Synopses & Reviews
Imagine a house tailored to your every need and personal taste. A home with generous living and dining rooms to entertain friends, a kitchen to suit your style, views where you want them, and a study large enough for all your favorite things.
Hugh Howard always dreamed of building such a house. When he and his wife, Betsy, learn that they're expecting their second child, Howard seizes the opportunity. It doesn't matter that his only formal training was working two summers as an electrician's assistant when he was in college or that the two young men who help him - one a skilled hunter, the other a college student from Scotland - have little or no experience in building trades. Howard is determined to design and build a house with his own two hands, a house that combines a sense of history with all the comforts of modern amenities. He learns as he goes, taking the reader on engaging detours through history, architecture, and home design.
Fifteen months later and wildly over budget, Howard - having put in some four thousand hours - completes a home for his family: a fine twenty-five-hundred-square-foot Federal-style-house. Each piece has a story and old hardware store to the staircase from a nineteenth-century parsonage. And along the way, Howard builds a community of new friends - a third-generation mason who constructs a remarkable Russian heater; an eccentric Irish landscaper who creates and unusual garden design; and Charlie, whose ancestors helped establish the hamlet where Howard builds his home.
Full of good stories, bright ideas, and passion for architectural history, House-Dreams is a gratifying story about a man with a dream and the inclination to fulfill it - whatever it takes.
Synopsis
Imagine a house built and tailored to your every need and personal taste. Hugh Howard dreamed of such a house, and when he and his wife, Betsy, learn that they're expecting their second child, he seizes the opportunity to build a home for their growing family.
Fifteen months later and just in time for the winter holidays, Howard, exhausted and wildly over his budget, completes their home-a fine 2,500-square-foot Federal-style house. And each piece has a story, from the cut nails that come from Howard's old elementary school janitor to the staircase that comes from a parsonage built just after the Civil War.
Howard discovers that all his planning and hard work earn him a house, yes, but he also gains a community of new friends-the people who help him along the way. There's Charlie, whose ancestors helped establish the upstate New York hamlet where they build the house; Ralph, a third-generation mason, who constructs a remarkable Russian heater; and Robbie, an eccentric Irish landscaper who has his own peculiar way of designing a garden.
HOUSE-DREAMS is for readers who spend weekends improving their houses, hardware store die-hards, and the millions who regularly tune in to the Home Garden Network and PBS's This Old House.
Synopsis
The story of an amateur builder and two novice apprentices and how they turned an overgrown blackberry patch, ten truckloads of lumber, a keg of cut nails and an antique staircase into a real home.
"House-Dream is probably the most warmhearted and engaging book about house building that I've come across. Hugh Howard has done a terrific job of charting the builder's journey while personalizing it for everyone." (Bob Vila)
Major decisions often get made for small reasons. The day we resolved to build a house for ourselves demonstrates how the little can beget the big. The impetus for one of the most momentous decisions of our lives proved to be a tiny wildflower." (from House-Dreams)
About the Author
Hugh Howard is the author of eleven books in the fields of history and architecture, most recently, Mr. and Mrs. Madisons War: Americans First Couple and the Second War of Independence. His next book with photographer Roger Straus III, Houses of the Presidents, will be published in October 2012 by Little Brown. He lives in East Chatham, New York, with his wife and two daughters.
Table of Contents
The Mayflower (1)
The Footprints (5)
Building the Box (30)
The Secondary Imagination (45)
The Matrix Materializes (68)
Oh Hearth and Home (92)
The Negative Moment (127)
A Winter's Work (145)
The Common Hours (172)
An Imagined Arcadia (195)
Of Columns and Completion (218)
The Race to the Finish (244)
The First Christmas (274)
EPILOGUE:
The World As We Would Have It (286)
FLOOR AND FRAMING PLANS (299)
NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS (301)