Home Comforts
The Art and Science of Keeping House
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4.1 • 15 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The classic bestselling resource for every American household, Home Comforts addresses the meanings as well as the methods of housekeeping to help you manage everyday chores, find creative solutions to modern domestic dilemmas, and enhance the experience of life at home.
"Home Comforts is to the house what Joy of Cooking is to food." —USA TODAY
For the first time in nearly a century, here is an engaging and comprehensive book about housekeeping. Far from a dry how-to manual, nor a collection of odd tips and hints, a history book, or an encyclopedia compiled by a committee or an institute, Home Comforts is a readable guide for both beginners and experts of all the domestic arts. Including choosing fabrics, cleaning china, keeping the piano in tune, making a good fire, folding a fitted sheet, setting the dining room table, keeping surfaces free of germs, watering plants, removing stains—this guide covers everything that modern people might want to do for themselves in their homes.
Further topics include: making up a bed with hospital corners, expert recommendations for safe food storage, reading care labels (and sometimes carefully disregarding them), keeping your home free of dust mites and other allergens, home safety and security, this is a practical, good-humored, philosophical, even romantic, guidebook to the art and science of household management.
Customer Reviews
The housekeeping authority!
Cheryl Mendelson's 'Home Comforts' is the modern bible for keeping a clean, comfortable, and welcoming home. I own both this book and Martha Stewart's 'Homekeeping Handbook' and prefer this one for it's depth of content. Mendelson's suggested cleaning schedules may seem borderline obsessive, but don't let that turn you off. The bottom line is that this book will provide you with the knowledge to clean and care for anything in your house, as often as makes sense for you.
I do have to offer a caveat about this title in e-book format, though. The content formatting is a disaster. Paragraphs of text appear randomly and out of context at the end of chapters. Chapter numbers don't appear at the beginning of each chapter. Some images aren't correctly placed. Some text is just missing - for example, the Glossary of Fabric Terms in chapter 14 includes the definitions, but the terms being defined are missing. If this is your first time through this book, you may want to get the paper version. But having this wealth of information searchable in e-book format makes up for the (inexcusable) formatting problems.
Ebook version is a mess
Download the sample and you'll see all sorts of problems. Random text inserted willy nilly, and whole paragraphs that clearly belong elsewhere.