BiblioVault - Books about Maintenance and repair

Building a Market

The Rise of the Home Improvement Industry, 1914-1960

Richard Harris

University of Chicago Press, 2012

Each year, North Americans spend as much money fixing up their homes as they do buying new ones. This obsession with improving our dwellings has given rise to a multibillion-dollar industry that includes countless books, consumer magazines, a cable television network, and thousands of home improvement stores.

Building a Market charts the rise of the home improvement industry in the United States and Canada from the end of World War I into the late 1950s. Drawing on the insights of business, social, and urban historians, and making use of a wide range of documentary sources, Richard Harris shows how the middle-class preference for home ownership first emerged in the 1920s—and how manufacturers, retailers, and the federal government combined to establish the massive home improvement market and a pervasive culture of Do-It-Yourself.

Deeply insightful, Building a Market is the carefully crafted history of the emergence and evolution of a home improvement revolution that changed not just American culture but the American landscape as well.

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Guide to Electrical Maintenance

The Institution of Engineering and Technology

The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2015

The Guide to Electrical Maintenance provides guidance on carrying out maintenance activities and using good practice techniques. It examines the operational risks, mitigations and processes that may be used in carrying out electrical maintenance, and also provides insights and philosophies to ensure that electrical maintenance activities are not only safe, but are satisfactorily planned and properly carried out.

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Homeowners and Neighborhood Reinvestment

George C. Galster

Duke University Press, 1987

This book investigates the efforts of homeowners to maintain and improve their dwellings. Their behavior, it has found, depends on economic variables as well as the sociological structure of their neighborhoods. Residential satisfaction, expectations of the neighborhood, and mobility plans were taken into account.

Multivariate statistical analyses of models were conducted using household data from Minneapolis and Wooster, Ohio. Three important findings emerged. First, homeowners' sense of solidarity with their neighbors is as significant in determining their efforts at home upkeep as are their income or age. Second, the optimism of homeowners toward increases in property values results in behavior opposite to that produced by optimism about neighborhood quality of life. This implies that different kinds of predictable gaming behavior occur among homeowners, depending on the neighborhoods in which they live. Third, both short-term and extremely long-term plans to move prove damaging to home upkeep.

The results of this study form the basis for a better understanding of such residential phenomena as class succession, racial transition, and gentrification. Galster's findings will also be valuable for analyzing policies that attempt to encourage neighborhood reinvestment.

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Power System Commissioning and Maintenance Practice

Keith Harker

The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 1997

Power system reliability and security is highly dependent on the practices employed in both the commissioning and maintenance processes. Both must be to a high standard to ensure that equipment does not enter service with latent deficiencies. This demands engineers who understand the necessary management involved as well as the technical processes. There is very little literature currently available on the subject; a situation which this book seeks to redress.

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Renovating Value

HGTV and the Spectacle of Gentrification

Robert Goldman

Temple University Press, 2021

HGTV has perfected stories about creating and capturing value in the housing market. But according to Robert Goldman, this lifestyle network’s beloved flagship programs, Flip or Flop, Property Brothers, and Fixer Upper—where people revitalize modern spaces and reinvent property values—offer “fairy tales” in the wake of the 2008 economic crisis. The cable channel’s seductive, bingeable programs may show how to find and extract value from properties, but, in fact, they insidiously ignore the realities of the real estate and mortgage markets, housing inequality, gentrification, economic insecurity, and even homelessness. In effect, HGTV has turned house flipping into a master narrative about getting ahead in America during an era of otherwise uneasy economic prospects.

HGTV pictures its insular moral economy as an alternative to a crisis-ridden neoliberal finance system that shaped landscapes of foreclosure and financial uncertainty for millions of households. Renovating Value explores the circuitry of consumer credit and debt, and a rent-gap model of gentrification that charts a path to the rehabilitation of Value. Goldman shrewdly critiques the aspirational myth of adding value to a home simply by using imagination, elbow grease, and aesthetic know-how.

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