You do not have to spend more to keep a house well. You have to know which ten things do the work.

Cora Lee's House Book is a 280-page guide to keeping a house cool, clean, fed and standing on almost nothing. Seventy-seven chapters across five parts — the bill, the cleaning cupboard, the groceries, the repairs, and everything else a house throws at you. Every chapter tells you where it fails. It comes as a clean, large-type PDF that reads on a phone, a tablet or a computer.

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280pages

77chapters

7-dayrefund

Most of what you are paying somebody for, you can do on a Saturday.

Cora Lee · Macon, GA

The problem

The bad advice looks exactly like the good advice

Search for how to get a stain out and you will get four hundred pages that all say the same thing, and not one of them will tell you who checked it. Most of it is harmless and useless. Some of it is not harmless.

Mothballs in an open closet do nothing to the moths and something to you. They only work sealed, and sealed is not how anybody uses them.
Bleach on a rust-coloured stain sets the mark permanently. It is the most expensive mistake in a laundry room and it is the first thing most people reach for.
Standing a hot pot on the counter to cool is what most of us were taught, and with rice it is the thing that makes people ill.

This book was built the opposite way round. Nothing went on a page until it had been traced to a named public source, and where no source existed, the book says so on the page instead of guessing.

What you get

280 pages, and here is exactly what is in them

77 chapters in five parts, one PDF, set at 6×9 inches. Instant download.
42 of those chapters cost nothing to do. Every chapter carries a cost band, and the top one is under $50. Nothing in the book costs more than that.
Thirteen safety pages, printed in a colour used nowhere else in the book, so you know what a page is before you read a word of it.
An index by problem with 83 entries. Not subject headings. The towels smell. A tap drips. I smell gas. You look yourself up by what is wrong.
Five subjects she refuses to teach from a page, named at the front, with the reason for each.
A dated price sheet at the back. Every figure carries the month it was checked, so you can see how stale it has got instead of guessing.

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280 pages, delivered as a PDF the moment you pay.

What it replaces

Four books, or one

The chapters in here are the ones people buy four separate books to get, and then keep four separate books to use.

What you would otherwise buy

The No Bill Home$27
The Homemade Cleaning Cupboard$27
The Half Price Grocery System$32
The Whole House Fixbook$27

Four books · 236 pages$113

What this is

Bills, heat and the winter power cut✓
The cupboard, the mixes, the laundry✓
Groceries, the freezer, what keeps✓
The fixbook, the damp, the yard✓

One book · 280 pages$27

Competitor prices and page counts as listed at the time of writing.

What's inside

Five parts

One · 14 chapters

The house that doesn't eat your paycheck

Cooling a house you can't leave open at night · finding every draft in an afternoon · the water heater dial · the appliances quietly running up your bill.

Two · 15 chapters

The cleaning cupboard

Ten things that replace a shelf full of bottles · exact measurements · what must never touch what · and bluing.

Three · 18 chapters

Half price groceries

The price book that ends overpaying · where coupons actually went · one chicken and three suppers · and a chapter on rice that says the opposite of what you were told.

Four · 13 chapters

The fixbook

The drip · the sticking door · what a wall will actually hold · and a hundred things that cost nothing.

Five · 17 chapters

The rest of the house

Sheets · closets · ants · roaches · mice · mosquitoes · the porch · and where the water goes.

Page 53: the Part Two opener, with the gold numeral 02, the part title, and her four things under the sink. — Page 53: the part that replaces your whole cupboard — ten things, with exact amounts.

Page 83: the bluing method, set as numbered steps with the reason written under each one. — Page 83: numbered steps, in order, with the reason under each one.

Page 112: where the coupons live now, four places worked in order. — Page 112: where the coupons actually went. Four places, worked in order, and what each one is worth.

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280 pages, delivered as a PDF the moment you pay.

A coupon on something you were not going to buy is not a savings. It is a purchase somebody talked you into and let you feel clever about. From Half price groceries

How every chapter is built

Read one and you know how to read all of them

Seventy-seven chapters, the same four sections, always in the same order.

Whether this fits your house: A few lines telling you honestly whether the chapter is for you. Some are not. This is also where the gloves, the open window and the shut-off valve go — before a method, never after it.
How I do it: The actual thing, in order, with the real amounts.
Where it fails: What it will not do, the version going around that does not work, and the times it makes matters worse.
And one line at the end: A judgment, not a summary.

The part nobody else prints

Every chapter tells you where it stops working

That is the difference between this and a list of hacks. Anybody can write down what works. A method with no failure case has not been tested; it has been repeated.

