DIY Life

Stumped by a difficult DIY task or a fix-it job gone wrong? Here's a possibility to consider: How to Mend it.com. This Brit site lets readers submit questions for other readers to answer. It's a lot like super-popular Yahoo Answers, but it's devoted entirely to fix-it topics. Car repair, home maintenance, renovations, large and small appliance jobs, computers, plumbing, lawn mowers, film projectors, boats, heating and cooling systems, toys, roofing, car alarms, and even musical instruments. Yep. They're all covered here.

Lots of questions seem to go unanswered. However, many others get one or even several replies. Worth a shot if you're having a problem and don't want to pay big bucks for a repair service. To test the site's mettle, I searched washing machine repair. This brought up over 15,000 questions on the topic. Problem is, (assuming you're searching for answers) you're going to have to hope that plugging in a more specific search term will take you to the questions best-suited to your situation. Obviously, you are not going to want to scroll through all those questions page by page.

Bottom line: if there's one fix-it this site could use, it's a more sophisticated search function. But give it a whirl anyway. It's free advice, people!