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Down and dirty - a complete step-by-step guide to making, installing and living with beautiful, all-natural earthen floors For most of human history, people have lived in durable, comfortable buildings made from natural materials such as soil, sand, rocks and fiber. All over the globe, these ancient traditions persist; a quarter to a third of the world's population today lives in houses built partially or entirely of earth. Conventional Western building techniques using industrial materials may save time and create efficiencies, but these perceived savings come at considerable financial and environmental cost. As well as boasting a unique and beautiful aesthetic, natural building techniques are accessible, affordable and nontoxic. Earthen Floors: A Modern Approach to an Ancient Practice is the first comprehensive, fully illustrated manual covering the history, use and maintenance of this attractive, practical flooring option. This detailed, fully-illustrated guide explains every part of the process, including: Sourcing and harvesting materials Preparing the subfloor Pouring, finishing and sealing the floor Living with and maintaining your earthen floor. Because information on creating quality earthen floors was not previously widely available, there have been some negative experiences. Drawing on the combined knowledge of the most qualified earthen floor practitioners, as well their own substantial experience, the authors deliver the definitive resource for this exciting technique, perfect for everyone from the novice to veteran builder.

This book was published as an in-depth guide to the selection, mixing and application of lime and clay based plasters, renders, paints and washes.

Zero Waste Home is the ultimate guide to simplified, sustainable living from Bea Johnson, 'the priestess of waste-free living' (The New York Times).Bea Johnson transformed her family's health, finances, and relationships for the better by reducing their waste to an astonishing half litre per year. It's all down to the 5 Rs: Refuse, Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Rot (and only in that order!). Zero Waste Home shows how these key principles can be applied to every area of your house from the kitchen to the kids' room, and it's packed with easy tips for all of us: from buying in bulk and clever meal planning to simply refusing unwanted freebies and using your plants as air fresheners.Bea Johnson shows, by inspiring example, what green living looks like and offers a practical, step-by-step guide to diminishing your environmental footprint and improving your life.'Bea Johnson is a guru of zero-waste living. The book is precise . . . simple yet deep. It doesn't preach.' Sunday Times'Johnson is an incredible advocate for her lifestyle . . . refreshingly honest.' Metro'Chic, charming, stylish' Red

Following in the footsteps of the successful Beginner's Guide series, The Beginner's Guide to Upholstery takes readers gently by the hand and shows them the simple techniques they need to bring their love of fabric to upholstered items for the home.

Now in its third edition, Black & Decker The Complete Guide to Patios gets a fresh update with the latest products, even more projects, and all-new photos.

Helps you create holiday masterpieces for the home, family and friends with the tried-and-true scroll saw projects and patterns from the archives of "Scroll Saw Woodworking & Crafts". This collection of holiday favourites features fretwork, compound-cuts, intarsia and inlay projects for ornaments, wreaths, Santas, portraits, and candleholders.

Part memoir, part cultural history, this book tells the history of homebuilding in America over the past 100 years, told through twelve modest houses that the author knows intimately.

Everything you wanted to know about building a workbench, making outfeed tables for shop machines, making work tables and assembly tables, storage cabinets for tools, materials, supplies. Bonus: Build like an aircraft engineer, super-flat and strong with a torsion box workbench, assembly table, and alignment beams.

Demonstrating how woodworkers can approach the complex job of designing and making built-in cabinets for kitchens, family rooms, and home offices, this technical handbook provides meticulously detailed shop drawings, instructions, and hundreds of professional tips for saving time, materials, unnecessary aggravation, and money.

Gathers useful information about woodturning chucks and fixtures. This book is designed to help both beginners and advanced turners improve their skills and broaden the range of projects they tackle at the lathe, by presenting a crafted combination of how-to advice and projects.

Constructing instead of consuming: good design for little money | The successful Internet campaign, now in a convenient collected volume

Collins Complete DIY Manual has sold over 3 million copies and is the most comprehensive and authoritative DIY manual ever produced.

