This Old House

Classic PBS show on home renovations. If you haven’t seen it, it utterly unique. They carefully explain what to do at a layman’s level, but they don’t talk down. They assume you can do hard repairs and show you every step. I would strongly recommend looking for any resources they have connected in even the slightest way to the renovations you want to make. Even the most minor video can help you out.

Just to give a small example, they have an entire feature segment on one episode about rain run off from a small outdoor building where you might not want gutters. They go through alternate options and show installation of a simple drip edge. Even if you have no intention of installing drip edge yourself, it would still be something to look at if you build a basic outbuilding. You might see that abs realize that you need to control water runoff, and that there are ways to do it without putting in a gutter system the building probably wouldn’t even support. It would give you something to talk to the contractor about both to communicate exactly what you want and to see if he can keep up with the conversation— lots of people don’t know very much about home remodeling but still go into the business.

To be clear, I’m just using the gutters thing as an example. I’ve used them as a resource across the board to flesh out ideas I have had for a customer’s home. I would put them over any other resource—google, ChatGPT, YouTube, etc. because the videos are so well organized, you can click around in major segments and not watch the whole thing and still get a very good idea of what’s going on.