Do-It-Yourself, Home Repair, DIY, maintenance 

This guide is tailor-made for those who enjoy working with tools and want to brighten up their home. Whether you're thinking about paving your patio, covering a counter with laminate, painting or papering a wall, or simply having the fun and satisfaction of building something useful and beautiful, this book will fulfil a dual purpose. It explains how to do the job and shows what tools and materials are required. It is divided into eight major sections. The first two, "Tools" and "Hardware", consist of colour photographs of over a thousand tools and articles of hardware, with explanations of their use. Included are all the standard hammers and saws, pliers and screwdrivers and nails and hinges, but there are also specialized and unusual tools, such as a textured paint roller, an around-the-corner bit for drilling holes in tight corners, a screw pitch gauge, and a variety of router templates. Each of the six sections that follow is devoted to the skills needed to use these tools and articles of hardware to work with a particular type of material or group of materials. Colour photographs show either the raw materials or the effects that can be created by using them, including woods, metals, mouldings, wood finishes, and concrete blocks, stones, pavers, ceramics and vinyl tiles, plastic laminates, fibreglass, glass and glass blocks, paints and wall coverings, and flooring of all kinds. Each set of pictures is followed by full step-by-step instructions on working with the materials, giving all the information a beginner needs, and including advanced techniques as well. In the tradition of other Reader's Digest do-it-yourself books, these instructions are brought to life with hundreds of full-colour drawings that include all the necessary details. This is not a project book providing blueprints for specific jobs, rather it teaches how to work with a variety of tools and materials, offering the skills and confidence to create ones own projects. Although this guide is not intended as a manual for large construction jobs (it has no information on electrical work, plumbing, or house-building), the skills it teaches can be put to use, helping the reader to save money by doing much of the work in even the largest of projects, leaving only the heavy-duty and highly technical work to the professionals. Rounding off the book are sections on organizing a safe workshop, working safely with tools, planning a project (including standard measurements for furniture and open spaces around the home), understanding basic electrics and how to convert figures from one system of dimensions into another. And, in case the reader wants to tackle a larger project, there's also help on selecting and working with a contractor. - from Amzon