Whether your home is small or large, an apartment in the city or a country cottage, it is a space that should be at once beautiful and livable. The key to that is managing the upkeep without feeling flustered. Until now, there has never been a comprehensive resource that not only tells how to care for your home and everything in it, but that also simplifies the process by explaining just when. With secrets from Martha Stewart for accomplishing the most challenging homekeeping tasks with ease, this detailed and comprehensive book is the only one you will need to help you keep your home looking its best, floor to ceiling, room by room. In Martha Stewart’s Homekeeping Handbook, Martha shares her unparalleled expertise in home maintenance and care. Readable and practical–and graced with charts, sidebars, illustrated techniques, and personal anecdotes from Martha’s decades of experience caring for her homes– this is far more than just a compendium of ways to keep your house clean. It covers everything from properly executing a living room floor plan to setting a formal table; from choosing HEPA filters to sealing soapstone countertops; from organizing your home office to polishing your silver and caring for family heirlooms. Martha Stewart’ s Homekeeping Handbook is organized for clarity and maximum practicality: Room by Room covers the upkeep of the appliances, tools, furnishings, and surfaces found in each room, from the entryway to the kitchen, from the attic to the laundry room. Throughout the House instructs the reader on the proper ways to routinely clean and periodically maintain everything in the home, including dusting, sweeping, vacuuming, polishing, scrubbing, waxing and much more. Comfort and Safety focuses on techniques to ensure your home is running properly and safely, such as recognizing when to clean vents, fixing a leaky faucet, and eradicating pests. A-to-Z Materials Guide provides an invaluable resource that explains the unusual materials that many favorite objects are made of–from abalone to zinc–and how to care for them so they last. Encyclopedic yet friendly, Martha Stewart’s Homekeeping Handbook is a seminal work–a must-have for everyone who wants a well-cared-for home that will endure for generations.

What is our intention with the book? Imparting knowledge and experience in step with actual practice and future trends to everybody concerned with housekeeping and managing procedures for housekeeping. Reading the book you will find answers to these questions: What is the farsighted housekeepers knowledge on guests expectations and trends? How to optimize the housekeeping department with regard to permanent cost pressure? When is a room considered clean and tidy? How to handle the building equipment and appliances and how to set up an adequate maintenance plan? How to organize efficient and environmental opera-tions for the hotel laundry? How can an ABC or Ishikawa failure analysis help to improve quality? What to do to operate the hotel environmentally? With the information of the book, I wish to sensitize professionals and managers from tourism, hotel CEOs, executive officers and managers, supervisors, room division managers, trainees, students and career changers for ambitious housekeeping.

A classic bestselling resource for every household, Home Comforts helps you manage everyday chores, find creative solutions to domestic dilemmas, and enhance the experience of life at home. “Home Comforts is to the house what Joy of Cooking is to food.” —USA TODAY Home Comforts is an engaging and comprehensive book about housekeeping. It is a lively and readable guide for both beginners and experts in all the domestic arts. From keeping surfaces free of germs, watering plants, removing stains, folding a fitted sheet, cleaning china, tuning a piano, lighting a fire, setting the dining room table—this guide covers everything that people might want to do for themselves in their homes. Further topics include: making up a bed with hospital corners, expert recommendations for safe food storage, reading care labels (and sometimes carefully disregarding them), keeping your home free of dust mites and other allergens, this is a practical, good-humored, philosophical guidebook to the art and science of household management.

This fully revised edition of the National Trust Manual of Housekeeping is essential reading for all those interested in the care of historic houses and their collections. It gives practical guidance on how to care for fragile interiors, maintain decorative fixtures and fittings and how to display furnishings and objects within their historic context. It also includes the latest thinking on housekeeping theory and practice. In particular, the Manual highlights the ways in which preventative conservation measures can help reduce the need for expensive repair to collections at a later date. It also explains how to strike the balance between the care and display of historic interiors and the provision of public access. Full of engaging insights into traditional and modern housekeeping techniques, the Manual explains how the nation's treasure houses have survived until today, and champions their future preservation, using conservation science, professional advice and environmentally sustainable methods and materials. Written by internationally renowned specialists at the National Trust, this Manual brings together many years of practical experience in the care of hundreds of historic houses and their collections.