"Ceiling height is something that people don't understand," Susanka says. "If you make all ceiling heights 9 or 10 feet tall, it becomes monotonous."

She dropped some ceilings in two rounds of remodeling at her own home in Raleigh, N.C., that are chronicled in the book. Among other spaces, she dropped a middle section of a long passageway between foyer and kitchen to a height of 7 feet. This created a needed "transition area" between the foyer and kitchen — and made those rooms' ceilings actually seem higher, she said.

And she defines "dropped ceilings" rather broadly: Many rooms will benefit from borrowing the idea of a soffit from your kitchen in order to achieve "visual layering."

That is, adding a soffit to encircle a family room ceiling, for instance, doesn't remove any square footage from the space, but may help to differentiate it from the rest of the house. It also may make a smaller space seem larger because our eyes now perceive several spaces where before, they just perceived one, she says.

"Just as punctuation helps us to extract the full meaning of a sentence, spatial layering serves the same function for our eyes, separating the space we're looking at into bite-sized pieces without obscuring the experience of the whole," she writes in the book.

Head for the light. Susanka says a highly effective way to make a house feel bigger is to provide a "view" along its longest axis, such as from a foyer toward the back of the house. A view might be acquired by directing the eye toward a distant light source, such as installing a window at that far end. Or it can be had more simply by putting a lighted painting on the far wall. The effect also helps to move people toward the back of the house, she says.

Kitchen redos, minus the nervous breakdown. Recognizing kitchens as the leading design problem in most houses, Susanka devotes about one-third of the book to the subject. Though she addresses full-size room additions to gain more kitchen space, generally she focuses on improving what's already there.

Her suggestions include the predictable — consider the work triangle, leave the utilities in place in order to minimize construction cost, add an island, et cetera.

But her ideas also include "borrowing space" from adjoining areas in order to open up the room. Her principal target here is the dining room, which she suggests ditching.

"I don't hate dining rooms, I just hate rooms that aren't used 99 percent of the time," she says. Most homes don't need both formal and informal dining spaces, and a properly designed space can handle both, she says.