{"product_id":"lou-manfredinis-house-smarts-isbn-9780345449894","title":"Lou Manfredini's House Smarts","description":"Lou Manfredini, aka Mr. Fix-It, is the trusted friend every homeowner wishes he or she had—someone who \u003ci\u003eknows\u003c\/i\u003e houses. In his fun, friendly, fully illustrated guide for both inexperienced and seasoned homeowners, he takes you through your entire house and around the yard, showing you how it all works and what to do when it doesn’t. The result: You’ll have a clear understanding of the systems that make up your house and gain the expert knowledge to proceed with any job, big or small—whether you’re hiring a contractor or doing it yourself. Discover\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e• How your house works: an anatomy lesson\u003cbr\u003e• The wonders of water—where it comes from and where it goes\u003cbr\u003e• Getting wired—the magic of electricity\u003cbr\u003e• Windows—ways to bring in the sunshine and keep out the drafts\u003cbr\u003e• The joys of being floored—good floor construction and maintenance\u003cbr\u003e• Wall power—it’s not what’s \u003ci\u003eon\u003c\/i\u003e them but what’s \u003ci\u003ein\u003c\/i\u003e them that counts\u003cbr\u003e• Decorating secrets the pros don’t like to share\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003ePlus\u003c\/i\u003e Lou Manfredini’s sixty-minute home inspection, an essential tool list, and an ABC glossary of terms: from \u003ci\u003eair duct\u003c\/i\u003e to \u003ci\u003eweather stripping\u003c\/i\u003e!\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e“IF YOU WANT TO UNDERSTAND HOW YOUR HOME WORKS, TRY THIS BOOK. . . . There are many homeowner guides available, but this one stands out because it is complete and easy to understand. The book does a good job of explaining homeowner basics, as well as what problems can be solved without an expensive expert.”\u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eLos Angeles Times\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“Lou Manfredini has found a way to take the intimidation out of your relationship with your home.”\u003cbr\u003e—MATT LAUER\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A WORTHWHILE INVESTMENT.”\u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eWisconsin State Journal\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“Lou Manfredini is truly the ‘house-whisperer.’ He shows you how to understand your home and how it works in a whole new way. A must-have for every homebody—you’ll never look at your home in the same way again.”\u003cbr\u003e—SUSIE COELHO\u003cbr\u003e   Lifestyle expert and author of \u003ci\u003eSusie Coelho’s Everyday Styling\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“A fact-filled, easy-to-understand manual for homeowners. It’s funny and [Manfredini] tells great stories. We can’t think of a better gift for new homeowners or, better yet, somebody thinking of buying a first home.”\u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eNew Orleans Times-Picayune\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“Filled with helpful illustrations. . . .This book would be a great wedding gift or even a ‘textbook’ for the college student moving into his or her first apartment.”\u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003ePittsburgh Tribune-Review\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“Renovators and home-buyers, start here . . . A terrific guide for both seasoned and new homeowners, this tome tackles your abode from the ground up.”\u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eAmerican Way\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“An entertaining guide that helps explain the many parts that make up a home.”\u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eLibrary Journal\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eLou Manfredini\u003c\/b\u003e started working in a hardware store when he was thirteen years old. He worked as a carpenter’s apprentice in college and opened his own construction company in Chicago in 1985. His media career began ten years later when he pitched the idea of a call-in show to a local radio station. WGN-AM picked up the show, and Mr. Fix-It was born. T The radio show is now nationally syndicated, and Lou is also a frequent contributor to television and print media as well. He appears regularly on the \u003ci\u003eToday Show\u003c\/i\u003e, and has a bimonthly column in \u003ci\u003eUSA Weekend\u003c\/i\u003e. He still runs his own construction company, and actively builds and renovates homes. Lou lives in Chicago with his wife and four children.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eCurtis Rist\u003c\/b\u003e is the coauthor of \u003ci\u003eThis Old House Homeowner's Manual\u003c\/i\u003e. He is a former senior writer at both \u003ci\u003ePeople\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eNew York Newsday\u003c\/i\u003e, and is currently a contributing editor for \u003ci\u003eDiscover\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eFamily Fun\u003c\/i\u003e. He lives in New York City with his wife and two sons.\u003cb\u003echapter one\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHow a House Works\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA home is more like a living, breathing organism than a pile of  lumber and concrete; here's an anatomy lesson\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI'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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eYet 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhat 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt'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 like learning to cook pasta.  