Presents 62 cabin design interpretations that range in size from a cozy 100 square feet to a more spacious but still economical 1,000 square feet, and include sleeping accommodations, kitchen and bath facilities, and a heat source. This title provides floor plans with suggestions for designing the space for optimal use.

A step-by-step guide which covers various aspects of building a garage from the planning and design stage through to construction and completion.

Whether readers are looking to add a small solar component to provide a modest contribution to their home energy needs, build a new home powered completely by solar panels or do anything in between, this updated, revised and expanded title provides detailed answers to all of their questions.

The consumer guide to small-scale wind electricity production! Maybe you're not T. Boone Pickens, but you can build your own home-sized wind-power empire right in your back yard. Wind Power For Dummies supplies all the guidance you need to install and maintain a sustainable, cost-effective wind generator to power your home for decades to come.

Discover forgotten low-input food gardening methods for surviving uncertain times ahead. The decline of cheap oil is inspiring increasing numbers of North Americans to achieve some measure of backyard food self-sufficiency. In hard times, the family can be greatly helped by growing a highly productive food garden, requiring little cash outlay or watering. Currently popular intensive vegetable gardening methods are largely inappropriate to this new circumstance. Crowded raised beds require high inputs of water, fertility and organic matter, and demand large amounts of human time and effort. But, except for labor, these inputs depend on the price of oil. Prior to the 1970s, North American home food growing used more land with less labor, with wider plant spacing, with less or no irrigation, and all done with sharp hand tools. But these sustainable systems have been largely forgotten. Gardening When It Counts helps readers rediscover traditional low-input gardening methods to produce healthy food. Designed for readers with no experience and applicable to most areas in the English-speaking world except the tropics and hot deserts, this book shows that any family with access to 3-5,000 sq. ft. of garden land can halve their food costs using a growing system requiring just the odd bucketful of household waste water, perhaps two hundred dollars worth of hand tools, and about the same amount spent on supplies-working an average of two hours a day during the growing season. Mother Earth News Wiser Living Series

Teaches the basic techniques to get started, as well as more advanced ways to approach and create finely crafted boxes. This book offers this advice: Repeat yourself. Repetition leads to refinement and refinement leads to success. It arranges the projects by the level of difficulty, instructing you to use your imagination and ask a few questions.

Everything you need to know to achieve a DIY-standard retreat - the sort of holiday home you have always dreamed of. The authors describe each step in the process, from identifying the land to deciding on and developing plans for a structure that suits your lifestyle and budget.

Includes equipment requirements, instructions for creating wall foundations, coping with drainage problems, and hints for incorporating gates, fences, and stiles.

The only how-to manual on the subject directed to mainstream owner-builders

In this revision of Working with Wood: The Basics of Craftsmanship (1993), the longtime instructor of a basic woodworking class introduces wood's properties and techniques (hand and power) for projects which utilize these skills. Korn still regards hands-on experience as the best teacher. Annotation

Written by the founder of the Yacht Design Institute, this book contains answers to several boat related topics. It contains information on many aspects of boat-design and serves as an introduction for backyard boatbuilders, students of boat design, or someone looking to buy a first boat.

The Bread Builders explains the grains and flours, leavens and doughs, the chemistry of bread, and the physics of baking in a big book filled with helpful drawings, photographs, recipes, and tips. In a unique angle for a book on baking bread, it also includes detailed diagrams and instructions for building your own masonry bread oven from scratch.

There's no reason to buy a ready-made birdhouse when it only takes a few short hours to build an even better version. This 128-page book is jam-packed with more than 50 projects that make it easy to attract birds to any garden.

Featuring common business assumptions, this book reveals a mind-set that aims to free contractors from the tyranny of an unprofitable, unproductive routine. It also provides specific tips on topics such as planning, money and personnel management and teaches readers how to implement the ingenious turnkey system of management.