Stephen Pollan

Foolproof Guide To Renovating Your Kitchen: Fireside (February 4, 1997), 192 pages; Buy from amazon.com; "Kitchens are probably do-it-yourself remodelers' number one target, and few remodeling projects offer as much potential for lifestyle upgrade or are as fraught with potentially dangerous detail as the typical kitchen retread. So just one of Pollan and Levine's suggestions is worth the whole book: hire professionals to do the job. Most of the other advice is similarly Big Picture stuff, concerned with getting your ideas on paper, finding the right contractor, and overseeing the project. Pollan and Levine strive to provide comprehensive instructions in a chronology whose logic they stress by actually having a trail of dashes wending from one instruction to the next. They box every step amid plenty of white space, throw in plenty of decorative drawings, and generally make the book rather resemble a slide show or flip-chart presentation. Their effort is a potentially valuable resource for those interested in creating a new kitchen and too smart to do it themselves." —Booklist