If you put the spaghetti into a pot of cold water and try to boil it  from there, you end up with a big congealed mess in the pot. You do  this exactly once in your life, then never again. Instead, you learn  to put it in boiling water, and you come out with perfect pasta every  time. With houses, as with pasta, there's a natural logic and order  in the way things should be done. Taking the time to learn this, as  we're about to do in this book, will empower you to care for your  home wisely and with confidence. Before diving in, however, let's  take a quick tour of a house and focus on some basic elements.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eMeet the House\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWe tend to think of houses as we know them as something fairly  recent-dating back to the Colonial era, perhaps, or maybe all the way  back to the Renaissance. Yet the origins of four walls and a roof  actually go back much further than that. The first identifiable  houses are some fifteen thousand years old and are indeed unique.  They amounted to a cluster of homes, found in what is now Ukraine,  created out of the tusks and bones of wooly mammoths (unfortunately,  this is no longer a materials option). Things evolved quickly after  that, and you can find references to palatial houses with swinging  doors and finely polished floors worthy of a spread in Architectural  Digest going all the way back to The Iliad and The Odyssey some three  thousand years ago. Indeed, the desire to live in a well-crafted and  comfortable house is one of the things that marks us as civilized  humans-as does the frustration over not always having things in our  home work and feel just the way we want them to.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhat exactly is a house? It's heavy, that's for sure, and in order to  remain stable it needs to be connected solidly to the ground. If you  build a house flat on the ground with nothing supporting it from  underneath, all that weight will soon start shifting and sliding and  the whole structure will eventually fall down. Instead, houses sit on  top of foundations, which can range from fully excavated ones or  shallower crawl spaces to concrete slabs. What type of foundation you  have mostly depends on what part of the country you live in. If you  live in the North, where the ground freezes in the wintertime, you  need a full foundation or crawl space that extends down several feet  to what is called the frost level or the no-freeze zone. Built this  way, the foundation will be immune from all the bucking and heaving  as the ground alternately freezes and thaws-an action that could  otherwise buck and heave your home right off its foundation, like the  losing cowboy in some real estate rodeo. If you live in the  freeze-free South, your foundation is more than likely a concrete  slab laid right on top of the earth, with no major excavation  required. Either way, the foundation has to be set in what is called  undisturbed soil, which has settled to the point where it is  completely compacted. If you build it on top of a recently filled  area, the soil will inevitably settle-as will your house, and in ways  not likely to enhance its value.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNow comes the structure of the house, which is usually called the  framing. Like the skeleton in our bodies, framing gives a house  support and keeps it standing upright. When you think about it, a  house has to withstand a great deal of pressure. Not only is its  sheer weight bogging it down, but it has to hold up against the  onslaught of shifting winds and-depending on where it's located-the  weight of winter snows, the occasional hurricane, and even an  earthquake tremor or two. The framing has evolved into an intricate  design of vertical, horizontal, and diagonal supports that can hold  up pressures applied from any direction.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLet's consider a wood-frame house. The framing begins on top of the  foundation, with pieces of wood called the sill. On top of the sill,  horizontal boards called joists carry the weight of the floor above  them and also help to lock the rising walls in place. The walls  themselves are built of vertical pieces of wood called studs, which  are connected on both ends to rows of wood running around the  perimeter of the house, called the plates. Then come more floor  joists, which form the structural base of both the floors and the  ceilings of a home. If you've got a second story, this process  repeats until it's capped off with angled boards called rafters,  which rise to form the roof. If you have a solid brick or stone home,  you won't have studs, but you'll still have joists and rafters.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe joists and the rafters work in complementary ways to keep the  walls standing upright. The joists are actually compressed from the  weight they carry, which causes the fibers within them to tense-thus  pulling the walls in tightly. The weight of the roof also presses  down and out on the roof rafters, but with the opposite effect on the  walls: It tends to push them outward. Since the walls are being  pushed outward by the rafters and pulled inward by the floor joists  at the same time, the forces cancel each other out. Happily, the net  force is zero-and so the walls remain standing. Sturdy as it is,  however, this arrangement would quickly fall over if the house were  buffeted with a sideways force. To further buttress it, the sides are  covered with plywood sheathing or with pieces of lumber nailed  diagonally across the studs. Built this way, a house is far stronger  than the sum of its individual components. It can withstand any  pressure-downward, sideways, and any combination thereof.