Book Review : New Home Construction Guide Is Worth Reading

Jim Locke is a carpenter who can write. Really write. His book, “The Apple Corps Guide to the Well-Built House” (Houghton Mifflin Co., $19.95, 276 pages) is possibly the best one-volume introduction to the complicated world of custom-home building.

Although it’s written from a Massachusetts perspective and assumes that the client is building a new house from scratch, this book contains so much useful information and advice that it should be read by everyone, in any region of the nation, who is considering substantial renovation or remodeling.

Locke is no ordinary carpenter: He’s a principal of Apple Corps, the building firm featured in Tracy Kidder’s best-seller “House” (Houghton Mifflin, 1985). Locke and his associates are all members of the baby boom generation (he’s 42) but they build with old-fashioned craftsmanship that is usually associated with the generation or two before the baby boom.

He’s a good working psychologist, as anyone dealing with something as inherently emotional as home building must be. His suggestions on how to understand builders and the various subcontractors are, in many ways, as valuable as the information he provides about windows, roofs and foundations.

This is the book a lot of builders would write, if they could. It’s the book home improvement writers could write, if they had the insights of a working builder. Reading it and following his advice would save untold numbers of clients millions of dollars in costs and millions of hours of wasted time and agony.