Milwaukee Journal Sentinal

My favorite of all these recent books by far… — Kirkus Reviews

A how-to book providing you with all of the tools you need to become a producer instead of a consumer and transform your home from the ground up. Projects range from the simple to the ambitious, and include activities done in the home, in the garden and out on the streets. Provides step-by-step instructions for a wide range of projects, from building a 99-cent solar oven to making your own laundry soap to instructions for brewing beer. Making It is the go-to source for post-consumer living activities that are fun, inexpensive and eminently doable.

Our goal in this book was to provide really stripped down, simple projects that use only inexpensive, easy to source materials. We also tried to use the same materials and ingredients over and over again, to save you time, money and storage space. The moral of this book is that it doesn’t take much more than creativity to live well, to live healthy, and to live inexpensively.

It’s also a really pretty, well organized book–if we don’t say so ourselves. Here’s a preview what it looks like inside. Please forgive the black layout marks:

The Urban Homestead (Expanded and Revised Edition): Your Guide to Self-Sufficient Living in the Heart of the City (Process Self-reliance Series)

by Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen 

“The contemporary bible on the subject” — The New York Times

This celebrated, essential handbook for the urban homesteading movement shows how to grow and preserve your own food, clean your house without toxins, raise chickens, gain energy independence, and more. Step-by-step projects, tips, and anecdotes will help get you started homesteading immediately. The Urban Homestead is also a guidebook to the larger movement and will point you to the best books and internet resources on self-sufficiency topics.

Written by city dwellers for city dwellers, this copiously illustrated, two-color instruction book proposes a paradigm shift that will improve our lives, our community, and our planet. By growing our own food and harnessing natural energy, we are planting seeds for the future of our cities.

What’s the difference between these books?

We get this question a lot. The Urban Homestead has projects in it, but overall it is more of an inspirational book, a book to get you thinking about the possibilities of do-it-yourself living. It’s a great place to start. We wrote Making It because we’d had comments from readers of The Urban Homestead that they wanted more projects. Making It is a 100% pure project book. It’s for people who don’t need convincing, who just want to dive in and make stuff. They are complimentary books–there’s not much overlap between them, and they form a nice set.