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhat comes next are the various systems that make our home life  easier and healthier. The gaps in the walls between the studs become  filled with one network of pipes that supplies water and a separate  network for draining waste. Wires bring electricity to every outlet  and light switch, and heating and cooling ducts or radiator pipes  snake their way to every room. Doors and windows provide light and  access, and insulation in the walls helps buffer changes in  temperature. The roof and the exterior siding provide a block against  wind, rain, and even sun. The goal of all these systems is to create  an indoor space that's distinct from the outdoors-one in which we,  and not nature, can control our comfort, moderate changes in the  seasons, and regulate for ourselves the arrival of night and day.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe Number-One Enemy\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSo with a structure as beautiful and strong as a house, what could  possibly cause it to deteriorate? The answer lies in a simple  molecule containing one oxygen and two hydrogen atoms-in short,  water. You can live in a home built of\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ethe most massive beams, and water will lay it to waste within a  matter of years. It can\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eseep into the tiniest cracks beneath shingles on the roof, drip  through uncaulked gaps around windows, and pool in basements, where  it forms rot-causing swirls of humidity. Short of a cataclysmic fire,  there's nothing that is more destructive to the long-term health of a  home than water.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe most obvious trouble comes from water that pours into the house  from outside. Water isn't evil; it's just adhering to the laws of  simple gravity and heading downward. If you have a house where water  drains from the roof and drips away from the house down a gentle  slope after it lands on the ground, your home will be dry. If you  have a home situated at the base of a hill or surrounded by a  driveway or walkway that pitches toward the foundation, then your  home will be wet. Once water comes in contact with wood, it turns  something hard and dry and inhospitable to life into something soft  and damp and inviting to everything with roots, rhizomes, pincers,  and teeth.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn addition to old-fashioned inundation, there's a more subtle yet no  less destructive form of water infiltration at work in many houses.  As a problem, this is sometimes harder to pinpoint because the water  originates inside the home and begins to rot it from the inside out.  To see how this could happen, let's take a step back to look at what  goes on within a home. Today's homes are sealed with insulation,  weatherstripping, and caulk to reduce heating and cooling losses.  Unfortunately, this also reduces the ability of moisture to escape  from a house. Take a shower in the morning, boil a pot of water, open  up the dishwasher and release a cloud of steam-all of these  activities release moisture into the home. That may not sound so  serious, but combine this with a basic fact of physics-that warm air  holds far more moisture than cold air-and you'll begin to recognize  what sort of problem can emerge.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn a heated house, warm, excessively moist air gradually penetrates  into the walls and ceilings, where it comes in contact with colder  surfaces that are chilled by outside air. Where these two surfaces  meet, the air suddenly dumps its load of moisture in a process that  we all know is called condensation. But what not all of us know is  that the moisture ends up lingering right inside the walls. I've  ripped apart the walls in some relatively new houses during the  course of renovations and found that the structure has been  completely rotted as a result of this process. Again, there was no  obvious leak that needed to be patched; it was simply damage  resulting from chronic condensation. I'll go into greater detail  about the causes and remedies for this-which include installing  ventilation fans and constructing walls in ways that block the water  vapor from penetrating in the first place-in coming chapters.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe Air We Breathe\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWe take many things for granted in our homes-right down to the air  that we breathe. Where does it come from? And how can we be sure that  it is pure?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNothing is as healthy as a drafty house. The air inside it is  exchanged every few minutes, and it is always fresh. Any  impurities-from things such as formaldehyde emanating from glues in  carpeting and in kitchen cabinets to excess moisture that can lead to  mold and mildew-simply vent away with the breeze. Most of us,  however, have long ago opted against drafty houses. Beginning with  the oil crisis in the 1970s and continuing with the rise in home  heating prices, it has become a necessity to add insulation and  weatherstripping to contain that expensive heated or cooled air. The  more expensive fuel becomes, the more people seal their homes up. --  Mark Righter Assistant Production Manager North Market Street Graphics Lancaster, PAIllustrated by Harry Trumbore","brand":"Ballantine Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46303469306085,"sku":"NP9780345449894","price":21.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780345449894.jpg?v=1767731840","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/lou-manfredinis-house-smarts-isbn-9780345449894","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}