Do you enjoy making sandcastles? Do your mashed potatoes become fine art before you eat them? If you enjoy working with your hands and being outdoors, youll love sand-casting with concrete. Veteran concrete creator Bo Atkinson shares his passion and experience in this wonderful step-by-step pictorial. Starting with a pile of sand, a pile of gravel, some water, cement, and reinforcement, he demonstrates how simple it can be to create anything you fancy from concrete. His projects include a fairy lantern, a birdbath, a toadstool seat, a bench, and even a small footbridge.

Heres a wonderful opportunity to tour 28 beautiful new log homes without leaving your lounge chair. Sumptuous photographs bring the houses to life, while floor plans act as your guide to every part of the home. This is a tool for anyone who dreams of building a log home, with hundreds of ideas to sift through. These are real homes, chosen for their outstanding designs, tasteful decoration, and real-life, lived-in practicality.

Visit a dozen exciting homes where the owners have ignored standard building practices in favor of creative alternatives. These homes, found from Massachusetts to California, are expressive of individuality as well as artistry, and you'll be inspired to branch out and craft your own unique living space. Homes featured include Eliphante near Sedona, Arizona, a four-acre art installation complete with free-form rammed-earth buildings and handmade stained glass. You'll also tour the sculpted grounds and meditation huts of a recycling artist and guru, and the mystical home and gardens of Gnome...

This lavishly illustrated book explores the beautifully decorated homes, cottages, and hotels of New Jersey's historic Ocean Grove. This charming little seaside hamlet has been listed by the National Register of Historic Places as the richest concentration of Victorian architecture in the nation, and this book helps to illustrate why. One avenue after another, uncover the wealth of lovingly preserved homes that make up this still-active Methodist revival camp town. Picket fences and rose privets frame absolutely lovely homes, dripping with preserved wooden scrollwork, carefully highlighted in...

From once-cast-aside items, these artists have carefully crafted fine jewelry to experiential gallery installations. This book takes you on an exciting tour through their imaginations. Experience the found object art movement touted by artists and groups like Philadelphia's Dumpster Divers who declare trash the failure of imagination and set out to glorify what others have cast aside. More than 80 artists across the United States and Europe are represented in over 400 original artworks. Many of them make their work a poignant environmental message, some uncover treasure and transcendent...

Explore New Orleans in over 230 colorful postcards published during the first half of the 20th Century. These hand-tinted photographs and the accompanying text help illuminate this fascinating city, from its early agricultural and trade port origins, through its elaborate religious and riotous cultural heritage. Wonderful imagery of popular and historically significant sites accompanies interesting essays and trivia tidbits that shed light on one of North America's most colorful cities. Visit charming gardens, private courtyards, and balconies dripping in iron lacework. Tour scenic parks and...

Building a new house or planning a remodel? Heres the first place to shop for ideas. Enter more than 50 kitchens, each carefully planned and perfectly primped to inspire you. These pages are packed with professional design ideas to help you create a perf

Includes a wonderful circular patio centered around a firepit, to a demonstration walkway that illustrates how to lay basketweave, running brick, and herringbone patterns, this book is the perfect resource for anyone who wants to undertake a great home improvement project. Learn how to lay the groundwork, study details for edging and popular paver designs, and finish up like a pro. A special chapter details the process of laying a permeable paving surface, an increasingly popular alternative in today's eco-conscious world. Clear photos detail every step in the process, and a gallery of more...

Over 300 images of wine cellars immerse you into the stylish and impressive world of today's vintage connoisseur. A wine cellar is becoming a standard feature of today's luxury home. The ability to invest in fine wines, to age them properly, and to have them on hand for entertaining is a luxury more people can afford. This book is packed with ideas and technical information for designing safe, stylish, beautiful wine cellars. Essays by leading designers and a section detailing the proper construction of a wine cellar make this an invaluable reference.

Todays top homes include spa-scale, master bath suites that serve up far more than the traditional 10-minute morning routine. Luxury bath suites include whirlpool tubs, multi-faceted showers, soaking tubs, and, above all, space. Tremendous attention is being lavished on the design of baths where youll want to linger . When you do leave, you feel more relaxed, beautiful, and prepared for the world than when you entered. A tour through these pages, filled with over 300 color images, will inspire designers and homeowners setting out to create their own in-home spas.