Around the House: Reflections on Life Under the Roof - Hardcover

Featuring the author's best articles from Home magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, and elsewhere, a collection of funny, informative essays treats a variety of home-improvement challenges and chores. 25,000 first printing.

s 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