Media

Spring is in the air for home-improvement magazines

May yields household chores along with those blissful blooms, but don’t despair, these mags should set you right: they bring the advice if you bring the tools.


Hearst has two offerings on the newsstand — aimed at different audiences.

House Beautiful is easy on the eyes. Bright colors. Lots of ideas. You soon realize that, at least for middle-income folks, the ideas being presented seem largely out of reach.

One of the handful of question and answer features is an interview with interior designer Lilly Bunn about how she designed a Manhattan apartment for a single woman in her 20s. Bunn says she made the apartment glamorous and also comfortable. She offers the dubious opinion that a single woman has no children and can take risks since “it’s all about you.”

How many young women living in Manhattan do not need to share their one-bedroom or larger apartments? A feature on a family that built their own Locust Valley, NY, home modeled after a French chateau is eye-catching. The wife got the idea from their annual visits to that country.


Hearst’s HGTV, meanwhile, is a bit more low-brow.

“24 things to put in a mason jar” is one pictorial. A recommendation for $25 paisley Target window curtains is another giveaway.

Credit HGTV for recognizing Mother’s Day. There is a feature on surprising Mom by fixing up her bedroom. A new rug, window treatments, an armchair, a new dresser can all do the trick. Readers can buy the dresser, not surprisingly, from HGTV home. T

here are some good practical tips, like when to call a tool man and when not, like when replacing a window. Like HouseBeautiful, HGTV is a well-designed magazine that is easy to follow.


Sky blue, robin’s egg blue, Tiffany blue or just plain light blue — whichever it is, there’s a bunch of blue in this month’s issue of This Old House. At least two-thirds of the walls and fixtures chronicled here are bathed in it, by our calculations.

This weird phenomenon goes unexplained, and so do a number of the DIY projects — the folding serving tray, for example, which gets a single illustration. Maybe this magazine’s readers are all experts and just need a gentle prod to whip up something dazzling. More likely, we suspect, this magazine is content to present DIY as a spectator sport.

So we’ll just root for the trim-looking guy who’s building that compost bench on page 59, the one wearing the blue golf shirt.


The Family Handyman, on the other hand, is the real deal.

Do not pick up this magazine unless you are either a serious DIY enthusiast or looking to change your life.

If you’re interested in the latter, you might start by building yourself a mini-shed for all of the garden tools you plan to buy.

The eight-page spread on this $400 project was thorough and reassuring.

Once you’re done with that, turn that useless, steep hill behind your house into a lounge patio with a circular retaining wall built with modular concrete blocks. This $2,500 project will require “at least two long, sweaty weekends of labor,” the magazine warns.

But perhaps most useful were the tips on restoring a wood deck on the cheap.


The New Yorker provides a rather light and unsatisfying snack as it profiles a Silicon Valley geek who is looking to replace food with a sludgy substance he calls “Soylent” (despite the association with the cannibalistic dystopia in the old Charlton Heston flick).

The big question: could a person really live for a lifetime on this semi-tasteless concoction of protein, carbs, lipids, fiber and vitamins?

In a singular show of half-interest, reporter Lizzie Widdicombe lives on it for “more or less, a three-day weekend.”

Indeed, she doesn’t appear to have enjoyed it much, citing issues with bloating and flatulence.

That appears to have been that, and Lizzie is presumably back to her quinoa and baby carrots. If you want to read something worthwhile about humans’ need for food, check out the March 2012 article in Harper’s by Steve Hendricks, who went without eating anything at all for 20 days straight.


New York gives us yet another issue on TV, with the cover promising to answer the pressing question of why “The Big Bang Theory” is so successful.

After pausing to wonder about the average age of this magazine’s readership, we searched for something a bit more interesting, and had to settle for a lengthy musing on whether Lara Logan should be allowed back on “60 Minutes.”

The piece by Joe Hagan turns out to be a good read, arguing convincingly that CBS News chief Jeff Fager and his boss Les Moonves have let the once-venerable news program go to pot.

In addition to the disasters that engulfed Logan’s reporting, we also have Fager to thank for puff pieces on everything from Blackwater to the NSA to Jeff Bezos.

When The Post reported on Logan’s sexcapades with the headline “Sexty Minutes,” Fager had it framed in his office. We’d be tempted to applaud him for this if it weren’t so pathetic. Fagan eventually took it down, according to Hagan; now it’s time for somebody to take him down.