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Strategies & Market Trends : The Residential Real Estate Crash Index -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: energyplay who wrote (175219)	1/6/2009 1:28:33 PM
From: GraceZ	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 306849

There are free TV programs, usually on basic cable and/or PBS, that show many home maintenence and improvements I've learned a lot watching HGTV, even some things my husband doesn't know after spending the last 35 years doing commercial construction. Of course, he can barely stand to watch those shows because they do a lot of things very differently than he would do it (and HIS way is always the best). If there is one thing you learn it is that best practices vary a lot by locale, especially when you are talking about residential. The biggest obstacle people face is mental, their own reluctance in even trying to learn how to use power tools or how to do simple stuff. I was lucky in that my father made us learn to use power tools from an early age, but no one is born knowing how to do any of that stuff and it's never too late to learn. Women suffer from this reluctance to learn how to do stuff around the house more than men who are expected to know how to fix stuff therefore even if they don't know what they are doing they give it a shot. Women make themselves hostage to various home improvement contractors which may or may not be skilled or even honest. There is this false idea that you need physical strength to do most stuff around the house but women can do great things with just a little leverage or the right power tool. Or, they could ask thier friends for help, assuming they have at least some friends who work for a living. I have a good friend who is really good at various nasty jobs that need to be done around the house but he is totally baffled by trying to fix anything on his computer. We trade off all the time because I actually enjoy fixing stupid problems on a computer. I'd gladly trade my 10 hours tracking down some dumb computer problem on his laptop to have him spend an hour or two up on a ladder cleaning out and reattaching a gutter. It beats Hell out of me trying to get my husband to do these things on his day off.