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Rating: 
Summary: Not Useful
Review: I am giving this book only one star as I expected more from Better Homes & Gardens; their books are consistently excellent, but this one is a stinker.If you pick up a book about cats, it should feature cats. But when it comes to small spaces, it seems any home will do even if it's 3000 square feet. "Small spaces" is obvious a relative concept, depending on what you're used to. To me, a small space is any home which has a decided lack of closets, or storage areas. Bedrooms are small and difficult to make functional; children have no basement to play in, the kitchen has a puny eating area, etc. There wasn't a single picture in this book which impressed or inspired me. To show readers pictures of homes which appear large, airy, and identical to any home found in any design magazine, is just not useful at all. I highly recommend Taunton Press' Storage Idea Book - it is inspirational and jam packed with great visuals.
Rating:
Summary: Not Useful
Review: I am giving this book only one star as I expected more from Better Homes & Gardens; their books are consistently excellent, but this one is a stinker. If you pick up a book about cats, it should feature cats. But when it comes to small spaces, it seems any home will do even if it's 3000 square feet. "Small spaces" is obvious a relative concept, depending on what you're used to. To me, a small space is any home which has a decided lack of closets, or storage areas. Bedrooms are small and difficult to make functional; children have no basement to play in, the kitchen has a puny eating area, etc. There wasn't a single picture in this book which impressed or inspired me. To show readers pictures of homes which appear large, airy, and identical to any home found in any design magazine, is just not useful at all. I highly recommend Taunton Press' Storage Idea Book - it is inspirational and jam packed with great visuals.
Rating: 
Summary: just what we needed! wonderful!
Review: I am so excited about this book. It's just what my husband and I needed. The book combines style with practicality. What I mean is that the photos show rooms that are current and stylish and and even inspiring and the writing explains how I can use those ideas in our home. An excellent book. Handsome and helpful.
Rating: 
Summary: Wonderful Photos, But Difficult Reading
Review: I gave this 4 stars on the wealth of large, colorful photos and the ideas you can get from those.
Had to knock off one star for the difficulty of reading the text. Sentences 25 to 35 words long are difficult to digest (and I have a masters degree). The photo captions are grouped together, forcing the eye to jump back and forth trying to see what is being described. Even the picture captions are such dense text that they require re-reading to figure out what the author is saying. By page 100, I'd abandoned the text and just examined the photos.
There are some great ideas to be gleaned from this book. I liked the sliding mirror that revealed a television inset into a bedroom wall. Also great was the hidden storage in stair treads. It's too bad that the text just didn't flow well.
Rating:
Summary: Great book to guide you into a wonderful home!
Review: This book is a GREAT tool for making your house a home. It's loaded with tips and basic principles that will improve any room. Decorating Small Spaces teaches its reader the "rules" and then actually shows how to break them with style. For instance deep colors on the wall of a small room might actually make it seem larger because the walls appear to recede.
Starting with basic principles-color, furniture placement, storage, etc-the book then goes room-by-room showing how those principles can work. There are pictures to exemplify these principles on almost every page.
This book won't show you how to organize a kitchen drawer or books on a shelf, but it will show you how to arrange everything in a room to make the room more spacious.
I highly recommend this book. It has helped me transform my awkward small condo into a beautiful & livable home.
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