How to Maintain Your Home - 201 Great Home Maintenance Tips and Ideas

Home maintenance isn't restricted to repairs. In fact, certain tasks--when performed regularly--may actually prevent things from breaking in the first place. But when things do go wrong (and it's inevitable that they do), there are things that you can try before you grab the phone to call for pro.

Maintaining your home should be fun and easy. This book helps you make it so with the best home maintenance tricks and must-know do it yourself tips

The book covers the following areas:

* Flooring and Stairs

* Furniture Care and Refinishing

* Maintaining and Repairing Windows

* Maintaining and Repairing Screens

* Maintaining and Repairing Doors

* Soundproofing

* Home Lighting and Electricity

* Plumbing

* Pest Control

Here's just a small sample of the tips included:

A coat of wax prevents rusting on chrome kitchen chairs.

Paper stuck to a polished table can be lifted after saturating the paper with cooking oil.

Decals will easily lift off painted furniture if you sponge with vinegar.

To tighten wobbly wicker furniture, wash it outdoors with hot soapy water, rinse it with a hose, and let it air dry. The wood and cane will shrink and tighten.

Saggy wicker or cane seats can be similarly tightened by sponging them with hot water.

Sometimes a warped table leaf or other board can be straightened by exposure to wet grass and hot summer sun. For this treatment, water a grassy area thoroughly and set the board, concave side down, on the wet grass. As the dry side of the board absorbs moisture from the grass, the moist (convex) side is dried out by the sun and the board unwarps. This process takes no longer han a day.

You can usually rub cigarette burns out of wooden furniture with very fine sandpaper or steel wool. Then, if necessary, color the area 'with shoe polish to match the rest of the surface.

To remove cracked glass from a window without excessive splintering, crisscross the pane on both sides with several strips of masking tape, then rap it with a hammer. Most of the pane will be held together.

If you try to open a window and it refuses to budge, tap a hammer on a block of wood at various places on the sash. (Don't hit the sash directly with the hammer, or you'll leave dents.) The tapping may jar the sash loose.

To make dried-out putty workable again, sprinkle it with a few drops of raw linseed oil and knead it until it is soft and pliable.

Before attempting to chisel dried and hardened putty from a wooden window frame, brush raw linseed oil over the putty's surface. Let it soak in to soften the putty.

You can fill a pellet gun hole in a window pane with clear nail polish or shellac. Dab at the hole; when the application dries, dab again-and reapply until the hole is filled. The pane will appear clear. A pellet-gun hole in stained glass can be filled the same way.

When installing a new window pane, speed up the process by rolling the glazing compound between the palms of your hands to form a long string the diameter of a pencil. Lay the" string" along the frame) over the glass, and smooth it in place with a putty knife.