The pen: NEW BOOK: Contractor walks homeowners through the process
Yvonne Jeffery
Province
The way Mike Holmes sees it, not doing your research before starting a home renovation gives you about the same odds as playing the slot machines.
Contractors can ring up as good, bad or ugly, says the star of the hit HGTV show Holmes on Homes. Since he figures the good ones make up only 20 per cent of the market, he’s traded his hammer for a pen to give you an edge.
Make It Right: Inside Home Renovation with Canada’s Most Trusted Contractor (Collins, $39.95) is the result. The book walks homeowners through the entire renovation process, from the dreaming and planning stages to maintaining your home once the work is complete.
“I can only be in so many places at once,” Holmes says by cellphone from a rooftop renovation earlier this week.
It’s a frustration Canada’s construction hero has expressed before. E-mails telling of renovation horror stories flood his production team by the thousands, but the show can only help a limited number of people each year. Hence the book, which joins a line of work wear and a charitable foundation in the rapidly expanding Holmes empire.
“(The book) is giving readers a helping hand,” Holmes says. “In a way, I’m with them from the start.”
Make it Right is thorough, refreshingly opinionated and accessible. Beginning with the planning process, Holmes covers who to hire and how to hire them, plus the inner and outer workings of your home (and why you need to know this). Kitchens, bathrooms and basements get their own chapters, then Holmes wraps things up with home maintenance.
“I’m trying to educate people on the home that they’re living in,” he says. “Too often, what people want to see is what the finish is — it’s as if the homeowner and the contractor don’t care how it was built. If you want to protect it on the inside, you have to build it right on the outside.”
That means understanding how to make a home watertight and yet well ventilated before worrying about the profile on the crown moulding. Holmes’s overwhelming message is to go slow.
“That’s the No. 1 rule — slow down,” he says. “What are you in a hurry for? After slowing down you need to educate yourself. And No. 3, check out your contractor — three golden rules to live by in my world.”
Holmes says it should take more time to plan the job and find a contractor than to get the work done. If not you should be worried, because that’s when mistakes happen — especially when it comes to moisture, which is one of the biggest problems he ends up fixing.
One of the book’s strengths is Holmes tells you which materials he recommends where, and why.
The Holmes Foundation, launched last April, wants all residential renovation and construction in Canada to be done right — the first time. Its efforts are focused in two areas: supporting the skilled trades and helping families left impoverished by unqualified contractors.
The first family is already being helped. Faced with a situation where the only practical solution was to pull their house down, Holmes did just that. The new house is almost halfway complete, built using Holmes’ ideas for a watertight, environmentally sustainable, reasonably priced home.
“I’ve always said that we can build a home that won’t burn, a home that won’t flood, a home that won’t mould. I think I’ve spoken enough — now I’m doing it.”
Television coverage of the home’s construction should air in early spring.
“You’ll see lives change back to normal, back to the good,” Holmes says, “and at the same time you’ll learn about good building practices.”
© The Vancouver Province 2006