The Not So Big House

Sarah Susanka: The Not So Big House Collection: The Not So Big House and Creating the Not So Big House,
Sarah Susanka's best-selling books, The Not So Big House and Creating the Not So Big House, are available for the first time in one slipcase set. These two volumes offer all of Sarah Susanka's...

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Susanka, Sarah: Creating the Not So Big House : Insights and Ideas for the New American Home, The Taunton Press 2002
ISBN: 1561586382 New Photographs by Grey Crawford

Oversized Trade Paperback. 4to. 258 pp. Illustrated throughout with color photogrphys by Grey Crawford. Following on Sarah Susanka's first book, The Not So Big House, this book puts into action her new blueprint for the American home: a house that values quality over quantity. Here Susanka takes an up-close look at 25 houses designed according to Not So Big principles. New. Trade Paperback 4to - over 9¾" - 12" tall

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Susanka, Sarah; Obolensky, Kira: Not So Big House : A Blueprint for the Way We Really Live, Newtown, CT, USA Taunton Press 2001
ISBN: 1-56158-376-6 Very Good

199 pages, Index, Bibliography, Color Photos through out. Clean, crisp copy. Contents include: Bigger Isn't Better; Rethinking the House; Making Not so Big Work; Lifestyles of the Not So Rich and Famous; Dreams, Details, and Dollars, The House of the Future. Oversized Soft Cover Used

