Home Guru

By Bill Primavera The harbinger of trouble ahead with any product or appliance in the home is usually just a little kink in its operation. Once that whiz is heard or blip is seen, it’s only a matter of time

By Bill Primavera I’ve written many times about various established contractors and their work in this column who rely on the quality of their work and good reputations to stay in business. But I’ve learned the hard way to take

By Bill Primavera For many years, I lived in a high-maintenance house, as high-maintenance as it could be: an early 18th century colonial with very few modern updates when I first bought it. In fact, there was still an outhouse

By Bill Primavera As I sat one morning in an old Hitchcock kitchen chair that had been hitting me at the wrong place in my back for more than 25 years, I grumbled to my wife, “Why do I subject

By Bill Primavera  Have you ever heard the word “fake” more often in your life? While most of it is concentrated in our political arena pointing toward the media, one area where you wouldn’t have heard it in a long

By Bill Primavera Sometimes I think The New York Times is reading my mind, or vice versa. I had been considering writing a piece about the joys of outsourcing jobs around the house when I opened the paper to find

By Bill Primavera  From time to time, I pick out snippets from my past columns that readers tell me they enjoyed. Here are some I enjoyed as well.  How I First Learned About Sex With the pending demise of the

  By Bill Primavera It’s been almost three years since I gave up two-story living in a colonial single-family house for a one-floor luxury condo. The most noticeable difference during that time is that I’ve gained weight. For most of

By Bill Primavera It was in the same week that my wife looked up from the lifestyles section of the newspaper and asked, “Did you know that green is the most soothing color to paint a room?” that my painter

By Bill Primavera About five years ago, I wrote an article about the advantages of staying put in the same home over a period of years, rather than moving every four or five years, which was the average length of