by Susan Ives, Alamo PC

It's taken us four years to get around to rehabbing the bathrooms because John is too busy watching home improvement TV shows to actually buckle down and work.

"Sorry dear," he calls out from his nest on the sofa, "I'll install those toilets after Steve and Norm finish laying the marble floor in the great room." Between This Old House, the New Yankee Workshop and Hometime, he has precious few moments left in the week to work on our own humble abode. It's a conspiracy.

There are a slew of home improvement sites on the Internet and if my husband is ever motivated to start surfing the web we might as well post the condemnation notice and be done with it.

You'll find This Old House on the Pathfinder web site, complements of Time-Warner, which publishes the magazine that accompanies the TV series. They didn't spend big bucks on graphic design; in fact, it looks like co-hosts Norm and Steve did it themselves, on a budget. The content is good, although a bit stale. As I write this column in mid-October, they have only posted the barest introduction to the Tucson House, which they started last Spring, and have nothing at all on the current project, which began several weeks ago. 

The material they have on the featured houses is a good refresher for fans: there's quite a bit on the Savannah, Nantucket and Salem houses and a teaser on the Concord barn and the Napa house. The tool encyclopedia is the best part of the site. I bought John a new hammer last Christmas and serendipitously selected Norm's favorite hammer. There's even a photo of it on the web site. John treats it like a holy relic, much too precious to use on something a banal as a nail.

Bob Vila, former This Old House regular and now host of Bob Vila's American House, also sweet-talked his magazine publisher, Hearst, into hosting a web site. The magazine, launched this September, looks like a winner. Our neighbors, Ruby and Joe, recently lost a big chunk of their life savings when a crooked contractor asked for money to buy materials, used it to finance other jobs, then vanished. The "10 contracting scams" article in American House listed that as scam two - right after the vultures who swoop into a neighborhood after a natural disaster.

I never gave much thought to gutters, but Bob's magazine had an article about glorious ones, and now my little heart is set on copper gutters. We'll need to hang them with the Lily Brackets, made of cast bronze, with a gold-plated ball at the center of each one. The gutters may be worth more than the house, but heck, you only live once.

While you're visiting Bob, check out the rest of the Hearst castle called HomeArts. They have a few neat estimators. Another dream project of mine - about #17 on the list - is to replace the wall-to-wall carpet in the living room with Saltillo tile. I plugged in the dimensions of the room, and was told to buy 352 tiles, 320 lbs. of thinset adhesive and 62 lbs. of grout. And a truck to haul it all in, although they forgot to put that on the list. Estimators are also available for paint, wallpaper and drywall. HomeArts hosts a small home repair encyclopedia, a homeowners clinic and Shelter, Country Living, Good Housekeeping, House Beautiful and Popular Mechanics magazines.

Hometime's useful and enthusiastic site is an aggressive sales pitch for the collateral items that promote the TV show - books, videos and logo-infested clothing. There are also a lot of broken links, which drives me up the wall. Dean and Robin realize, however, that they have to give something to get something, so they sacrifice some freebies. In their flooring section, for example, they provide information on subfloors & underlayments , ceramic and vinyl tile, sheet vinyl ,installing and refinishing hardwood floors, laminate flooring, carpet , flooring repairs and a flooring glossary. They sell videos on three of these topics, cheap at $11.95. 

The four women hosts they have had over the course of the show's run always struck me as being knowledgeable; I was crushed to read that every one is an actress who probably knows less than I do about plumbing.

Your New House hasn't made it to the San Antonio Market yet, although it seems to be airing in every other Texas city. This TV show is geared toward new home buyers, but a lot of the tip pertain to remodelers as well. They carry the complete transcript of every show, also indexed by topic. I learned some tricks about storing paint: if you breathe into the can before you seal it, your carbon dioxide will force out the oxygen and prevent skin from forming. Another trick is to store the can upsidedown, so if a skin does form in will be on the bottom of the can and do minimal harm. Of course, the best tip is to seal the can tightly, an act I am congenitally unable to perform, as John will attest.

Did you know that the more home improvement shows you watch on TV the dustier your house will become? I got a good explanation of this phenomenon from Jim Rooney, a home improvement contractor, carpenter, construction superintendent and home inspector who writes a column,Home Front, for a Maryland newspaper. Jim says that the cathode ray gun at the back of your picture tube sprays charged ions onto the glass, which is coated with a chemical which glows when struck by the charged electronic particles. The charge passes through the glass and into the room where it attracts uncharged dust particles to the TV set like a magnet. Some dust makes it to the screen and other heavier dust particles settle out along the way. So if anyone asks, it's John's fault that the house is dusty. 

