House Keys: The Essential Homeowner's Guide to Saving Money, Time, and Your Sanity Building, Buying, Selling, and Maintaining a Home

A Winner in the 2017 e-Book Awards competition by Writer’s Digest. 

Tips and tricks from a female Home Inspector. Through short, solution-packed, and humor-infused anecdotes based on her personal experience as a home inspector and licensed general contractor, author Lisa Turner shows homeowners how to save money and offers simple answers to home ownership questions.

Who is this book for?

House Keys is an invaluable reference book for you if you are:

• About to buy a home
• Selling your home
• Upsizing or downsizing
• Building a house
• Renovating or remodelling
• Looking to become more organized and de-cluttered
• Concerned about home security
• Responsible for maintaining your home

Not only does the book explain how to save money building, buying, and selling a home, it also covers gadgets, automation, safety, organizing, rightsizing, cleaning, and maintenance. An entire section explains what a home inspection is and is not, and how to use an inspection to save money.

This hefty 456-page homeowner’s guide with 25 well-organized sections will show you how to:

• Use a home inspection to sell your home
• Organize your home to reduce the mess stress
• What renovations will get you money back on resale?
• Downsize, upsize, de-clutter, and remodel
• Save time on home maintenance and cleaning
• Handle the most common emergencies
• Design a secret room and secret spaces
• Choose the best contractor for your custom home
• Make everything from decks to appliances last longer
• Prevent fire and carbon monoxide poisoning
• Monitor your home while you’re away
• Stay secure in your home with technology
• And have fun at the same time!

Why would you want a 436-page book of home inspection stories?
As one Amazon reviewer wrote: “You might think a book on home inspections would be boring, but Lisa made this a fun read. I liked the part on Crawlspace Surprises. The book is actually a grouping of many short articles from Lisa's newspaper column - each article is about 1-2 pages. The table of contents and index will help you find what you want so you can quickly find articles about each topic.”

Here are just a few more of the topics that Lisa covers:

• Top six myths about home inspections
• Mistakes to avoid when building your custom home
• What is a Tiny Home and is it right for you?
• Is “Green Building” expensive and is it time to go solar?
• To pressure clean or not to pressure clean your deck?
• How to make your water heater last longer
• How to keep ants, bees, termites and mice out of your home
• Energy saving tips and tricks

There are also some unusual topics such as finding secret hiding places in your home, extended warranties (are they a scam?), and how to tell if your home is haunted!

Writer’s Digest on House Keys:

“The book is very well organized by topic and subtopic. You have created an incredibly useful guide that can either be read cover to cover or used as a reference. I enjoyed your approachable writing style and appreciated how clearly you explained all of the terminology and concepts you discussed. Excellent job. . . ” –Writer’s Digest Judge

Use Amazon’s Look Inside feature to peruse the Table of Contents to see what’s covered in this homeowners’ manual. House Keys also makes a great gift for a new homeowner or anyone who wants to save time, money, and stress on the most valuable asset most of us will ever own – our home.