In addition to being an obsessive reader, I’m also an obsessive book hoarder. As in, I have hundreds of books I will probably never read again, but I can’t bring myself to give them away or sell them or recycle them. Maybe it’s because my maternal grandmother has an art book collection that takes up most of her downstairs wall space in the form of tomes squeezed into full-to-bursting bookshelves. Maybe it’s because I’m a writer, and I wouldn’t want to do with someone else’s book what I hope no one is doing with my book. So as you can probably imagine, our bookshelves look a little something like this (except less color coordinated):

While I implied above that book hoarding might be a family trait, it would only be on my mother’s side. My dad lets books slip into and out of his life – reading them and then passing them along – unless they are some of the few he’s happy to read again and again. The bookshelf area of his home is, as a consequence, tiny, but size doesn’t mater. And yet, I think that’s why I’m so hesitant to part with my books – even the ones that haven’t brought me much pleasure other than hastening the passage of time. I think I am afraid of someone coming into my home, seeing no bookshelves, and assuming that I don’t read much.

But even this strikes me as odd. Because the truth is that some people don’t read much for pleasure anyway, and there’s nothing wrong with that. They just enjoy other things. So why does the idea of someone pegging me for a non-reader make me feel so queasy, and furthermore prevent me from de-cluttering our right now extremely cluttered finished basement (which it should be noted is home to walls of bookshelves)? At this point in my life, I’m visiting the library for books more often than buying them, so it’s not like I’m adding to my collection. I’d wager that most of the books on those shelves have been with me since just after college. Some of them are even textbooks!

Do you, lovely readers, hold on to relatively unimportant books with a similar zeal? What’s keeping you from parting with them?

If I say ‘small house,’ what comes to mind? A super wee micro-house or something like this? Or do you think of a structure containing roughly 1700+ sq. ft. of floor space? Because, hey, it’s not a McMansion, so it must be small, right? I got to thinking about this subject after reading The Elusive Small-House Utopia, an article about Builder magazine’s latest concept home and what it means for building trends in general.

That concept house, the Home for a New Economy designed by Marianne Cusato, measured in at the size of the average American home built in 1980, or around 1700 sq. ft. Then the housing market went insane, and soon it became not unusual to see newly built houses hovering out the 6000 sq. ft. mark!

When Cusato sat down to devise the Home for the New Economy, she tried to consider how families actually use their living areas. She started with a simple, symmetrical three-bedroom plan, excising extraneous spaces — the seldom-used formal dining room, for instance — while enlarging windows wherever she could and adding a wraparound porch. A result was a house that was compact, comfortable, bright and energy-efficient.

Sounds tasty, right? But at 1700 sq. ft., does it really seem particularly small? Maybe I’m just coming at the article with a bias – my house tops out at 1100 sq. ft. and we think that might include the finished basement – but even when I hear that in 2007 the average American house surpassed 2500 sq. ft., 1700 still sounds like a lot of space for the average family. Not huge, but big enough for comfort.

“Everybody hates the Calvinist sacrifice; they just don’t want to hear of it,” says the architect Andrés Duany, a founding father of the New Urbanist movement and a mentor of Marianne Cusato’s. Duany argues that the sprawling homes of the last decade actually met a need, albeit imperfectly, by reproducing internally what suburban communities lacked: an exercise room substitutes for a park, a home theater for the Main Street cinema. Buyers will only accept smaller homes, he says, if their surroundings compensate them.

So let me ask you, my lovely readers, what you think small means when it comes to housing for, say, a family of three? How much space does a person really need, anyway?

I wouldn’t give up all of the trees in my back yard for anything, but they sure drive me crazy this time of year. What’s your least favorite thing about autumn? (Other than the fact that it heralds the coming of winter, of course.)

First came chalkboard paint, then came whiteboard (dry erase) paint. And I think both are super cool! We already put up an amazing magnetic chalkboard in my daughter’s room – and I’m almost all set to do the surface of our kitchen table in chalkboard. Next stop, whiteboard in the office!

But it never even occurred to me to use dry erase paint on surfaces! You can get a whiteboard table from Powells, for example. Or you do what someone did in the space pictured above and cover your boring kitchen counter tops with whiteboard paint. While I don’t know how the finish would, ahem, stick around, I can say for sure that it would be fun while it lasted!

Manolo says, please allow the Manolo to introduce to you the newest addition to the Manolosphere, Green Manolo.

Edited by our good friend Christa Terry (a.k.a Never teh Bride) of the Manolo for the Brides and the blog you are reading at this very moment, Manolo for the Home, the Green Manolo is the blog all about the super fantastic sustainable lifestyle!

And now, you must go visit the Green Manolo

India’s richest man has apparently moved into the most expensive home ever built. Mukesh Ambani, the chairman of Reliance Industries, who has a net worth of $29 billion, spent an estimated $1 billion on “Antilla,” a 400,000 sq. ft. residence in Mumbai’s upmarket Altamount Road area. My first impressions? It’s…big.

Call me jealous, if you will (and I won’t deny that I’d love to be a billionaire), but tell me this is not one ugly house. From the outside, it looks like a piece of one of those bizarro world mod apartment blocks that are poised to disengage from spaceship earth once the time is right. But lest I mistakenly suggest it’s lacking in outdoor amenities, I should point out the three (three!) helipads. And from the inside? The bathrooms, dining rooms, elevator banks, and living areas are apparently outfitted as dully as possible, in that way only too much bland stereotypical opulence can be dull. I mean, do you really need a huge chandelier every fifteen feet? Do you?

Yes, I know. This is a kid’s room. But double the bed and scale up the desk and I wouldn’t mind at all if it was my room – though I might also replace the tiny little side table with this one so I could actually set a few books down. I’m sure The Beard would be just thrilled to serenade me to sleep on the ukulele. Right?

Image via

Manolo says, please allow the Manolo to present to you the latest addition to the Manolosphere: Manolo Jewelry!

Edited by our good friend, and the long-time commenter at the blogs of the Manolo, La Petite Accadienne, who will be certain to provide you with much jewelry-based entertainment.

Manolo Jewelry!

And now you must go and leave our friend La Petite Acadienne the comment welcoming her to the world of blogging.