Small Space Organizing: A Room-by-room Guide to Maximizing Your Space by Kathryn Bechen

First of all, I would like to extend a heartfelt “Thank you” to Kathryn Bechen and her publisher for sending me a copy of "Small Space Organizing" to review for them. I am truly grateful for this generosity. I really appreciate the time, effort and expense it takes to make a reviewer copy available to me.

I am thrilled to be a reviewer for Kathryn Bechen’s book, “Small Space Organizing: A Room-by-room Guide to Maximizing Your Space”. I don’t live in a small home, but my family does have some unique challenges that make this book a valuable resource. First of all, our kids’ bedrooms are on the small side, so getting the most out of that space can be pretty important to a teenage girl. We’ve converted my oldest daughter’s bedroom into an office because she and her husband just moved into our basement/family room. So, using this book to create for them a defined space that gives them both living and sleeping quarters was essential.

I love Kathryn’s quote at the beginning of the book: “Small spaces give us the opportunity to live sincerely, forcing us to choose which of our possessions make our hearts sing.” What a beautiful idea! I did discover that I have much room to downsize regardless of the space in my floor plan. There are questions to assess your space, website addresses for products and services, space for your own notes on each chapter, and plenty of ideas for embracing the “less is more” concept for every room in the house!

There were only two drawbacks to this amazing book: First, I would have loved some drawings to inspire my imagination. Second, I would have enjoyed reading about ideas for maximizing a small outdoor space.

Still, my plan is to sit down with my husband and choose an area of our house to work on. Then we will read Kathryn Bechen’s suggestions for that space and list our own ideas. Then we can start enjoying the process of investigating the changes we want to make. Maybe we can choose a different project every few months to make the “makeover” more affordable.

I think this would be a great blogging project! Choose a room, post BEFORE photos, blog about the process of “maximizing your space” including stores and websites shopped, decorating tips and challenges encountered, then post AFTER photos.

“Available January 2012 at your favorite bookseller from Revell, a division of Baker Publishing Group.”