Help for the fixer upper.(Collins Period House)(Book review)

British how-to books assume a profound knowledge of everything they teach, which can be either intimidating or challenging depending on your abilities. Although the outside cover of Collins Period House claims it will tell you "how to repair, restore & care for your home," you may end up tearing the house down and trying again after discovering what has to be done. On the other hand, this is the perfect book for that too since it starts each repair with a search for the cause of the symptom. The authors are really house doctors, to whom a house is a living thing, liable to ailments caused by weather, insects, funguses, and even changes in the level of the surrounding land. This anthropomorphic approach to the old house blunts the realities of rotting wood and crumbling mortar.

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Take damp, for example, which is something of an obsession with the British, and rightly so. There are three kinds of damp: rising damp, penetrating damp, and condensation, "and each can be mistaken for the others."

In the old days, we are told, damp tended to evaporate in the relatively porous building materials then used. When such houses are subjected to well-meaning upgrades, damp flourishes. Walls are sealed with impervious paints, modern mortar contains more cement than it used to, and a damp proof layer insulates the floors. "This all tends to trap moisture within the fabric of the building, and the damp is driven further up the walls. Rising damp usually contains salts that have been carried up from lower levels and, being highly absorbent, the salts exacerbate the problem."

A gloomy chapter entitled "Rot and infestation" details the dire effects of damp on wood, causing both wet rot and dry rot. There are very realistic renderings of the five principal woodboring bugs and a cartoon of a nineteenth-century gent, top hat flying, crashing through a rotten floor into the floor below. The main lesson is that without constant water the funguses that cause both rots die. Vivid and gruesome descriptions and pictures of the effects of both maladies are followed by the cure, which amounts to when in doubt chop it out.

In keeping with the authors' clinical approach the chapter on "Weatherboarding" (clapboarding) starts with a log and illustrates how the three types of clapboards are cut, shaped, repaired, and nailed. As elsewhere, there are first-class colored drawings of how to do all of these ...