Not So Big Remodeling (Susanka) [Hardcover]

I have several Sarah Susanka books.
This one is just as useful as the others, particularly if you plan to extend your home.
She pays particular attention to how the house will look from the outside as well as how it will work internally.
I see many additions that have lacked this thought, where the addition is clearly a bit plonked on, with no notion of making it look part of the house.
There are also ideas on how to use your existing space better. In fact, her starting point is to challenge whether an extension is necessary or whether it is better to remodel within the existing footprint. This was our approach and, by following her advice , we are developing a nicely balanced house that suits our lifestyle without going through the hassle of planners and upset neighbours that can result when trying to extend.

Here, the main concept in all Susanka's books - small, thoughtful changes can make big differences - partly overlap and are also carried over and enlarged-upon; it is as well-written, organised and photographed as the other books in the series. Admirably pulling together the aesthetic, the practical, and the economical aspects, this book offers many concepts that are well explained in the text and reasonably well demonstrated in diagrams and photos.

The book starts with a section called "The Look of Your House": considering the exterior, then the front and back entryways - all areas those of us living in averagely small homes have very little ability to change. More usefully, it goes on to look at "Kitchens and Gathering Spaces" where of course kitchens get a lot of coverage - first working within the footprint by borrowing space, opening up, or relocating, then "bumping out" by creating alcoves outside the original footprint; basements suggestions are offered to make the living space there more enjoyable and attractive; excellent suggestions from earlier books are repeated and expanded on, such as delineating differently used areas (within one larger space) via ceiling heights, soffits, arches, beams, framing, columns and half-walls.

"Baths and Personal Spaces" offers useful improvements to bedrooms, bathrooms and studies and answers challenges many people have, such as small bathrooms, where to put a TV, and generally dealing creatively with smaller spaces. The final section, "Pulling it all Together" features colour tips, green changes, how to make a house feel welcoming, how to deal with large but featureless rooms, and whole house transformations - one with no changes to the footprint, another with just small changes, followed by some case studies of bigger changes, but very few larger extensions, which Susanka claims are rarely really needed.

The book's main strength is showing how making many small changes can transform the big-picture and fascinatingly it starts and ends by demonstrating just how Susanka pulled this off in her own home (which, by the way, has 10 rooms and a nice sized garden, therefore qualifying as a LARGE house for most of us).

Negatives: about half the ideas are unusable either because of wide-ranging differences between the way UK and US houses are designed, especially their exteriors, or because the book, like all of Susanka's books, is really focused on medium size rooms, not small rooms/houses with little or no potential for extending or for changing the way different rooms are used - yet these are the spaces most of us have to live in. Further, the decoration throughout is not to my taste, featuring lots of wood - which, a la Jack Sprat & and his wife, you may well like - but this point is practically irrelevant in such an excellent survey of modern design challenges and solutions.

Another negative for me was going too far the other way in trying to prove that large extensions are not necessary: several long extensions (along say an entire side or back wall) created as little as 3 feet extra, even where the outdoor space easily would have permitted more gain. I am pretty sure that the costs in doing this, which after all must involve knocking down the old exterior wall and building a new one, must be disproportionately large - on a square footage basis - by comparison with doubling or even tripling the extra width gained. The same applies to a number of suggestions for roofline improvements. Perhaps the different way many US houses are built mean that such changes are comparatively less expensive over there.

Overall the authors provide hundreds of clever suggestions for small changes that can be made in a home to improve it, challenging modern attitudes towards extensions/refurbishment to go beyond just square footage concerns, and encouraging 'thinking better' for more efficiency and workability.

By the way, don't buy both "More Not So Big Solutions" and this book - they are virtually identical but with different covers and titles.