Renovating Woman: A Guide to Home Repair, Maintenance and Real Man

A guide to home repair for women offers practical advice on how to maintain, troubleshoot, and repair any area of the house and includes guidance on saving money and finding an honest contractor

Most women shudder when faced with repair and remodeling projects. After all, how many miserable experiences with hammer or hired gun can one individual endure? With wit, a boundless sense of humor, and a great head for practicalities, media columnist Bennett steps in to save the day, if not the year. Bennett implores readers to learn contractor talk, amass a good chest of tools, and tackle one small project at a time. Those repair tasks could be as simple as relighting the furnace's pilot light or as complex as rewiring a ceiling fan. Everything is spelled out, illustrated, and written in plain English, with lots of warnings (turn off the main power switch, for instance). Should hiring and supervising a contractor become necessary, there are invaluable diplomatic guidelines to follow. The most important lesson is Bennett's rule that one of the most critical tools every woman ought to have prominently displayed is a good attitude. Barbara Jacobs

Bennett here shares what she learned when, after 23 years of having a man around to fix things, her marriage ended. Many of the repair jobs she considered so complex and difficult were not. Renovating Woman, which is also the name of a popular fix-it column Bennett has written for the Washington Post and Baltimore Sun, shows the reader how to do basic repairs and how to deal with contractors and home improvement professionals. The sections on repairs are erratic, dealing with some things in great detail while mentioning others, such as the soldering of pipes, only in passing. Readers should skip these parts and go right to Reader's Digest New Complete Do-It-Yourself Manual (LJ 11/1/91). However, Bennett's insights on dealing with people in the building trades, doing routine maintenance, and feeling confident enough to be responsible for a house are humorous and to the point. For larger collections.?Cynthia Johnson, Cary Memorial Lib., Lexington, Mass.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.