Around the House : Reflections on Life Under a Roof [Hardcover]

David Owen (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 11, 1998

"Owen is the McPhee of Sheetrock,
the Gibbon of grouting, the Proust of paint."
--Esquire

Twelve years ago, David Owen and his family moved from an apartment in New York City to a two-hundred-year-old house in a small town in rural Connecticut. Life under a leaky roof has not only made Owen handy with a reciprocating saw but has shown him why it isn't necessarily foolish to keep a broken refrigerator in the bathroom.
        In Around the House, Owen explains the usefulness of a noisy furnace (you know it's still working), the easiest way to increase a home's value by $25,000 (add a $50,000 kitchen to it), the perfect location for a second home (two doors away on the same street), and the reason most remodeling projects are futile: "You could spend a million dollars perking up a living room, yet at your next dinner party you would still find guests in the laundry room resting drinks on piles of folded underpants." He also identifies the most difficult home-improvement chore in the world: "the last ten percent of anything you start."
        Around the House is a collection of new essays plus Owen's finest pieces from Home magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, and The New Yorker. It's the home-improvement guide for anyone who knows that the truly impor-tant work around any house isn't done with hammer and nails.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In the mid-1980s, New Yorker staff writer David Owen saw a 200-year-old Connecticut farmhouse and decided to buy it. When he took his wife back to see it, he couldn't find it at first; when he did find it, his wife hated it. They bought it anyway, "probably because we believed that abandoning a house it had taken me a single morning to discover would be more complicated and inconvenient than living for the rest of our lives in a place we didn't like." Fortunately, "as luck would have it, both the house and the town have turned out to be pretty much exactly right for us." It's certainly done wonders both for the naturally handy Owen's repair skills and for his writing career; his first book, The Walls Around Us, was a delightfully chatty guide to real home repair for people with leaky roofs and carpenter ants. Owen returns to a subject clearly close to his heart with Around the House: Reflections on Life Under a Roof. Musing on the necessity of learning by doing, he writes, "The problem that most do-it-yourselfers face is how to acquire home-improvement skills without ruining the home they are trying to improve." Owen's answer is self-apprenticeship--he learned how to build a porch by repairing his front steps, how to measure and cut rafters by building playground equipment, and practiced his roofing skills by building a house for his cat. "With a few more years of practice," he says, "I'll be ready to approach my wife with an idea I've been mulling over lately: dismantling our house down to the foundation and building a new one from scratch." These eloquently funny essays on everything from bathtubs to telecommuting are the perfect vicarious pleasure for would-be do-it-yourselfers, the smugly apartment-bound, or the terminally lazy.

From Publishers Weekly

In 1991, New Yorker staff writer Owen wrote his wonderful The Walls Around Us: The Thinking Person's Guide to How a House Works. Or just as often, how it doesn't work. Now we find out just why he was inspired to write it in the first place. In 1985, Owen and his wife decided it was time to get out of their cramped Manhattan apartment and move to the country. Alone, he found an old house in Connecticut?what would be euphemistically called "a handyman's special"?and bought it at once. When his wife first saw it she was appalled, but they decided to keep it and slowly, room by room, they began to renovate. The author sees an old house almost as a shoe, "it needs to be tried on and worn for a while." And wear it he does in 67 brief, whimsical essays that prove that a home is more than a house. Here Owen displays imagination (voila! and a refrigerator becomes a bookcase); inventiveness (outsmarting the droppings of pet rabbits); and a kind of practical sentiment (grandmother's old furniture serves as convenient decoration and evocation of happy memories). There are treatises about a video camera almost never used ("Memory is better than a video camera, because, in addition to being free, it doesn't work very well"), the importance of a room of one's own and how to bribe a child out of a used baby blanket with $5. Owen also fills us in on the mysteries of a Paris bidet, his apathy toward weeds and how to discipline a new puppy (bring it into the bed with you). Forget parents, kids, spouses, jobs, the ultimate love-hate relationship is with our houses, and this funny, eclectic collection recalls that full range of joy and annoyance.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: Villard; 1st edition (August 11, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679456554
• ISBN-13: 978-0679456551
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,463,263 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

David Owen is a staff writer for The New Yorker and a contributing editor of Golf Digest, and he is the author of a dozen books. He lives in northwest Connecticut with his wife, the writer Ann Hodgman. Learn more at www.davidowen.net.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars He is the most consistent humorist today, January 25, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Around the House : Reflections on Life Under a Roof (Hardcover)

Owen can bury his funniest lines in his grand understated way. I haven't read a book of his that didn't make me laugh out loud, and this is no exception. If you haven't read him yet, this is a fine start.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Dave Barry meets Bob Vila, February 28, 2000

By 

Dylan Steinberg - See all my reviews

This review is from: Around the House : Reflections on Life Under a Roof (Hardcover)

For fans of David Owen's earlier book, The Walls Around Us, the style of this book will be familiar. Although it's less informative than the earlier book, Owen's musings about home ownership and home repair are very entertaining.

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars this is a wonderful, interesting, humourous, literate book -, November 29, 1998

By 

[e-mail] (Bangkok, Thailand) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Around the House : Reflections on Life Under a Roof (Hardcover)

This is a wonderful book - I bought it through amazon.com of course! - and I HIGHLY RECOMMEND it to anyone who enjoys the essay-form and is interested in the vissitudes of modern life. Humourous in an understated way and literate without being pretentious. BUY THIS BOOK and be prepared for a treat. A good Christmas present as well.