Product Description

"In a world of extreme makeovers, this book is a thoughtful, adventure-filled, witty look at what the space we live in says about us, the pleasures of home renovation projects great and small, and how home renovation can change our lives. Few things define us as powerfully as the place where we live. The size and location of a house may reveal basic facts about our financial or social status, but it is the personal touches -- a paint color or a homemade desk -- that reflect our aspirations, our tastes, our secret desires. In Sheetrock & Shellac, David Owen recounts his renovation and home construction projects in small-town Connecticut -- from catching the home improvement bug while watching workmen replacing a leaky roof to his first tentative foray into DIY (successfully building an enclosure for a bathroom radiator that had ""turned into a sort of low-tech factory for converting splattered urine into odor and dust""). As his skill grows, so does his confidence: replacing a broken light switch turns into wiring an entire room, making bookcases is followed by building an office. Some of the more overly imaginative projects -- for instance, an ambition to install sinks and hot and cold faucets in all the rooms of the house -- never come to fruition but are amusingly recounted for other intrepid home designers. Owen's two-hundred-year-old farmhouse provides numerous occasions for home improvement projects, and layers (literally) of fascination. Owen quickly learns the hard way when to tackle a project himself and when to turn for help. But soon he's so comfortable with the undertaking that he decides to take the big leap from renovation to building a completely new home from the ground up. In this case, Owen decides to build a weekend cabin a mere six miles away from his home. From a discourse on kitchen countertop materials to the complete history of concrete, to a near-disastrous mishap with a tree, a newly constructed roof, and an overzealous chainsaw, Owen's journey through home designing and building proves both enthrallingly educating and hilariously detailed. New Yorker writer Owen's engaging narrative, filled with a wealth of practical information, hands-on tips, and canny insights, explores the ways in which the human processes of construction and renovation leave all the parties transformed. More than a simple how-to, Sheetrock & Shellac is a why-to, a wellspring of savvy advice and encouragement for anyone who has ever contemplated changing their surroundings and changing their life. "

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #95712 in eBooks
• Published on: 2007-03-02
• Released on: 2007-03-02
• Format: Kindle Book
• Number of items: 1

From Publishers Weekly
Owen, a New Yorker staff writer, takes the middle road here, offering neither a brass-tacks guide to renovation nor an acute introspective account of the endless remodeling of his home. Instead, he ping-pongs between describing the incomplete minutiae of many projects in his rambling 200-year-old Connecticut house, walking staccato-step through the building of a cabin some 10 miles away and diving into the history of such things as kitchen surfaces, window glazes and shellac. He presumes readers have followed his various projects as he's written about them over the years. Those who haven't can indeed still follow, though they might feel they are eavesdropping on someone else's conversation. Owen writes that home improvement is "an ongoing relationship between a dwelling and its dwellers, and when it's done right it doesn't end." When he finishes something he sees only what he did wrong, so prefers to "leave a few ends dangling," which provides only limited insight into the nature of human domesticity or creativity. Owen will not connect with the many home renovators who, no matter how pleasurable the process nor satisfying the outcome, want to finish something they started. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Prolific author and New Yorker staff writer Owen approaches the age-old "how do I do it myself" question uniquely. Instead of step-by-step directions for, say, cutting down a tree or erecting wallboard, he first traces his beginnings as a DIYer--in his case, creating a second bedroom out of a 750-square-foot Manhattan apartment--which leads to his Connecticut home ownership, and the soon-to-be-fulfilled yen to build a ground-up cabin. So, this home-improvement odyssey (or, as one of his friends notes, "If I'd known I could afford to spend this much on a house, I'd have bought a nice one to begin with") tackles each room; the kitchen, for instance, includes detailed word sketches of the preparation process as well as riffs on the more than $15,000 Aga cookers and countertop alternatives. (Formica, by the way, is the most popular material.) Other meanderings are just as riveting: his musings on the beauties of wire screening lead him to the efficacies of "adhesive pest management" from the Tanglefoot Company and, eventually, to borate solutions that wipe out wood-boring beetles naturally. Charming and edifying, regardless of the reader's DIY proficiencies. Barbara Jacobs
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The best-selling poet in America in the nineteen-thirties was also a newspaper columnist, a small-time actor, and a successful designer of Hawaii-themed dinnerware. His name was Don Blanding. He wore an oversized fedora and had a Clark Gable mustache, and he described himself as an "artist by nature, actor by instinct, poet by accident, vagabond by choice." He was born in Kingfisher, Oklahoma Territory, in 1894. In 1912, he saved the life of a six-year-old neighbor, Billie Cassin, who grew up to be the actress Joan Crawford. In 1915, he briefly shared an apartment in Chicago with the novelist and playwright Sherwood Anderson. For a few years in the nineteen-forties, he was married to the crayon heiress Dorothy Binney. He was famous for having no fixed address, but he kept turning up in certain favorite warm-weather locales, mainly in Florida, Hawaii, and California. He died in 1957, at the age of sixty-two. In 1986, the musician Jimmy Buffett borrowed the title of one of his poetry collections, Floridays, for a song (which he dedicated partly to Blanding) and an album.

