Lou Manfredini's House Smarts

chapter one How a House Works A home is more like a living, breathing organism than a pile of lumber and concrete; here's an anatomy lesson I'll admit it-to call myself an expert on matters of the home is a little presumptuous. When I think of experts, I imagine people like Stephen Hawking rather than some guy named Lou. Yet for all of my professional life, I have indeed been involved with home maintenance and renovation. And for most of this time, what I have focused on are the mistakes that homeowners make. When I began working at a hardware store in high school, my job was to answer people's questions-and inevitably these concerned problems that they had themselves created: Why was the new faucet that they just installed dripping? Why was the paint that they just spread on the exterior of their house now peeling? And why were the walls in their newly renovated bathroom already beginning to turn gray with mold and mildew? Everyone seemed to have drafty windows, screen doors that wouldn't shut right, and cracks in their living room walls. I always swore that if I ever got the chance to build a house, I would build it in such a way that it didn't have any of these problems. I got my wish some years later during college-not an entire house, perhaps, but at least a significant portion of it. Looking for a summer occupation, a friend and I started our own company-gloriously named Home Care Services-and promptly found work doing odd jobs for his mother, who worked as a real estate broker. We fixed mailbox posts, planed the occasional closet door, and one day were called to look at a peeling deck on the back of a house new to the market. "Do whatever you can to make it look better," my friend's mother told us, and we set to work. Using my hardware store skills, I noticed right away that the problems seemed to extend far beyond the crackled finish. For one thing, the wood beam connecting the deck to the house appeared to be thoroughly rotted. Crawling around some more, I noticed that this connecting board as well as the structure of the deck itself were made from ordinary pine (the kind that rots) as opposed to pressure-treated wood (the kind that does not). Obviously, the deck had been built by some hapless weekend carpenter who had taken a great set of plans from a do-it-yourself manual. While that was okay, he must have skipped a few pages regarding wood selection. He'd also missed the part about pitch: The whole deck angled not away from the house, as it should have to drain rainwater, but directly toward it. After a few years of having rainwater slosh against them, both the siding of the house and the structure beneath it were beginning to decay. In short, the entire deck was junk, and worse, it was literally ruining the house. What was to have been about a $75 deck staining job suddenly turned into a $1,500 emergency repair project-and the beginning of a crusade on my part to help people understand how to care for and maintain their homes. What causes mistakes such as this? Mostly ignorance. If things are done incorrectly-whether it's because people are trying to save money or because they really just don't know any better-they can create so many additional problems. That deck was a good example. At a quick glance, it looked okay. But there were two key flaws that anyone should have easily understood-the deck had the wrong pitch, and it was made with the wrong wood. Because of that, all those hours of work and all the money that had gone into it were wasted. Ironically, the repairs ended up costing far more than it would have cost to build the deck correctly the first time. It's not as if there are a million concepts to learn regarding a home. There are actually only a few key principles to keep in mind, which then have many easy-to-follow variations. In this sense, learning to maintain your home is a lot likeManfredini, Lou is the author of 'Lou Manfredini's House Smarts', published 2004 under ISBN 9780345449894 and ISBN 0345449894.