100 Things Every Homeowner Must Know

Family Handyman has been answering homeowner questions since the early 1950s, and this is the magazine's short-answer collection: one hundred things worth knowing before you need to know them. Where the water shutoff is. Why the basement smells damp in July. What to do the first hour the power goes out. How to keep mice from finding the gap they always find. Each item runs a page or two, with the photographs the magazine is known for.

It earns its place on this shelf because of what it does to a reader's sense of the house. Most household emergencies are not emergencies; they are ordinary problems that nobody explained. A homeowner who has read this book knows which noises mean something, which repairs are a ten-minute job, and which ones are worth a professional. That is the same competence our own guides are built to produce, arriving here in a form you can read on a Sunday afternoon.

Pair it with our hand tools buying guide if you are still assembling the drawer, and with Tools and Shelter for the fuller treatment of anything it covers in a page.