I first heard about Blanding from a friend, who had bought one of his books at a flea market and thought that I would get a kick out of it. The book is called Vagabond's House. It was first published in 1928, was reprinted more than fifty times during the next couple of decades, and is still in print today, though only barely. I bought my own copy from a used-book dealer; the flyleaf is inscribed "Aloha Don Blanding." The book is -- well, the book is virtually unreadable. And the illustrations, which are also by Blanding, are on the creepy side, full of statuesque naked ladies and dated-looking silhouettes. But the title poem is kind of captivating:

When I have a house...as I sometime may...

I'll suit my fancy in every way.

I'll fill it with things that have caught my eye

In drifting from Iceland to Molokai.

It won't be correct or to period style

But...oh, I've thought for a long, long while

Of all the corners and all the nooks,

Of all the bookshelves and all the books,

The great big table, the deep soft chairs

And the Chinese rug at the foot of the stairs,

(it's an old, old rug from far Chow Wan

that a Chinese princess once walked on).

My house will stand on the side of a hill

By a slow broad river, deep and still,

With a tall lone pine on guard nearby

Where the birds can sing and the storm winds cry.

A flagstone walk with lazy curves

Will lead to the door where a Pan's head serves

As a knocker there like a vibrant drum

To let me know that a friend has come,

And the door will squeak as I swing it wide

To welcome you to the cheer inside.

And there are a couple hundred more lines, all written in the same merrily sprung anapestic blandometer. I've never drifted from Iceland to Molokai, and I don't own a Chinese rug or a Pan's head door knocker (although I now sporadically search for both on eBay), and some of Blanding's decorating touches are mildly disturbing -- "An impressionistic smear called 'Sin,'/ a nude on a striped zebra skin," "a nook / For a savage idol that I took / from a ruined temple in Peru, / A demon-chaser named Mang-Chu" -- but the impulse that drove his fantasy must be close to universal. The theme of Blanding's poem is the same happy daydreaming that leads to the construction of tree houses, backyard forts, ice-fishing shacks, cottages at the beach, and three-bedroom raised ranches in suburban New Jersey. The Vagabond's reverie is a reverie of shelter.

Don Blanding is unrelated to Jim Blandings, the fictional protagonist of Eric Hodgins's 1946 novel, Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (which was made into a movie, starring Cary Grant and Myrna Loy, in 1948, and was remade, as The Money Pit, in 1986), but Blanding and Blandings share a belief in salvation by home improvement -- and so do I. Anyone who has spent a happy hour wandering the aisles of the Home Depot, or has looked covetously at a neighbor's brand-new pressure-treated garbage-can enclosure, or has used two hooks to hang a picture on a freshly painted living-room wall and then stepped back to admire the completed project from various distances and angles, understands how a drifter like Blanding could take comfort in the idea of a fixed anchorage, and why a sensible urbanite like Blandings might yearn to upend his life by buying a decrepit country place on the verge of collapsing into its cellar. All shelters, even real ones, have fanciful dimensions as well as structural ones. All houses are also houses of the mind.

There's a second poem about the Vagabond's House in Vagabond's House, just seventeen pages after the first one. It begins:

I wrote of a house of dreams one day,

My "Vagabond's House." I told of the way

That the rugs were laid across the floor,

I told of the walls and the paneled door,...

The jars of spices along a shelf,

I told of the things I chose myself

To grace my house...those priceless things

That an hour of idle dreaming brings.

So vividly real it sometimes seemed

That I quite forgot that I only dreamed;

...So I wrote as though the house were real.

The book went forth and made appeal

To some far person in some far land.

I know, for a letter came to hand....

"Dear Friend," it said. "I don't know you,

But I am a dreamer and a vagabond, too,

And the house you built of fragile stuff

Is the same as mine. If we dream enough,

If we strive and work, I truly feel

That we can make our houses real.

