Sheetrock & Shellac: A Thinking Person's Guide to the Art and Science of Home Improvement by David Owen  (10)
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The Walls Around Us: The Thinking Person's Guide to How a House Works by David Owen  (8)
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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
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
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
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