I've yet to find the one home improvement web site that knocks my socks off. There a few that take a stab at it but none of them has wrestled its way to number one on my bookmark list. Check out DoItYourself.com, Home Improvement Net and ImproveNet. They all have potential, but none is quite the all-encompassing home improvement site I'd like to see.

So far, three sites are tied for a precarious first place. 

The articles in HouseNet are well written and realistic, on home improvement topics that interest me. The have a nifty reminder service; if you sign up (sacrificing your e-mail address and zip code to them) they will alert you to routine maintenance activities keyed to your region, along the lines of "change your air filter right now!" You also get the option of entering up to 20 reminders messages of your choice, such as birthdays and wedding anniversaries. The content is still thin, but it seems to be growing at an acceptable clip.

Home Ideas bills itself as the ultimate research tool for your home project. Its centerpiece is an extensive archive of articles from Today's Homeowner magazine. I searched for the word bath, our current obsession, and got 88 hits. Not bad! Once I started reading, I was hooked. There was a great idea for a corner shower seat, with a description of a new device that let's you install one without ripping out your existing tile. I want it. I'm getting too old and decrepit to shave my legs standing up. The site has twelve little estimator applets, including ones for comparing furnace efficiencies and determining how much insulation you need. The links are excellent, and they have a utility that allows you to request that product brochures be mailed to you. 

Living Home claims to add something new every day. So far the content is thin, with only a few articles and most of them fluff. I entered the chat area - there were a lot of questions asked, but not many answers. This appears to be a glossy new site. When it matures it may be worth a second look. 

The really great advice is buried deeply. Since we're still in the midst of a major bathroom remodeling, I started with kitchens and baths. An excellent resource is Kitchen.Net. Baths are an afterthought on this site, but their "sweat equity" section does include some pertinent information, including articles on laminate flooring basics, ceramic tile, bathroom design basics, installing a new faucet, finding the high point of the floor and hardwood tub surrounds. 

Our plumbing changes will be modest. For starters, we replaced our elderly water-guzzling toilets with the 1.6 gallon low flush variety, and got a $150 rebate on our water bill for being good citizens. Before you start patting me on the back, consider what Bob Allen, the cyber-plumber, has to say about low-flush toilets.

"In some areas, city utility companies have had to flush sewer mains with thousands of gallons of water to clear blockages caused by not enough water flowing in sewers that were sized and sloped for toilets which flushed 3.5 gallons. 

"Our elected officials, in their infinite wisdom, decided to cut back on the size of the flush, without realizing that this would require a redesign of the whole sewer system for everything to work properly."

I confess that our swimming pool has had days when Dr. Kervorkian has been spotted filling IV bottles at the water's edge and skipping rocks across it would cause sparks. PoolSpa has a handy free water test utility. After I enter data about my pool, record the results of my chemical test and make observations about the water condition, this site tells me exactly what to do to clear the water. If water chemistry baffles you, a good explanation is at swimming@home, Swimming Pool Owners' Guide to Water Chemistry.

One statistic I gleaned in my Internet ramble is that about four million Americans remodel their kitchens each year. We haven't even started on that room yet - the oven is a disgrace for a cookie baker of my stature and we sketched out the plans for an efficient shelving system in the pantry two years ago and have done nothing about it. The front yard is poorly designed; the only way to get to the driveway from the front door is to cut across the lawn or to walk out to the sidewalk and backtrack. That will involve hacking out the old concrete and pouring new. Our house will soon need painting, inside and out and I have my eye on a new front door with a leaded glass inset. John's promised to replace the water heater when I'm in Las Vegas for COMDEX. We still haven't decided whether to refinish the tub in the hall bath or replace it, and we're still wavering about whether to resurface the bathroom sinks with laminate, cultured marble or tile. 

There is no lack of projects, and no lack of resources on the Internet to help us make the right decisions.

Although John owns every power tool ever invented, he reluctantly recognizes that there are times when a guy has got to throw his macho to the wind and contract it out. A great local resource is the Greater San Antonio Builder's Association. Not just for new homes, they have a directory of members of their Remodelor's Council, and an Associate's Directory that covers every skill from air conditioning to yard care.

Susan Ives, president of Alamo PC, lives in hope that elves will visit her house at midnight and take care of all the dull maintenance shores while she sleeps.