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Regal, William & Neil Chanlder & Neil Chandler. Walking a Golden Mile. World Wrestling Entertainment, 2005.
Brand New, Paperback, clean, tight, unmarked, no cover or spine creases ; 0.9 x 9.1 x 6.1 Inches; 320 pages; <P><font size="+1"><b>Chapter One: A Wrestler, a Comic or a Clown</b></font><P></p><P>I'm not as old as you might think. It's just that I've been wrestling a long time. There's very few on the current World Wrestling Entertainment talent roster with more experience on the job than I have. The fact is I was born Darren Matthews on May 10, 1968 in a little village in the middle of England -- Codsall Wood in Staffordshire. Not a lot goes on in Codsall Wood. My dad Don Matthews is a builder and he built the house I was born in, just fifty yards from my grandfather's house, where my dad himself was born.<P></p><P>Wrestling is one of my earliest memories. Whenever I could, I'd watch it on TV. I also loved that old show <i>The Comedians</i>, all those old gag-a-minute northern stand-up comics, and I loved Slade too, the glam rock band. Wrestling, comedy and showbusiness -- they were always going to play a big part in my life.<P></p><P>I was seven when my mum Paula left us. Mum and Dad had a massive row and my dad took me out in the car to see some of the houses he was building. He said to me: "What would you think if you got home and your mum wasn't there?" I don't remember being too bothered. I'd always looked up to my dad and he was the one I wanted to be around. But it must have affected me, because I took my frustrations out on other kids. They'd tease me in the playground, shouting, "Where's your mum?" For the only time in my life, I turned into a bully. There's nothing I hate worse now than a bully. That or a liberty-taker. I've no time for bullies -- and I met plenty of them when I became a wrestler. I try to live my life without having regrets, but the fact that I bullied other kids all those years ago is something that troubled me for a long time.<P></p><P>I used to be a right naughty lad. But then when I was about fifteen I woke up one day and the thought struck me: "This is not the way to be." I couldn't carry on the way I had been. That was it. Simple as that. I've prided myself on my politeness from that day.<P></p><P>I hated every single minute of school. It's a terrible thing to admit when I know so many kids watch me on TV every week, but it's true. I detested it. My first school was a Catholic school, St Joseph's Convent, even though I'm not a Catholic. Mum leaving when I was so young didn't help matters, but I would never have been able to handle being preached at by those nuns in any case. I never liked being told that I'd go to hell if I didn't do what some nun told me to.<P></p><P>Just about the only highlight I remember from school was being taken on a trip to Chester Zoo when I was eight. My best friend was a lad called Andrew who had this curly thick white hair. He began pulling faces at a gorilla who retaliated by throwing a big pile of shite at him, hitting him square in the face. All you could see of Andrew were his eyes, peering through this steaming mask. The nuns were running around, shouting and screaming. It was like a <i>Tom and Jerry</i> cartoon. If that was the only thing I can remember from school, you can imagine how mind-numbing I found the place.<P></p><P>Then when I was nine I went to the middle school -- and was soon faced with another confusing situation. My mum had run off with this bloke and my dad ended up marrying his wife. It got pretty complicated. I've a half-brother who's my mum and step-dad's kid, and a step-sister.<P></p><P>My dad had custody of me and I'd go to stay with my mum in the school holidays, but I didn't like going. She lived in Bristol, a hundred miles away. When I was there I never saw much of my brother, who was always out with his friends. I didn't really know him, though we do keep in touch today. He's nice enough. But most of the time I didn't want to be there because I wanted to stay at home with my dad, granddad and the close family who lived nearby: my uncles, aunties and cousins -- especially my cousin Graham. He's older than me, but we spent so much time together growing up that he's more like a brother to me than anything else.<P></p><P>But my dad was always the one I looked up to. To this day he's the nicest man I've ever met -- and I'm not just saying that because he is my dad. He is the kindest person. I've never heard him swear or even say a bad word about anybody. He's a real hard worker, too. You never saw my dad without a pair of overalls on. He would come home covered in cement and has always worked hard for his living.<P></p><P>He doesn't need to work these days but he still does. He still gets up early every morning and never stops all day. If he didn't work he wouldn't know what to do with himself. Lately he has had problems both with his leg and with his arm but nothing stops him. I've seen him shovelling stuff with one hand. If he gave it up now he'd have no financial worries but that is who he is -- a grafter. But what it meant for me when I was growing up was that dad was often out at work. That meant I spent a lot of time with his father, my granddad.<P></p><P>Granddad's name was William Matthews, known as Bill, and he was probably the biggest influence in my life. In his younger days he was a bit of a rogue, well known for fighting and drinking. He'd do a bit of wrestling, a bit of boxing, a bit of running -- anything to make a few quid. He'd tell me stories about how he used to wrestle at a place called the Pear Tree pub. Back in the 1920s and 1930s they had a ring up in the beer garden where he used to do his stuff. He packed it in back in 1933, aged just thirty-two, because he came down with pleurisy and pneumonia. He also worked in Blackpool for a while. He was a navvy and there had been a lot of work going there when he was younger, on the sea walls and the like.<P></p><P>He used to tell me all these stories about him fighting when he was younger. He was a big, powerful fellow, over six feet tall, and he was a great character. He used to joke around and would teach me all these dirty stories and poems. He'd tell me all these things and whenever I repeated any of them to my mum, I'd get a thick ear for it. I've still got a picture of him in a suit and the older I get, the more I look like him.<P></p><P>He died in 1990, when he was eighty-nine. He loved it when I started wrestling and travelling around the world. Even when I'd moved to Blackpool, I'd come back to see him more than I would most people. Whenever I was passing through the Midlands on the wrestling trips that would take me all over the country, I'd stop over with him.<P></p><P>He drank all his life and smoked a pipe. He'd had every disease you care to name but in the end, the only reason he died was because he had got fed up with living. My gran had died a few years before and he used to tell me there was nothing on TV he wanted to watch any more, nothing he wanted to do. The last time I saw him, he told me: "I'm going to die, son."<P></p><P>"Don't be so soft," I said. I told him I was due to go to South Africa two weeks later to wrestle.<P></p><P>"Don't stay," he said. "Get yourself gone."<P></p><P>He died soon after. I did what he'd told me and went to South Africa. That was the way it was between him and me.<P></p><P>When I got to Codsall High School I had the same trouble as before. It bored the life out of me. Things that I liked, I did okay at, such as woodwork. But something I didn't like -- French for example -- was another matter. I got thrown out of French for being a disruptive little git.<P></p><...

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