Handygirl's Special: Training for home ownership

Hi,
I am an aspiring toolgirl who is hoping to get some advice. I am considering purchasing a house deemed a "handyman's special" and I was wondering if you could recommend places where one could get a basic grounding for home repair and reno. I don't have aspirations of becoming an electrician or doing all the work myself but I would like to know enough not to feel like a complete knucklehead with power tools and to save myself from complete bankruptcy. Thank you for any help you can lead me to or send my way!!!
Sincerely,
Ginny Chau

Dear Ginny,
Thanks for your letter. I've highlighted words with the potential to give your life the qualities of purgatory. Let's go through them one by one.

Advice

Everyone will offer it, especially relatives. Never trust advice unless the speaker will personally bail you out with cash when things get ugly. (The only exception to this is when the advice-giver owns a pickup truck. If their advice is wrong, you acquire the right to use their pickup truck any time you need it. Get that in writing.)

Handyman's Special

When realtors abandon flowery language and describe a house bluntly as a "handyman's special", it's their way of saying, "You'd be nuts to take this baby on, but dang it's inexpensive." If you're a woman with imagination, you'll be able to see past obvious defects to the glowing potential underneath, but be careful; this ability can lead to marriage.

The handyman's special comes in three flavours:

• Disgusting - The structure is sound but every surface has been decorated with appalling taste and no other buyer will touch it. This is a gold mine. After a bit of demolition you can impose your own taste on the home and no one will ever guess it once looked like an Australian bordello.
• Rotten - Stuff falls off when you lean on it, but the framing and structure is okay. It hasn't been freshly painted since, well, since paint was invented.
• Hopeless - The pong of rot assails your nostrils from a block away. Children call it "Old Lady Anderson's Freakhouse". Teenagers schedule assignations in the basement, which they access via a back door that's been busted since the Sixties. Neglect, leaks, stray cants and dry rot have compromised so much of the deep structure (beams, walls, windows, framing) that marketing this property as 'inexpensive' is a thigh-slapper.

Grounding

Home repair is different from renovation. Home repair has a fairly tight range of irritation (the part doesn't fit, the part was discontinued, the part is from hell) whereas renovation has an infinite scope of breath-sucking dilemmas through which only faith and luck will sustain you. For example, I once had to renovate a water-damaged closet wall. The closet had been sodden for so long that the inside walls were growing mushrooms. Real, actual mushrooms.

For basic home repair, nothing beats a shelf full of good manuals (Black and Decker, Ortho, Stanley or Home Depot's repair series). You really can figure out almost anything as long as a book is lying open beside you saying, "this is how you do it". When your repair departs from what's happening in the book, grin wryly. It's starting to get good.

For renovations of cosmetic status (tiles, trim, flooring, paint, etc.) sign up for a spate of seminars at the local hardware store or home center. The Home Depot, for example, offers free 2-hour workshops entitled Do-It-Herself (gardening, painting and power tools for women).

Work

Construction work can stress a relationship. Determine your mate's tolerance for dust, noise and mayhem by camping beside a 6-lane highway for at least a week.

Knucklehead

Synonym for bonehead.

Bankruptcy

Avoid this embarrassment by spurning Rotten- and Hopeless-ranked handyman's specials, but be cautiously optimistic about a Disgusting-level home. CRITICAL TIP: Pay a reputable contractor to inspect the house so you'll know how bad it really is.

Help

You'll need more than you can possibly imagine. Prey on single friends with lacklustre social lives. Set up a tab at the local pizza joint. Never rely on a spouse's participation unless you've got a marriage counsellor on retainer. Remember, you can't change a man but you can always change a furnace filter.