Do-It-Yourself: Spring forward into home repair via the Web

All through the winter, you promised yourself to fix that leaky toilet or refinish the hardwood floors. Now that spring is near, the excuses for not getting these home improvement projects done have finally run out. Time to get to work. Where do you turn for information?

The Internet is a vast compendium of do-it-yourself plans and advice for the handyperson about the house. Usually, a quick search with your favorite search engine (Yahoo, Google, etc.) will bring up tons of home improvement links. Oftentimes, though, many of these links are trying to sell you equipment, supplies or plans.

Several really good sites, though, offer helpful advice without the hard sales pitch. Jerry, the Natural Handyman http://www.naturalhandyman.com/iip/iip.shtm, gives solid advice and information without pushing any particular products down your throat. Jerry also publishes a free email newsletter twice a month, full of tips and answers to questions he's been asked.

Many "weekend warriors" enjoy finding out about home improvement from watching their favorite TV shows. One of the more popular of these, the PBS program "Hometime," uses its Web page http://www.hometime.com/ to give more detailed plans and information about their televised projects. "This Old House," another venerable home improvement show, publishes details about all its projects and general home renovation articles on its Web site at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/thisoldhouse/. A cable channel devoted to the do-it-yourselfer, DIY http://www.diynet.com/, has a large home-improvement section on its Web page, with a project index and links for all its shows.

A home-improvement encyclopedia http://www.bhg.com/bhg/category.jhtml?catref=cat10002, courtesy of Better Homes & Gardens, includes online calculators to help estimate how much material is needed for different projects around the house. And the home repair guide at About.com http://homerepair.about.com/c/ht/How_index.htm has built a list of simple "how to" projects, and links to tons of other home-improvement sites.

Armed with the right knowledge from the Web, this spring you can tackle any job you want around the house!

—Stewart Brower and Laura Taddeo, University Libraries