The fizz is the sound of two good things destroying each other. The boiling water behind it is what opened your drain. From The cleaning cupboard

And where a source did not exist, the book says so on the page. There is no sharpening angle printed in this book, because every list gives a different number and none could be stood behind. The chapter says that out loud and tells you to follow the edge already on your knife.

Where the figures come from

Checked, and you can check it too

No blog, content farm or retailer page was used as a source for anything in this book. Every amount, dilution, dwell time, temperature, load rating and threshold-for-calling-somebody was traced to one of these, in this order of preference:

University of Georgia Extension · other land-grant university extension services · the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention · the Environmental Protection Agency · the Consumer Product Safety Commission · the US Department of Agriculture · the Food and Drug Administration · the Department of Energy · the National Institute of Standards and Technology · the US Access Board · the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry · the National Pesticide Information Center · and manufacturers' own labels and safety data sheets.

None of those names appear in the body of the book. Cora Lee does not cite agencies at you — she tells you what to do and how much. The checking happened before the sentence was written, which is where checking belongs.

About the author

Cora Lee

My mother gave me the start of it. The other fifty years I found out myself, and some of that was finding out I had been wrong.

Cora Lee · Macon, Georgia

I was born in 1952 on the east side of Macon and I have kept the same house ever since. My mother carried me into it. Five children, fifty years, on almost nothing — not because I chose to live simple, but because there was no money, and there is a difference between the two.

I am not a chemist or a plumber or an exterminator. I am a woman who paid attention. Where a job goes past what one woman can teach you from a page, I say so, and I say who to call. There are five things in this book I refuse to teach, and I tell you why.

This is not a book about doing without. It is a book about not paying for what you can do yourself.

Is it for you

Honestly, some people should not buy this

It is for you if

You would rather do a thing properly once than buy a product for it every month.
You are keeping a house on a real budget and you are tired of advice written by people who are not.
You want to know why a method works and, more to the point, when it does not.
You are setting up a first home, or helping somebody who is.
You read something online, tried it, and it did not work — and you would like to know whether that was you or the advice.

And here is what it will not do

It will not give you a perfect house. It is aimed at a house clean enough to be comfortable and cared for enough to last. That is the whole ambition and it is stated on the second page.
It will not replace a professional where one is needed. Gas lines, the inside of a panel, termites, roof work, anything behind a wall. The book names the point where a job stops being household knowledge and tells you to call somebody, more than once.
It is not a get-rich book and it is not extreme frugality. Nobody is going to reuse a teabag. It is about not paying every month for what you can do yourself.
It is not a recipe book. There are no food recipes in here — the cooking is a separate thing.
It is not quick tips with no reasoning. Every method comes with its limits attached, and that makes it longer to read.
It is not medical, legal or professional advice, and it says so on its second page.

There is no prize for doing it yourself. Knowing what is wrong is worth money even when somebody else does the fixing. From The fixbook

Questions

Before you buy

What exactly do I get?

One PDF, 280 pages, set at 6×9 inches. That is the whole product. There is no course, no membership and no second volume.

What can I read it on?

Anything that opens a PDF: a phone, a tablet, a computer. One honest caveat — it is a fixed 6×9 page, not a reflowing EPUB, so on a small e-reader screen you will be zooming and panning rather than reading comfortably. Printed at home on Letter paper it comes out centred with a generous margin.

How is it delivered?

Through Gumroad, immediately after payment. You get a receipt with a download link, and the link keeps working — you can download it again later on another device.

What if it isn't what I expected?

Seven days, no argument. Reply to your Gumroad receipt within seven days of buying and say so, and you get your money back. I would rather you had that than a book that was not what you wanted.

Are the prices in it going to go out of date?

Yes, and the book says so. That is why there is a dated price sheet at the back with the month each figure was checked, and why no dollar figure ever appears in a chapter title. Cost bands only.

Is this medical, legal or professional advice?

No, and the book says that on its second page. Where a job goes past what one woman can teach you from a page, it says so and it tells you who to call.

Is my payment secure?

Gumroad handles the payment and the card details. This page never sees them and neither do I.

One payment, and it is yours

280 pages, 77 chapters, an index that finds things by what is wrong, and a “where it fails” on every single method in it.

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Instant PDF · 7-day refund · yours to keep

Still thinking it over?

Fair enough. It costs about what one bottle of the good spray costs three times over, and you stop buying the bottle. Two hundred and eighty pages, seventy-seven chapters, and seven days to decide it was not for you.

Get the book · $—

7-day refund, and you keep the book.