Written down before it's lost
My grandfather bought this land in 1919 with money he earned cutting other men's timber. He could not read well and he never had a bank account, and he kept forty acres and eight people alive on it right through the Depression.
He did that by knowing things. Not by working harder than everybody else, because everybody worked hard then. By knowing what a thing was made of, and being able to make it. He never owned a thing he could not fix, and he never bought a thing he could make.
My father was the same. Eight tools and a coffee can of screws, and he kept this house standing for fifty years. He couldn't have told you the name of a single thing in Book Two. He just looked at what was wrong, worked out what was actually happening, tried the cheap answer first — and when it was past him, he said so and got somebody.
When they were gone I realized nobody had written any of it down. Not one page. It lived in their hands and then it went with them, and the only reason I have any of it is that I happened to be standing there holding the light.
So I started the channel, and the same question kept coming: could I put it all in one place, in order, so folks could keep it. That's these two books. A hundred things we made instead of bought, a hundred we fixed instead of paid for, each one written the same way — what it costs at the store, what you need, and six steps to do it.
It isn't really about the money. It's about the feeling when something goes wrong in your own house and you already know what to do about it. You don't have to call anybody. You don't have to wait on a man who may or may not come Tuesday.
— Titus, Alabama