Member Reviews
"Feels Like Home: Transforming Your Space from Uninspiring to Uniquely Yours" by Marian Parsons is a dream come true for DIY enthusiasts and anyone eager to make their home truly personal without breaking the bank. Known as Miss Mustard Seed, Parsons combines her years of experience in DIY home transformation with practical advice and beautiful visuals to create an inspiring guide to home makeovers.
I really appreciated the author's warm and approachable tone. Instead of rigid design rules, Parsons offers flexible, room-by-room ideas that allow you to fuse your unique style and preferences into your living spaces. With each page, she encourages you to see your home as a canvas, one that can reflect your personality in both large and subtle ways. Her tutorials range from painting techniques to furniture transformations, with options that suit various skill levels—perfect whether you're a seasoned DIYer or a complete beginner.
Thank you to the publishers and NetGalley for the opportunity to review a temporary digital ARC in exchange for an unbiased review.
I'm a failed DIY-er. I follow so many people on social medias or YouTube and see them work magic... and I always think "if only I could" After reading through Feels Like Home, I feel like I actually can! Marian gives so many great ideas. And the pictures. Oh the pictures. If only to be an inspiration, spend some time cherishing the beauty in the photographs. This was fun!
Some pros about this book: The author does keep in mind that not everyone has a huge bank account to buy a ton of stuff - have you ever looked at an HGTV magazine or Southern Living and seen a cute ottoman only to find that it's $600?? This has some DIY projects in it that are helpful.
Cons: I felt like the author was pushing one kind of style out there. Maybe it was just to be examples of what SHE had done to make her house feel like a home, but it didn't really inspire me for how to make my home a reflection of ME.
Amazing book the pictures are truly inspiring m. I found so many creative ways to picture my home as my own unique space. This book is worth it for the lovely pictures alone but the advice and ideas are truly helpful and I am so glad I found this book. I highly recommend it if your wanting a book to help get your mind focused on truly designing a space for that fits who you are as a person and bring those aspects into your home.
Rarely does a house feel like home when you first buy it. Good advice for cultivating the home you want.
This is a great book about how to make your house feel like home and the pictures are really inspirational and helpful.
It was very hard to get a good opinion of this book as it did not transfer to the kindle platform correctly. The book came jumbled and disjointed. I was intrigued enough to want to see a physical copy some time in the future.
I have been working on ideas for my house for a couple of months. I have not acted on anything in any real way, except for a few touches here and there, and I thought this might help me make some choices.
The book begins with the author walking us through her ideas of a dream home, the mindset when looking at houses and also based on how much DIY one can do. She then walks through room by room and within that, idea by idea with mood boards to match. Now, I have never gotten the hang of a mood board, and therefore it was not too much help in my own quest. It is a colourful book with many ideas, but it had bigger DIY projects than I am currently capable of. It is a spread of her ideas for her own home, from which we can take a few inspirations. The suggestions are not limited to one type of project but encompass a wide range.
I would recommend this book for people who are handy with power tools and have a space in their home they are considering redoing. For today I want to put a plan of mine to sew a few curtains. If I get through that, I will consider it an achievement.
I received an ARC thanks to NetGalley and the publishers, but the review is based entirely on my reading experience and my own capabilities in this particular field.
If you buy this book for the inspiration pictures alone you will be extremely happy. I could have looked at her photos all day. The author is easy to understand (she doesn’t talk designer speak down to you at all) and gives really great tips throughout the entire book.
Highly recommend if you are just moving in to a new home or if you’re just looking to change things up.
A charming book that will give you ideas for how to make your home feel timeless yet authentically you. I loved browsing all of the photos to see how Marian transforms a space and to see how I could easily do it too. It feels like having a dream home is meant for the rich or people who have a lot of time, but reading this it feels like everyone can do it with a little bit of determination and fun.
A great book that really makes you think what home means to you. This is a book you want to own so you can reference back to it.
I've read my fair share of books on design and decorating and I find that most of them tend to overwhelm me what with their rules and info. This book is different in that the author teaches you the basics, just enough for you to have a foundation, and lets you have free reign over your own style. I am spellbound by the author's enthusiasm!
I thought this was an interesting book. It read like most home design books, thus not applicable to every reader, but I did enjoy a lot of the author's style choices.
Fans of HGTV can delight. This book shows the reader how to decorate one's home. Eases the way of DIY and more.
Although when it comes to decor and DIY a bit of uniqueness is called for to make one's home unique.
This is a big book with over 500pages to read and view, and is based on finding and creating your close to dream home. There is a lot of information, a lot of ideas and 9 tutorials to start the process of making a house a home of your dreams.
I enjoyed the book, it is a great book to have on hand to flick though, and each time the book is picked up new ideas come to tempt one. Great for lots of inspiration, motivation and encouragement, which is the aim of the book.
This was an okay decorating book but I found the title ironic since it didn't really give me any tips on how to make my particular home uniquely mine at all. The example photos are mostly from the author's home and others like hers, which are not at all my taste (fancy fake farmhouse style? buy a modern subdivision home and spend a bunch of money to make it look older and more traditional). To be fair, my decorating style is sort of "90 year old house meets cottage chic meets thrift store boho identity crisis meets too damn many people live in this house."
(When the plumbers in our population-700 town installed a bathtub in our basement a few years ago one of them asked his dad, the owner of the plumbing business, "Will it be up to code?" and his dad snorted out loud and said, "Not a thing in this basement is up to code." Our house has a razor blade hole in the back of the medicine cabinet to drop used razor blades behind the wall, which only people who have really old houses relate to. Our downstairs ceiling is entirely papered with 20+ years of our five kids' artwork to cover the old water stains and ugly ceiling tiles and people who come into our house frequently end up with a crick in their necks walking around looking up. And our couches are covered in layers of blue, green and teal blankets and fabrics because the couches were destroyed by the dog and bright red but had "good bones" and are nice and squishy.)
My home and my style are admittedly odd but I love our happy home, and it's very hard to ever find anything that matches it in decorating books or advice that's geared towards those who want to make their home more comfortable, personal, beautiful, etc. frugally. I don't want to do $5,000 projects to make it look like my ceiling has wooden support beams, thanks. I don't want to decorate with bizarre vintage photos of dead politicians I don't know. I don't want to custom order a couch upholstered with the perfect fabric for the amount of money some folks earn in a year. But I realize I'm in the minority, and most will probably greatly enjoy this book.
This is not an insult but it will be a very good book for middle to upper income "normal" people. :)
I read a temporary digital ARC of this book for review.
A fairly interesting concept of how to understand your home and how to make it more comfortable. Sadly though, tried to view it on my computer and later on my Ipad, and found it hard to see the images fully. Still though, would recommend if you had the physical copy.
I was given this food in exchange for an honest feedback. This book is beautiful, like nothing you will ever see before this. It is a book on a bespoke home, one that is uniquely and perfectly your own! The images will blow your mind if ou enjoy houses and decorating. It is more than that, it is how your home should feel and be to you! Appreciating your home and its unique build, looking at its potential.
Once again, the beauty and inspiration for making your space "feel like home" was achieved in the latest book from Marian Parsons, Feels Like Home, With loads of ideas and encouragement along budget-friendly and practical tips, Marian shows one how not only to love your space but also invites you to find your own style and character for your home. A wonderful book to have on reserve for new home owners or a thoughtful housewarming gift.
Feels Like Home, takes you through a journey of creating a place which feels like home to You. It does it via beautiful, design oriented pictures to explain the concepts. I enjoyed perusing the knowledge inside.