Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2112 in Books
• Published on: 2007-03-29
• Released on: 2007-03-29
• Binding: Paperback
• 128 pages

Synopsis
Your home should be somewhere you look forward to spending time. It should be a haven from the stresses of the world. You should be proud to have your friends round for dinner and they should leave impressed by your comfortable, clean, homely home. Nowadays, we don't all have the time or energy to make the most of our homes. But with a little help from Anthea, the queen of clean, you too can have a beautiful, clean and comfortable home to be truly proud of. With tips on everything from decluttering to dry cleaning, storage solutions to spring cleaning, dinner parties to brunches, this is an indispensable guide. There are simple lessons on each aspect of home making from cleaning to ironing to washing to tidying as well as top tips on entertaining. You will learn to entertain in style, with little effort and cost. Whether you're a housewife, or a young professional or student just setting up home, the Perfect Housewife has helpful hints to get you organised. You can save time and energy and turn your house into a home with Anthea Turner!

Customer Reviews

A great Potters export-thumbs up for Anthea!
I often wish I had 36 hours rather than 24 in a day. The firt time I tuned into Antheas show I was expecting something like bootcamp however found it quite pleasant to watch.
I quickly ordered her 'manual' as soon as it become available and I must say I am very very impressed with the book.
I, like many busy people have a chest freezer which although seems to be full a full meal could never be cooked from its contents. Anthea has clear guidelines on what you can freeze and how to freeze it (e.g. you can freeze a cake-for simplicity just cut it beforehand). Since reading the kitchen chapter I have made some changes in my routine. My mum also makes shopping lists now and we often do our shopping at less busier times (to avoid queuing times).
Cleaning is now less of a chore-10 minutes spent in the bathroom cleaning the sink which you wait for the toilet cleaner to work its magic is nothing in the grand theme of things. It will save you time down the line (the less dirt, the easier it is to clean).
I'm even giving meal planning a shot!

A book I can recommend to any of the following:

men living alone (or in a big group)
students-male and female
anyone who has recently moved out of their parents home
newly weds moving in together (will save a lot of tears at cleaning time)
new mummies who have no time to do anything
work from home people who find it hard to find time to do daily chores
new stay at home mums/wives/husbands
...plus anyone else who is struggling to grasp the functions of their vacuum, duster and mop and bucket.

A great manual which will make a great housewarming present.

I have just purchased Antheas entertaining in style book and shall post a review soon.

Hail Queen Anthea!
My friends all laugh at me and say I have OCD cleaning issues, but Antheas book informed me that I am running a tidy household! Her tips are great, especially her spring cleaning list, which I am working through just now even though it is summer. The tips for cleaning out your wardrobes have inspired me to get a babysitter this week and devote a day to tackle my wardrobe problems. I found the book quite positive and inspirational in parts. I have read a lot of it previously in a 1950's book I found about home management and just wonder how much Anthea got from historical cleaning routines that have been written about. Nevertheless, this is a good book and tends itself well for the new housekeeper, it can be daunting if you are not quite as precise as Anthea and may leave you feeling you are 'not quite' meeting standards expected, but it gives you something to aim for, I loved Antheas TV series and bought the dvd to actually watch the tips in action, again, as another reviewer stated, it would have been nice to have some demonstration pics in the book. I have changed my opinion of Anthea, I did honestly think (sorry Anthea!) that she was a bit of a nobody, but my opinions have definately changed and I hope she does another series. I really do think that a lot more woman would like to devote more time to their households but the pace and way of life these days means woman are split in so many directions, I am just thankful my life allows me the freedom to work and also keep an orderly home.
4 stars Anthea!

Please don't buy this TV cash-in
Surely having a happy home is vastly more important than feeling inadequate because the never-seen-or-used upward facing sill of your doorframes are dusty. I agree very strongly with all the points made in the review by flingthecow in June 2007.

If you are thinking about buying this book, please consider that Anthea Turner makes her living from her public image and in this case by the humiliation of the "students" on this show. She is one of today's "celebrities" who appear on reality shows, sell photo rights of their wedding day to gossip magazines. I understand that the premise of the book and the tv series is that Anthea maintains the enormous mansion shown on TV to her exacting standards with no help, and that this "perfect housewife" image has been very helpful to Anthea in terms of combatting some of the less flattering media coverage. To me it seems somewhat implausible that she isn't employing someone, if only to allow her enough time for her media appearances etc. There has been a lot of public concern over other TV misrepresentaions of the truth recently and I wonder if the more subtle ones may be also be quite damaging.

Preachy rant over, I am very sorry to say that I am now about to buy a copy of this book and DVD for my sister-outlaw. Perhaps my bitterness is because she has rejected the present which we spent hours searching for and fixing up. So, faced with the prospect of moodiness at family get-togethers, and my partner getting to see his delightful nieces even less often than he already does, my ideological objections to this cheap TV cash-in have been banished in favour of express delivery.

sigh....