And if mine comes true and I build some day

A house of wood and stone or clay

In a summer land by a drowsy sea

I hope you will come and visit me

For the door will open to rooms beyond

For poet and artist and vagabond.

Forced rhymes aside, I feel the same way (except for the last bit, about dropping by for visits). Home improvement is a powerful creative act, maybe the most ambitious creative act that all but the true artists among us will ever undertake. Remodeling a room, building an addition, planting a garden, even installing a bathroom sink are all forms of three-dimensional self-expression. Over time, houses evolve into structural extensions of the people who live inside them: our shelters become projections of our selves. I still have an almost physical memory of the houses of all my best friends when I was growing up. Each of those houses was a unique micro-environment, with its own topography, smell, ambience, quality of light, and temperature of parental authority, and each had features that came to seem indivisible from the personalities of its inhabitants. My memories of my grandmothers, who died more than fifteen years ago, are partly memories of their houses, which I visited often when I was little and which seemed to me, and still seem to me, as much a part of them as their potent perfume and their soft, fascinating skin. My memories of my own childhood are scenes in which the scenery is often a room. A nautilus is a living creature, not a shell, but when we think of the creature what we picture is the shell.

My direct adult relationship with home improvement began a week after I got married, in 1978, when I was twenty-three and my wife, whose name is Ann Hodgman, was not quite twenty-two. We had just graduated from college. On the Saturday of Labor Day weekend, we loaded our belongings into a small Ryder truck in Rochester, New York, said good-bye to Ann's parents and their dog, and drove to New York City, where we had rented the unfurnished one-bedroom apartment in which we would begin our married lives. I took the wrong expressway exit in Manhattan, and we nervously drove, for what seemed like several hours, down an avenue that neither of us had seen before. At some point earlier in the day, a short circuit had developed in the truck's steering column, and periodically it caused the horn to blare unexpectedly, sometimes for many seconds. The only way to stop the horn, I had discovered, was to pound the center of the steering wheel with my fist. At the corner of 120th Street, while we were waiting at a traffic light, the horn suddenly started, and when the people in the crosswalk looked up to see what the problem was they saw me, in the cab of our Ryder truck, face red with aggravation, pounding the center of the steering wheel with my fist.

Somehow, we got where we were going. Two friends from college helped us move in. The move didn't take very long. The friends went home. The sun went down. The power in our apartment hadn't been turned on yet, and we learned from the building's superintendent that no one from Con Ed would be able to turn it on until Tuesday, after the holiday, three days from now. The phone didn't work, either. We couldn't afford to go out. There was hardly anywhere to sit, because we didn't own a couch yet. Our apartment that night seemed as big and blank and dark as the formless future. The empty rooms were no longer quite empty, since we had heaped our boxes on the floors, but the apartment was not in any sense inhabited.

We lived in that apartment for seven years, and, little by little, we turned it into our home, initially just by filling it with possessions: our shell grew around us, chamber by chamber. We bought a couch, then some bookcases, then some other things, then a cheap metal table to hold the sole piece of office equipment that we owned in those days: a used IBM Selectric typewriter, which I had bought in college. Ann's parents gave us some old curtains. We hung pictures on the walls. After a few months, I could no longer quite recall what the apartment had looked like when it was truly empty -- could no longer re-experience the sense of portentous excitement and anxiety I had felt when the rental agent first unlocked the door and walked Ann and me through the starkly unlived-in rooms. Week by week, my brain overwrote the old memory files. The shiny expanse of parquet fl...

Customer Reviews

Should be titled: Interesting and Beautifully Written
I have been a DIYer for 25 years and found nearly every page of Owen's book engaging. Too, I learned a tremendous amount, a bonus I frankly wasn't expecting. Owen is a gifted writer who understands the poetry of things, and I highly recommend this book to anyone who loves home improvement or who wants to understand how the structures we live in work.

Smart and funny building and home repair
While The Walls Around Us: The Thinking Person's Guide to How a House Works is a better book (sequels are so hard) Sheetrock is another funny, idiosyncratic approach to home-owning, designing a house, and getting a bulldozer stuck in the mud. Owen, like me and many people, has more interest than experience in working on his house and his random walk through how things are made is entertaining. Sheetrock lacks the zing of his initial jump from NYC apartment to small town historic home, but I'll look forward to installment three of his home-learning saga.

Owen Makes You Want to Do It
Geesh, by the time I was midway through this I was ready to renovate my bathroom on my own until I came to my senses. Still, this is an engaging, informative, and witty book full of exquisite writing. I loved it.