if I had any hope it was destroyed by the crushingly bad Iowa-produced volume. which featured a long editor’s note about how you didn’t have to be located in Berkeley to be a vibrant publication, and then belly-flopped on cement.

order back-issues on eBay. the only mags available today that seem to come close to ReadMade are Craft and Maker, which are PROHIBITIVELY expensive, and often geared towards someone with an engineering degree and more resources than the average American.

I have never made a bad meal from a “Real Simple” recipe; they are good about publishing errata. My two oldest daughters are now subscribers, and I pass my copies on to another daughter.

I just ordered the back issues I was missing, and I have re-read each one several times already. As I move into a new condo (the first place my husband and I have ever owned), the suggestions and ideas are invaluable for us to set up my new space.

http://www.apartmenttherapy.co.....ter-054978

But then when I was 22, newly graduated, newly married, and moving far away, I decided I was going to completely clean out my parents’ house of all my stuff -a kind of symbolic cutting of strings.

I carried it around for three years before finally letting it all go. “Many of us started out in our first home the same way. We have many things from our childhood room, furniture handed down from family, dishes and decorations from our last apartment or college dorm. We try our best to make it all work together. But sooner or later it no longer satisfies us. We feel the urge to create a home environment that reflects who we are as individuals, a couple or as a family. We no longer need things from our childhood bedrooms; we want our homes to be ours, not leftovers from the past. But where do you begin?” (p.75 That Military House…)

I think this demographic of twenty-somethings could have a whole magazine (Real Simple Apartment?) -like Blueprint, but with focus and relevance* (not just lifestyle porn about being 23 with a six figure income and a stylish pad in some New York city neighborhood I’ll never see):

Advice on how to let go of your childhood things; how to set up your first home; how to give those hand-me-downs a more pulled together look until you can replace them; having your parents (or older siblings) visit; dealing with the relatives who can’t seem to realize you’re not still 13; managing your friendships when you are all trying to transition to Real Adulthood and some of you are making it faster than others (the strain in The Devil Wears Prada between Anne Hathaway’s character and her friend/boyfriend; this tension reminds me of the tension 6th grade girls who have been friends since kindergarten experience when some of them suddenly become interested in boys and dating and some are not there yet.)

* http://jezebel.com/gossip/nest.....332148.php

Big Solutions for a small living room/dining room
http://www.realsimple.com/real.....-1,00.html

I love the “Use Vertical Space.” Minimizing the amount of precious floor space that is sacrificed for storage with the use of tall bookcases is such a fantastic idea for getting the most out of tiny rooms. One of the beautiful bonuses of tall, small-footprint furniture is that it is more versatile in a variety of floor plans. It avoids the problem that occurs when the 64″ wide dresser that fit so well in the last bedroom doesn’t have enough continuous wall space in the next bedroom.

I also love the “Keep it in Scale.” It’s easy to forget standing in Restoration Hardware that the 6 feet deep couch is just not going to look as good in my 11′ x 13′ living room. And with moving in mind, staying small helps not just for the reason above (like that a love seat and two small arm chairs are more versatile and easier to work with than one giant couch), but with moving itself: getting that sofa up three flights of stairs and through doorways.

Anyway, wanted to pass on that find in case anyone else found it as inspiring as I did.

*In addition to The Itty Bitty Kitchen Handbook