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by: Fine Homebuilding Magazine
Topics include: screed rail, cribbing piles, wet screeds, center screed, magnesium hand float, bull floating, unmodified asphalt, grade nails, span cracks, footing drains, concrete grade beam, magnesium float, cementitious coatings, horizontal rebar, basement waterproofing, excess concrete, garage slab, frost wall, vertical rebar, contraction joints, filter fabric, foundation hole, capillary break, photo facing page, perimeter drains
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Book Description:
First Sentence: "At the engineering firm where I work, the past few years have brought us about a dozen jobs retrofitting designs for relatively new buildings that were structurally deficient or falling for one reason or another."
Reviews:
Really just a compilation of articles: I have a couple of other books in the "for pros by pros" series and they are great. I was disappointed in this one, however. Rather than a guide that started at the beginning and followed a logical progression, it was merely a compilation of articles from Fine Homebuilding. They were each good, but several mentioned that "space limitation prevent me from expounding on..." While this is true in a magazine, it shouldn't be the case in the book. Also, with so many authors, there was a lot of contradictory information. In one "chapter" the author showed exactly how to (and how not to) use rebar. In a subsequent "chapter" another author was shown using rebar in precisely the way the first author said was incorrect. This went on throughout the book. How do you know who is right? And while the book was published in 2003, some of the articles were from the early 80's. I was hoping for a chapter on laser layout, but there was no mention of a laser anywhere in the book. (But plenty of instructions to use water levels and transits.) It wasn't a bad book, just not what I was expecting after the Plumbing and Electrical books were so good. A better use of money would be to purchase a one year subscription to the Fine Homebuilding online archives - it's a great resource. It has everything in this book, along with thousands of other articles.