The Walls Around Us: The Thinking Person's Guide to How a House Works [Paperback]

David Owen (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 1, 1992

Anyone who's ever quailed at the thought of buying a two-by-four or suspected that his (or her) dwelling is breaking down out of spite will be charmed, educated and entertained by this delightful history and how-to of the house.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

With wry wit, Owen tells about his Connecticut house and how it works, or doesn't work, lacing his humor with informative vignettes.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

This is the literary version of Introductory House Maintenance/Remodeling 101. Owen, a staff writer for The New Yorker , describes in a popular style the general fundamentals of house construction and the materials involved. He also provides an overview of repairing, remodeling, and maintaining older houses with particular attention to walls, the roof, electricity, kitchens, bathrooms, and plumbing. Despite the basic coverage and limited use of illustrations, Owen's unique approach is extremely valuable to the first-time house owner or planner without a working knowledge of construction and maintenance.
- W.T. Johnston, formerly with Coastal Plain Regional Lib., Tifton, Ga.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (December 1, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679741445
• ISBN-13: 978-0679741442
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,073,816 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Worth it for the paint chapter alone!, August 25, 2000

By 

R. Kelly Wagner "[e-mail]" (MD, United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Walls Around Us: The Thinking Person's Guide to How a House Works (Paperback)

Have you ever wondered why you couldn't just use the paint they use for nuclear power plants, for your house? Wouldn't it be a lot more durable? David Owen has wondered - and visited the manufacturer who makes nuke paint, to get the answers.

Also among the choicest bits in a book that is full of great moments: the description of a layer of ugly wallpaper over a layer of ugly paint over a layer of ugly wallpaper over a layer of ugly paint...

Read this book during that break from stripping paint; have a tall glass of iced tea with it. And rejoice in the fact that even though it's 100 degrees and you're working on your house, at least you are not on an aluminum ladder near electrical lines in the rain.

I give copies of this book to friends as housewarming gifts for their first house...; we had to buy two copies for ourselves, as we don't want to run the risk of losing our only copy if someone borrows it.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It Gets You Where You Live, October 17, 2002

By 

James R. Mccall (Libertyville, IL USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Walls Around Us: The Thinking Person's Guide to How a House Works (Paperback)

This is a fine entry in the category of Well-written, Wryly-humorous Books About the Trials of Ordinary Life That Also Contain a Suprising Amount of Useful Information. If that sounds like an excessive qualification, it isn't, since the book is about houses, a subject dear, or dire, to the hearts of very many middle-class married men.

David Owen definitely writes as a guy. It's conceivable that a woman could enjoy this book, in the same way that some men enjoy reading Erma Bombeck. It's also true that many a woman these days finds herself, willy-nilly, the sole proprietor of some "huge box filled with complicated things that want to break," and so will see that this book is essentially inspirational and non-gendered, and will read it anyway. It's for anyone who has a house and doesn't know how that house works. Because if you have a house and don't know something about how it works, you will regret it, maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life.

The author is a writer for, among other publications, "The New Yorker", and he has the easy, colloquial, accomplished style that we associate with that magazine. This is not a "humor" book that tries to milk laughs out of the trials of a hapless urbanite who buys a 200-year-old farmhouse and gets his comeuppance. However, he was indeed a Manhattan apartment dweller with a wife and two young children who decided to buy a 200-year-old farmhouse in Connecticut, and certain mishaps and learning experiences did follow from that action. Some are laugh-out-loud funny, but mostly you will find yourself reading along with a smile that is composed of one part sympathy and two parts relief ("at least my house isn't THAT screwed-up!").

Mainly, though, in the course of your reading you will learn a lot. David Owen is a professional writer, and he knows how to research a topic, be it wallboard or lumber or electricity. (Perhaps the finest part of the book is the section on wallboard and plaster.) But he's also just an ordinary guy and a home-owner, until fairly recently just as butt-ignorant as you about how a house works. He lives in a this-old-house sort of place, and most of us don't. (Although once-fine old houses do present an implicit challenge that some of us fantasize about taking on, when our skills are a bit more honed.) His discussions, though, are firmly rooted in what many of us brood about on an almost daily basis: ugly walls, bad wiring, roofing leaks and wet basements.

But courage! A house need not be a millstone. It can be that fort Mom never let you build. If you're a grownup you can actually go out and buy power tools and plywood and all sorts of other neat stuff, and then you can come back home and make your house better.

Or worse. One of the virtues of this volume is its cheerful attitude toward working on one's home: that it is essentially a pilgrimage. Nothing is ever final, and every failure, every flub, teaches you something. Perfection is not the object, but rather, engagement. After a number of years of living in it, and coping with it, your home will become, for better and/or worse, an extension of yourself. If you love yourself, eventually you will love your house, too, with all its endearing faults.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Owen Presents Entertaining & Informative View of Remodeling, July 13, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: The Walls Around Us: The Thinking Person's Guide to How a House Works (Paperback)

As the owner of a 200-year-old fixer-upper, David Owen has more remodeling issues than most of us will ever have to *think* about, much less face. He gives us the benefit of them in _The Walls Around Us_. Every chapter is a self-contained essay in which, without lecturing, he clearly explains issues such as the differences in linseed-oil-based, alkyd, and latex paints (and each one's strong and weak points), shingles and tar and how ice dams ruin gutters, how finding lead plumbing is a lead-pipe cinch, so to speak, in some situations but not in others, and on through the rest of a house's components. In each chapter, Owen relates the subject to his need to address some component failure, small catastrophe, or need for improvement, making the book feel like the reader is having an unhurried visit with another do-it-yourselfer, trading "war stories" of balky drains, cracked plaster or shifting foundations.

This is not a "how-to" book, but rather a journey of discovery, in which Owen invites the reader to share with him as he learns how to deal with living in a house where things go wrong, and how to get past them without completely losing one's sanity or humor.