It doesn’t matter where you live, or if it's an older house or one that was recently built. Once you've spent some time in your home, you’ll probably come up with ideas for ways to improve it. It could be anything, from simple repairs, to redoing a room, building a deck, or even putting an addition on the house. Even with a good idea, many people still hesitate to get started on a project due to a lack of knowledge and experience, while others who jump right in may find that they're in over their heads. That's the reason for Building Tips For The Homeowner, where I share what I've learned over the years to help you complete your project with professional results.

             I’ve been working on homes for over thirty years now, and looking back, I'd guess it all started one summer that I worked on the family cabin. Originally, our cabin had been a streetcar in St. Paul, Minnesota. Then after being retired, it was hauled eighty miles and set up next to a lake in western Wisconsin. Over the years a porch was added, and little by little, some of the windows were covered over. One problem with the cabin was that the original walls of the streetcar were in bad shape, so on this project we worked our way around the perimeter, tearing out the old walls and replacing them with new ones framed up with 2x4s. After that was finished, I started helping my brothers and sisters on their houses. Then I started working for friends, and then friends of friends, until it became a regular job. Even today, on most of my jobs I still work alongside the homeowner. This gives me a different perspective than others in my field. It also means that most of the time I have to figure out a way to do a job by myself or with the help of one other person, pretty much the same as most homeowners.

            I learned as I went along, so I made a lot of mistakes before I figured out how to do certain jobs. This has always bothered me, and a few years ago I began to consider how much it would have helped if I'd known some of these things back when I first started, so I decided to write this book. There was never a master plan on what was going to be included in it, since that would partly be determined by the different jobs that came up at the time. The main idea was just to put in anything that I thought would be of benefit to someone -- basically to write the book that I wish I’d read years ago.

These days, there's information available on how to do almost anything. If you want to build a wall, plumb a sink, trim a door, etc., it's either in a book or you can find it on the internet. While this will give you the basic idea, it won't teach you the things that are learned from actually doing it. That's where this book is a little different. Instead of quickly going over something, I'm going to concentrate more on how to do a job step by step, and as you do it, what you're looking for, and how to deal with some of the common problems that you'll run into. Since I'm trying to pack a lot of information into the book, I'll try to keep it short and to the point, and to explain it in a manner that's easy to understand.

 

                                                                                                                                  Neil Tschida