BOOK REVIEW / NONFICTION : Home-Building: the Practical Approach : NORM ABRAM’S NEW HOUSE, <i> by Norm Abram</i> , Little, Brown $22.95, 320 pages

The prospect of building (or remodeling) a house can be a vision of hell or a glimpse of enlightenment.

Home-building as a sinkhole of time and money is perhaps the more familiar one, as depicted in “Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House,” or--less famously but no less vividly--in Richard Condon’s odd little memoir, “And Then We Moved to Rossenarra.” Or, if you can appreciate the Zen-like pleasure of beholding something of beauty come into existence board by board, brick by brick, Witold Rybczynski’s “The Most Beautiful House in the World.”

The more exalted approach is the one taken by Norm Abram, the real-life celebrity carpenter of “This Old House” and “New Yankee Workshop,” both airing regularly on PBS.

His project began in 1991 when Abram’s wife, Laura, fell in love with a $600,000 Cape Code-style house in the Boston area. To his wife, it was a dream house; to Abram, it was a nightmare of shoddy workmanship and deteriorating materials.

“Look, I can build you three times the house--with workmanship I’m comfortable with--for the same amount of money they were asking for the Cape,” Abram tells his wife. “And I’ll be happy building it.”

Do-it-yourselfers need not worry that “Norm Abram’s New House” is a touchy-feely celebration of home-building as a tool of self-discovery. Ever the practical man, Abram is less likely to rhapsodize about the spiritual rewards of building one’s own house than the ins and outs of septic tanks, the strategies of “stairway safety,” the nuances of the Rumford fireplace. Nor does Abram pretty up the process of construction, which is sometimes so stressful that it turns ordinarily benign people into raving lunatics.

“Laura said to a friend that if I were to build a new house at the same pace that I had renovated our present house, ‘I might kill him.’ ”

Now and then, Abram shares some tidbit that suggests an archeology of meaning in domestic architecture. For instance, the use of “transom lights”--a row of small window panes above the door--is mostly a matter of decoration nowadays, but these windows served a more urgent purpose in colonial times.

“A passerby might, seeing the flicker of flames through these panes, alert the household to a fire, an ever-present danger in colonial houses depending on open-flame lighting and open-hearth heating and cooking.”

Abram’s story is enhanced by a succession of sketches, drawings and photographs that explain how and why decisions are made about the configuration, design and construction of the house.

“We need to country it up,” says Laura at an early stage of the design.

The solution turned out to be exposed timber-frame construction, one of the many marriages of nature and culture that make this such an engaging book.