Around the House : Reflections on Life Under a Roof

"Owen is 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 identifies the most difficult home-improvement chore in the world: "the last ten percent of anything you start." Around the House is a collection of new essays plus Owen's finest pieces from Home magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, and The New Yorker. It's the home-improvement guide for anyone who knows that the truly impor-tant work around any house isn't done with hammer and nails.