After waiting for a month, Apartment Therapy : The Eight-Step Home Cure finally arrived!  This is a fantastic book for all levels of designers, but especially for those who have a total fear of design, those who don’t know where to start, those who are terrified of color, those who have a panic attack over committing to a rug or a sofa, those who have separation anxiety over parting with anything they have ever collected, and those who believe they do not have any taste.

 Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan, founder of Apartmenttherapy.com and apartment therapist extraordinaire peppers his eight week guide to a healthy living space with examples of how he helped his clients do the same.  In the process, even the most design phobic can find their long-buried style groove. (By the way, from now on I am dubbing him MGR, because I am lazy and his name is long).

In emphasizing how helpful this  book is to design newbies, my intent is not to put off those of you who are design savvy.  You may find yourself skimming the parts about where to find inspiration or how to make a style tray, but overall MGR provides a very useful timeline for reaching all of your apartment therapy goals, and you will have many breakthroughs along the way.  He also bends your design brain in ways that you had not considered, like how to eradicate the traces of that rotten ex who just moved out and took all your CDs with him. 

My first breakthrough occurred at step one.  Step one is to CLEAN!  I just moved out of a house I thought was pretty tidy, but once the heavy pieces were moved, the dust bunnies sent me running to CVS to buy Sudafed and Puffs Plus** for my moving men, who suddenly were performing a symphony of sneezes.  I can’t believe I was living like that – YUCK!***

Perhaps taking inspiration from What About Bob?, MG-R helps you start with baby steps, my favorite being "take one thing to the curb."  He also lets you keep potential junk in a specified area and mull it over for one week.  For months before I read this book I actually believed I was going to have a big yard sale and list other items on eBay.  If you are more organized and ambitious than I am, then go for it and help fund some new items, but give yourself a deadline of two weeks.  After that, take it all to the curb or to a charity.  You won’t believe how free you will feel,  how much extra storage space you have, and how much more room you have to make your space a place you love.  Do not fear, there is no guilt involved -  everything from ugly bridesmaid shoes (wow, that’s more redundant than "two twins") to ten year old issues of Martha Stewart Livings was taken from my curb long before garbage collection day.

This book is now under 11 bucks at Amazon.  It’s well worth the cost of two lattes at Starbucks.  Give the book a full read through, then try to figure out when you will have an eight week window to accomplish all the steps.  For instance, accountants will not have the time to commit to this between January and April 15.  Revisit the guide the week before you are going to start, and mark all of the steps on your calender.

*I should disclose that MGR recommends designpublic.com as a vendor in the book.  This did not influence this positive review whatsoever, as I have never met him, I already liked Apartmenttherapy.com a lot, and Design Public does not pay me enough to form a biased bone in my body.

**I should also mention that my dad worked for P&G for 32 years, and this formed many biased (brainwashed?) bones in my body.  It’s not "paper towels," it’s "Bounty."  It’s not "t.p.," it’s "Charmin."  Same goes for "Puffs Plus" – we don’t say the K-word for tissue in my family.

***For those of you who feel like cleaning and organizational failures and are paralyzed at the cleaning step, you should check out flylady.net .