It's 10 p.m. on Friday night, and you have just decided you want to replace the tile in your bathroom -- a nice weekend project. Only trouble is, though you're fairly handy, you've never done anything like that before. How to find out between now and tomorrow morning, when the home-supply emporium opens?
Hop on the Internet and cruise over to HouseNet, the first electronic bulletin board devoted to home improvement.
There you can call up an information file on bathroom projects and read the instructions on the screen or download the file and print it out.
Got a specific question? Check out the conference areas. Maybe someone logged on to the Money Pit can tell you where to rent a diamond tile cutter or how he planned a diagonal design.
HouseNet is the brainchild of Katie and Gene Hamilton, the St. Michaels-based home-improvement gurus who have been remodeling houses and writing books and articles on home improvement for 15 years.
"Gene's always been into computers," Mrs. Hamilton said in a recent telephone interview. "He read about these [special-interest] bulletin boards and said, we've got all this information, all these articles, we could do a bulletin board." She laughs, admitting that she's not as enthusiastic about computers as her husband. "If Gene hadn't been a tech head, we would never have done this."
But now that it's up and running, she said, she enjoys the interaction. "It's fun to communicate with other people. We've met some real interesting people and listened to or read about their projects."
Initially others in the computer industry were skeptical about the appeal of the bulletin board. One told them, "I don't know if people who work on computers even know what their roof is, much less want to fix it."
That hasn't been the case, she said; people with computers are interested in their dwellings. "It's not just techies, it's real people with real houses."
HouseNet has two sections. One is the information files, text files on particular home-improvement subjects that can can be read or downloaded. The other section consists of 75 different conference areas on different topics. People can log on and chat electronically with others on the network. Some conference areas are Contractor's Forum, the Money Pit, Gardening and Work at Home.
Anyone can log on to the HouseNet for up to 30 minutes a day, free of charge. Serious netters who need more information can subscribe to unlimited usage for $30 a year.
"All the files are searchable by keywords," Mr. Hamilton said, so people looking for help on a particular topic can find exactly what they need. The information in the conference areas is less organized but has another virtue, he said. "It's really one homeowner talking to another, so you have to sift through a lot of dispersed information -- but it's firsthand information."
Although the Hamiltons started the bulletin board a few years ago, in October Owens-Corning, the Ohio-based manufacturer of home insulation and other home products, began sponsoring direct connection to the Internet for HouseNet.
"Since the Internet connection, we're getting calls from all over .. the world," Mrs. Hamilton said. "We've had calls from Germany and from places we have to go to our atlases to find out where they are."
HOW TO HOOK UP
To reach HouseNet through the Internet, telnet to housenet.com. Or you can dial directly: (410) 745-2037.