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Home improvement guides
Practical, reviewed advice for planning repairs and projects, choosing the right pro and knowing what to ask before you hire.
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497 guides
- Guide
Siding guide
Siding is the part of the house everyone judges by appearance and the building judges by water management. Cladding is not a waterproof skin and was never meant to be one: it is the first layer of a system that expects…
11 min readSeptember 14, 2026 - Guide
Stucco guide
Stucco is an exterior plaster, applied in layers over masonry or over lath, and it has been used on American houses from the earliest colonial buildings through the Spanish Colonial Revival and Mission styles of the…
10 min readSeptember 14, 2026 - Guide
Exterior Cladding guide
Cladding is the entire outside face of a wall, and re-cladding is the one project that opens every square foot of it at once. That is what makes it worth doing carefully.
11 min readSeptember 21, 2026 - Guide
Exterior Trim guide
Exterior trim is the boards that frame everything: window and door casings, sills, corner boards, the frieze under the eave, fascia at the roof edge, rake boards on a gable and the brackets and mouldings that give an…
11 min readSeptember 21, 2026 - Guide
Chimney Repair guide
A chimney is the one part of an American house that is asked to stand in the weather on all four sides, carry hot gases out of the building and stay watertight where it passes through the roof.
10 min readSeptember 14, 2026 - Guide
Chimney Cleaning guide
Sweeping a chimney means getting the residue of burned wood back out of the flue, and in an American house it is usually bundled with the annual look at the venting system that catches a blockage, a disconnection or a…
11 min readSeptember 21, 2026 - Guide
Masonry guide
Masonry covers the brick, block and stone on an American house and everything that holds it together: veneer walls, foundation and garden walls, piers and columns, steps and stoops, patios and paving, chimneys,…
9 min readSeptember 14, 2026 - Guide
Brick Repair guide
Brick repair is the narrower trade inside masonry: replacing individual units that have failed, rebuilding small areas, and above all repointing, which means cutting out mortar that has deteriorated and refilling the…
10 min readSeptember 14, 2026 - Guide
Tuckpointing guide
Tuckpointing is what most American homeowners and most contractors call the renewal of mortar joints in a brick or stone wall.
12 min readSeptember 21, 2026 - Guide
Exterior Caulking guide
Exterior caulking is the small, unglamorous work of closing the joints a house cannot avoid having: the gap where a window frame meets siding, the seam where two materials change at a corner, the ring around a hose bib…
11 min readSeptember 21, 2026 - Guide
Exterior Waterproofing guide
Above ground, exterior waterproofing means keeping rain out of walls, and in the United States it is sold two very different ways.
11 min readSeptember 21, 2026 - Guide
HVAC Contractors guide
HVAC covers everything that heats, cools and ventilates a US home: gas and electric furnaces, central air conditioners, air-source heat pumps and ductless mini-splits, boilers, ductwork and the thermostat that ties them…
12 min readSeptember 14, 2026
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