I Wish I Owned a Home

I found this book at this local store called Watson Kennedy, which is the kind of store I could easily spend hours in. It’s the kind of place where everything costs just a little more than it probably should, and where items are organized by color instead of type. It’s the kind of place that sells several kinds of olive oils as well as antique etiquette books. Anyway, the reason I share this is because it’s also the kind of store that leads people to buy books they really don’t need.

This is just such a book, but it was actually a joy to read. It’s a coffee-table-type book filled with lovely illustrations and tips for decorating your home. The tips are great, and only a little ridiculous at times. It’s a well-written and useful book (hence the four star rating), and I found it inspirational. The only problems are that a) I don’t really have a budget to start adding things to our house (although my husband and I both dream of a new couch, and maybe a coffee table that isn’t a $19 shoe rack from Target) and b) we rent our apartment. So a lot of the suggestions – especially ones involving painting walls or hanging a lot of items on the wall – just aren’t practical for us right now.

However! Someday we will figure out a way to buy a place, and at that point I will pull this book out again and look it over. The suggestions about lighting were especially great, which is a sentence that really makes me feel like an adult. I don’t think 13-year-old me would think that I’d enjoy a book with a lot of talk about lamps, and yet I did. If you are lucky enough to be about to buy a house, or trying to figure out ways to decorate your home, I think this is a nice book to pick up.