The siding needs cleaning, the cracked wall needs plastering, the windows need caulkingbut no one wants to spend precious weekends working around the house. With The Lazy Way to Care for Your Home, just a few minutes a month of maintenance will not only keep the house looking great, but will avoid costly and laborious repairs and replacements down the road.The Lazy Way to Care for Your Home provides lists of toolbox necessities to make shopping quick and painlessno more wandering the aisles wondering which is the right wrench. With lots of handy short-cuts and tipssuch as rinsing the siding while watering the lawnthe house will practically be maintaining itself, both inside and out. The homeowner who buys this book will be the envy of all the neighbors, not only because the house looks great, but also because he or she is working half as hard!
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Not that you are particularly lazy, but when it comes right down to it, maintaining a home is potentially a lot of work for anyone, and you may feel you have better things to do. In today's speeded-up world, having to use up one's free time working on the seriously necessary tasks of keeping your home up and running is a problem for many people. What if there were a book that showed you how to make the most efficient use of your time and efforts to spend the fewest hours possible keeping the house in good working order? You'd want to get your hands on this book, right? Well, you can!
Meany's well-thought-out look at the ins and outs of just about every aspect of home upkeep covers storage, cleaning, inside and outside maintenance and repairs, basic plumbing fixes, window cleaning and repairs, deck maintenance, keeping your heating and air conditioning systems flowing smoothly, the tools and materials needed for each task, and even some thoughts on how to schedule and organize your work and time for greatest efficiency. In addition to all the basics covered, there are loads of additional tips and shortcuts, warnings about time-wasters that will spare future time and headaches, optional tips for things you can do when you have a little extra time, and some suggested "rewards" for jobs well done! Meany's lighthearted and witty writing makes this an entertaining as well as useful guide for today's over-scheduled homeowner. --Mark A. Hetts
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Pointers galore,
By
This review is from: Care for Your Home the Lazy Way (The Lazy Way Series) (Paperback)
'Care For Your Home' is a valuable contribution to the do-it-yourself canon. By implicitly condoning and even lauding a heretofore immoral trait, the authors of the Lazy Way series have begun the hard work of stripping away the residue of the Protestant and Jewish work ethic in order to help us achieve a worthier goal: total, unrestrained hedonism.The target audience of this book seems to be young homeowners who have day jobs and are therefore unable to give a lot of time to the maintenance and improvement of their abodes. It's a sort of cross between Heloise and Norm Abrams with a little Painting For Dummies thrown in. I personally don't like the Dummies/Complete Idiot approach, with its relentless attempts at cuteness, but if it helps to bring software geeks and policy wonks to a fuller understanding of gutters and studs, then so be it. Terry Meany isn't so cloying as some of the dummy advisors, and with a little acid this book could be made downright enjoyable. The discussion of wood gutters could be dropped altogether. Perhaps they're common in Seattle, but in my experience they're as rare as California condors. If you do own a home that's old enough to have wood gutters, it's likely you've got lath and plaster walls, which render the studfinders Meany recommends totally worthless, whether they're magnetic or electronic. Probably a third of the homes in the country have plaster walls, which makes the alternative to studfinders worth mentioning: measure over 16 inches from a corner or doorway, then drive in and pull out a 2 inch nail every inch to the left and right until you hit something solid. Fill up the little holes with spackle, then touch up or hang a picture over them (which is probably why you were looking for the stud in the first place). I both applaud and deplore Meany's section on yards. He recommends hiring somebody to cut your lawn, which may not be 'A Complete Waste of Time', but is certainly a total waste of money, which, when you consider that most people exchange their time for money, translates to A Complete Waste of Time. When you add to that time spent watering, you approach if not embrace A Massive Waste of Time. Yet, reading on, I found that Meany has actually hit upon the correct solution, which is low and no-maintenance plants. Rip out the grass (that is a task you'll want to hire out), till the soil, and plant tough, aggressive groundcovers and shrubs. For groundcover, vinca can't be beat. You can walk all over it, neglect it, never mow or trim it, and it still looks great. It even has little purple flowers in the spring. For shrubs, there is the usual assortment of evergreens, which grow to shapes varying from elephant to doormat. And Meany forgot to mention herbs such as sage and oregano. You can put in a little pint-size sage plant in the spring, and by October it will be bigger than a lawnmower. The rule of total neglect applies here, too. And it's great on chicken! It was disappointing to see Meany taking part in the government inspired hysteria over lead paint. Lead, like asbestos, doesn't hurt you unless you eat it or breathe the dust in large quantities. The same can be said of concrete or glass or fiberglass or even some types of wood. The lead paint rules in standard housing contracts are simply boilerplate: legalese put there by politicians reacting to a public horrified by child poisonings. If you're a slumlord, you better cover up or 'abate' your lead paint. But if you're a regular homeowner, you have nothing to worry about unless your paint is peeling off in flakes and your children go unsupervised for long periods. If that is the case, scrape it, apply some of the primer that is specially formulated to stop peeling, and put on a topcoat of quality latex. Then go pay some attention to your kids. In the tool department I would make some adjustments to Meany's list. For example, I would replace the hacksaw on the Good-Idea Tools list with the reciprocating saw. If you've ever tried to hack through a pipe with a manual saw, you'll know what I mean. The electric reciprocating saw, along with the microwave, is one of the hallmarks of the late 20th century, things that save exponential amounts of time. It's much less dangerous than a circular saw, and far more versatile, mainly because of its shape. It's a cylinder with a blade on the end that can be slipped into the smallest of spaces like a key, whereas a circular saw is roughly the shape of a pumpkin. Trying to use a pumpkin like a key is the cause of many accidents, both to bodies and property. The reciprocating saw can be used on everything from wallboard to fences to pipes to branches. Don't forget to get the kind that doesn't require a chucking tool to change blades.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Good philosophy but limited advice,
By A Customer
This review is from: Care for Your Home the Lazy Way (The Lazy Way Series) (Paperback)
While I like the concept, the actual useable advice is very slim. Trying just a little too hard to be cute and amusing, without providing enough practical "meat."
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
It's a good idea, but does it really work?,
By A Customer
This review is from: Care for Your Home the Lazy Way (The Lazy Way Series) (Paperback)
You may be wondering if "the lazy way" will actually accomplish anything. I know I've tried "the lazy way" many different times and had it back fire, and we all have a few pink t-shirts in our closets. But I can tell you from first hand experience that the suggestions in this book, though lazy, are effective. You can consider me a guinea pig of sorts, for I am the only child of Terry (& Jeanette - his wife). I've endured the strange smells, odd piles, and creative "tools" my dear old dad has come up with in order to come up with these lazy suggestions, and he, obviously, only included those that worked. I will grant that I am somewhat biased, but I definately can say, "seen it, done it, been there". So check it out. It really does work. Way to go Dad!
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