This Old House (1-year)

Customer Rating:
Summary: This magazine is a keeper
Comment: I enjoy the t.v show This Old House and Ask This Old House. This magazine is a continuation of these. It has major repair ideas for sure, but, it also gives ideas on smaller-scale home projects. It is informative, imaginative and fun to browse through. If you use a little creativity and imagination, you can use some of their ideas in your own home on a smaller scale. This is the perfect magazine for a do-it-yourselfer like my husband and me. The ideas and possibilities are endless. Even if I can't do them myself in my own home, I enjoy the ideas I get from reading and searching the pages for ideas. This magazine is a keeper!

Customer Rating:
Summary: This Old House
Comment: This Old House is a great magazine for DIYers -- lots of practical tips and ideas, step-by-steps for major projects, plus projects are rated for DIYer experience levels.

Customer Rating:
Summary: I LOVE THIS MAGAZINE
Comment: This is my first subscription to this magazine and I am scared to miss an issue. My house is already renovated but I love to look at this house and I continue to get ideas to further change and improve my house and what to look for when I finally get a chance to get my dream old house!

Customer Rating:
Summary: Great Ideas For Fixing Up Your House
Comment: This is a very informative magazine. It always has a number of different articles pertaining to a number of remodeling projects around the house,both inside and outside. If you are thinking of doing any projects now or in the near future,it would be great to subscribe to "This Old House" magazine. By reading what the experts have to tell you and seeing the pictures of the projects from start to finish,it will give you the incentive to start that project that you have been putting off. Try it for at least a year and see;I feel that you will be pleased with what you see as well as what you can accomplish on your own.

Customer Rating:
Summary: Misinformation and dangerously shallow information
Comment: Have been getting increasingly irritated with the magazine. I finally got fed up and canceled and asked for a refund after finding many errors in the current issue.


I'm no home expert but I saw much misinformation and a lot of dangerously shallow information.

Some of many examples:

* It tells you to drill big holes in a tree branch to hang a swing. To cover the magazine legally, there is vague advice in tiny type about using a sturdy branch. Drilling holes will weaken the branch. And may well eventually kill the branch.

* Supposedly Norm Abram's toolkit has one of those expensive, useless many-bits-in-the-handle screwdrivers, instead of a set of simple inexpensive screwdrivers that actually work.

* They recommend WD-40 as a lubricant. It is well known that WD-40 is a terrible lubricant, due to the solids in it that make it an excellent rust-preventative.

* They say to use a metal scraper blade to clean a glass cooktop.


If you can't trust them on the topics you understand, you sure can't trust them on the topics you want to learn about.


Many of the articles are pushing products, probably from companies that advertise on the TV show. (I don't watch the TV show, so I'm not sure.)

At any rate, the products and tools they recommend are almost always very fancy and expensive.

Despite the endless references to "Master Carpenter Norm Abram" and so forth, the TV stars are barely involved at all in the magazine. How would they have time anyhow?

A lot of effort is put into slick, clever, coy writing and beautiful photos. (If you look at the fine print, the photos are all "produced" and "styled.")

Then I got it. I looked at the info up front and realized that the editorial office is in New York City. The writers and editors are professional magazine writers who live in New York apartments, writing about things they don't have personal experience with!

They must have a problem with people canceling. The phone number to cancel was in the tiniest possible type.


Get "Fine Homebuilding" or the "Journal of Light Construction."