Bigger and better than ever
The two previous editions of the book known by home improvement retailers as “Big Red” sold nearly 600,000 copies. This new edition features a larger portrait format for better visual clarity, and incorporates a new page layout style. But all the features that made the original America’s best-selling “bible” of home repair are still present here—thousands of color photographs and detailed step-by-step directions.
The third edition also includes more than 30 projects not found in the original edition, as well as more than 300 new photos.
Got a problem with grout? Open
The Complete Photo Guide to Home Repair (to page 98) and watch your tiling worries dissolve before the simple beauty of photography. Black & Decker has anticipated your every question and problem with interior, exterior, and home systems repairs, and detailed the solutions in just over 500 pages. In no other human endeavor is a visual guide so important as home repair (well, maybe brain surgery), so this is a crucial aid to the handyperson. Easy-to-find sections on floors, insulation, roofing, chimneys, water heaters, wall switches, air conditioning, and much more are well-designed, brilliantly illustrated, and carefully outlined with step-by-step instructions from masters. The photos in particular are extremely valuable, offering many different views (sometimes even exploded) of the operation in question, and always showing just enough to communicate without overwhelming the reader with too much detail. These alone would be worth the price of the book, but the written explanations and instructions are also very helpful, offering tools, materials lists, and hints that wouldn't occur to the amateur. The book finishes with a maintenance schedule to help you keep repairs from becoming serious, and the end papers have conversion charts and tables that you'll use time and again. If you can't have Norm the master carpenter over to help you fix your old house,
The Complete Photo Guide to Home Repair is the next best thing.
--Rob Lightner
