Handy Andy's Home Work: A Beginner's Guide to Decorating, DIY and Maintenance Book

Andy Kane, famous as the resident carpenter and handyman on the BBC's Changing Rooms, has written a brilliantly simple beginner's guide for anyone new to decorating and DIY. Never wielded a paintbrush in anger before? Hammers are radar-guided to hit your thumbs? Don't worry, this is the klutz's friend, the idiot's handbook. Before he even starts to tell you how to fix anything, he takes you on a guided tour of the average home, explaining how it is all put together and how it is supposed to work. He goes pretty slow, so no one can get left behind: Your house walls tell you a lot about how they're built, especially if they're of plain brickwork. If all you can see are the long sides of the bricks, then you have cavity walls--two separate walls, each one brick thick, set about 50 mm (2 in) apart and held together by metal straps called wall ties. The gap in the middle stops any rainwater that gets through the outer wall from reaching the inner one, and in modern houses it often contains some insulation too. Having introduced us to the fabric of our houses, Handy Andy then explains what tools we're likely to need before embarking on concise step-by-step instructions for most DIY and decorating tasks, followed by an A-Z guide to common problems in which he answers, for example, three questions about electrics, three on leaks and overflows, four on locks, and so on. There are illustrations on every page to back up the words and make the explanations even clearer (occasionally even more pictures might have been useful). He takes care to tell the reader what you can do yourself and when you need to call the experts in, and gives numbers and addresses for professional associations and Web sites that will put you in touch with contractors who aren't cowboys. Finally there are checklists of things you need to look at every six months, every year and every two years. All in all, the book covers most things the beginner could want, although the real enthusiast may want to move on to the more weighty "Reader's Digest" Complete DIY Manual or The "Which?" Book of Do-it-yourself. --David PickeringRead More