Written on a third-grade level for poor readers of 14 and up who have ""decided to move out of your parents' home and into a place of your own,"" this bland guide to inexpensive decorating and doing-it-yourself is unlikely to reach or help its target audience. Legal status aside, it is hard to imagine a 14-year-old in such a situation who is together enough to afford and assemble the bare-brick, folk-art, full-kitchen, plant-and-pillow-filled, cheap-chic domiciles pictured here--or who is into serving ""an elegant dinner for a few friends"" and concerned about where to put ""that old angel food cake pan."" The few neat tips that are offered here might have better been incorporated in the authors' Slapdash Decorating (1977), which was aimed at kids fixing up their own rooms--a more appropriate audience for James and Barkin's choppy, exclamation-pointed sentences and breezy vocabulary. (""How to Stash Your Stuff"" is ""always a problem"" as ""There's never enough room for all your gear."") As for the suggested solutions to those storage problems, if you have to be told you can keep boxes of stuff under your bed, are you really ready to go out on your own?