The Savvy Woman's Guide to Owning a Home; How to Care For, Improve and Maintain Your Home

Rating:
Summary: Move over Martha Stewart...
Review: ...thanks to Kitty Werner, women won't be relegated to the kitchen anymore. Kitty humorously gives the lowdown on everything from steps to take when looking for a home to water heater maintenance after the purchase.

A "must have" for anyone looking to buy a home, SWG is literally filled with well-organized, useful information for every homeowner.

Savvy Woman's Guide is a bargain-priced reference book that is destined for the most accessible spot on the smart homeowner's bookshelf.

Rating:
Summary: Move over Martha Stewart...
Review: ...thanks to Kitty Werner, women won't be relegated to the kitchen anymore. Kitty humorously gives the lowdown on everything from steps to take when looking for a home to water heater maintenance after the purchase.

A "must have" for anyone looking to buy a home, SWG is literally filled with well-organized, useful information for every homeowner.

Savvy Woman's Guide is a bargain-priced reference book that is destined for the most accessible spot on the smart homeowner's bookshelf.

Rating:
Summary: The Ideal Housewarming Gift
Review: I devoured this book during my first week of home ownership and plan to read it again and again as I go through the first year of being responsible for the safe operation of many new appliances and appurtenances. Kitty Werner has written a comprehensive, easy-to-understand and even entertaining guide to all the things a house has that need to keep running for your comfort and safety. Her recommendations about fire extinguishers, chimneys, escape plans, routine maintenance and such are extremely valuable and eye-opening. She's done her utmost to keep the book relevant and useful whether you live in a city or out in the sticks. Thanks, Kitty!

Rating:
Summary: Useful for ANY Homeowner--or Renter
Review: Kitty Werner has done something amazing here: she has taken pretty much everything that anyone needs to know before owning or renting a home, and found an easy way to explain fairly technical concepts to people with no technical knowledge. And she manages not to sound patronizing, even when explaining real basic stuff that most of us take for granted--because she doesn't assume you have prior experience.

Her advice on practical matters from insurance to chimney cleaning to what to do in an emergency could save the reader thousands of dollars--and save lives.

The title is really too narrow for this broad and useful book. It's useful to both owners and renters, to both men and women. In fact, it would be the ideal present to buy a graduating college student just going out on his or her own--I sure wish I had such a book when I got my first apartment, and again when I got my first house. Don't let the book's somewhat peculiar layout choices get in the way. This book will benefit anyone who ever has to manage any aspect of finding and maintaining a place to live. Following Kitty's savvy advice will lower your bills, lower your stress level, and improve the quality of your life. I will ask the author if I can excerpt a chapter on my Frugal and Fashionable Living webzine.

Highly recommended.

Shel Horowitz is owner of http://www.frugalfun.com. His latest book is Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First. His most relevant book is The Penny-Pinching Hedonist: How to Live Like Royalty with a Peasant's Pocketbook.

Rating:
Summary: An extraordinarily practical guide
Review: Kitty Werner's The Savvy Woman's Guide To Owning A Home: How To Care For, Improve And Maintain Your Home is a charming, energetic, informative, and extraordinarily practical guide to the hundreds of minor pitfalls and dilemmas that come with being a homeowner. From how to prepare for emergencies, to which tools you should keep on hand, to how to evaluate insurance, The Savvy Woman's Guide To Owning A Home covers it all in clear language easily understandable by the non-specialist reader. The Savvy Woman's Guide To Owning A Home is indeed so straightforward and packed with useful information that by no means should it truly be confined to the female gender - any male homeowner who is inexperienced in matters of upkeep should consider this guide as well. Very highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: A First for Women Homeowners
Review: There are a lot of how-to books aimed at inexperienced people in just about any field you can name these days, but author Kitty Werner's "The Savvy Woman's Guide to Owning a Home" is a first for women homeowners. In a light and humorous style, yet clear and detailed enough to be of real help, the book teaches the basics of home care, safety, and fitting into a new community. It covers everything from the move to a new location, to season and yearly "to do" lists, to dealing with a host of repairs.

The book is laid out in a sensible way and contains sidebars with many helpful hints and fun anecdotes. It's something I could easily see becoming a "bible" for the new homeowner, female or male, but is especially excellent for women because it avoids the jargon often used when such information is geared toward men.

Rating:
Summary: The Perfect Book for any Homeowner
Review: This book is a godsend for people like me(and my husband)who live in a house, but don't really understand how it works. A house is like a small city. It provides you with water, heat, sewage disposal, shelter, warmth, and all that makes life cozy. But let something go wrong--then you can get desperate. Author Kitty Werner knows just what that's like. She talks about everything from packing up your valuables before you move to insurance (house replacement coverage, etc.), plumbing, electrical systems, repairs, dealing with pesky things, like ants and roaches, and coping with emergencies. She has chapters on such matters as finding a contractor (her father is a retired contractor) and being part of a neighborhood. And she writes about all this in a lively tone--it's as if you are having a personal conversation with the author. I rate this book very highly.