Why survey largely suburban and rural homeowners, who've been homeowners for 28 years, who've owned primarily single-family homes that are decades old and expect to find anything else but homeowners who say they are handy with tools?

To sell tools?

Well, the timing is right.

A survey of only 1,002 adult homeowners was conducted this summer, but just released last week, a week before the holiday shopping hordes go do their "until they drop" thing.

Get the media to mention "power tools" enough times and chances are, according to marketing experts, you will ring up sales.

The survey is the work of the Craftsman tool purveyor -- Sears, Roebuck & Co.

Sears, which also sells all the other stuff big box department stores sell, conducted the survey along with the Neighborhood Reinvestment Corporation, which founded NeighborWorks. NeighborWorks is a network of more than 230 locally based affordable housing and community development organizations nationwide. The survey is part of Sears' American Dream Campaign -- a $100 million commitment to strengthen families, homes and communities.

NeighborWorks is a stellar operation. Sears has a social conscience. If the survey somehow gets more people into homes or gets homeowners to take better care of homes -- even with its questionable approach, timing and targeting -- that too may be a good thing.

But Sears, in nearly a half dozen different news releases spun from just as many home improvement and home maintenance angles, says flatly, "The survey was designed to measure how well Americans care for their homes, probe attitudes about home ownership, ascertain what Americans know about home care, and pinpoint areas where they could use assistance."

If the survey accomplished that, it did so only for the narrow cross section of Americans it surveyed.

Sears says it surveyed Americans who are primarily women (63 percent) married (67 percent) parents (83 percent), averaging 53 years old, who have owned their homes for about 14 years, have been homeowners for an average 28 years, and who primarily own single-family residences (84 percent) that are 34 years old in suburban (40 percent) or rural (33 percent) areas.

See those red flags flapping?

Just for starters, the divorce rate is 50 percent and 33 percent of Americans don't live in rural areas the last time the U.S. Census checked. Not that there's anything wrong with living out in the hinterlands. In fact that's the point. If you do live out there and you don't know how to turn a wrench or hold a hammer and you aren't wealthy enough to keep a contractor on call for that 34-year-old mass-produced home, that dripping sound, late at night, in the middle of tranquility, will ruin your week.

Duh.

If your home is 34-years-old and you've been around single-family homes for nearly three decades, you are just about in the tool time prime of your life.

It's simply not surprising that 80 percent of those surveyed gave themselves a "B" or better in home maintenance or that 83 percent of the primary home care person in the survey says he or she is a Bob Villa in the making.

The survey also said 94 percent of those surveyed said that they or someone in their household could hang a mirror or art work using a wall anchor, 84 percent could repair a leaky faucet, 78 percent could change an electrical outlet or hang a fixture, and 75 percent said they could wallpaper a room, repair a grapefruit-sized hole in the wall or ceiling, or paint the outside of the house.

There's much, much more.

The survey also "discovered" that 95 percent of those surveyed have a toolbox in the home, 92 percent have user guides and instruction manuals for their major appliances, 76 percent keep records of major home repairs, and 75 percent say they have money set aside that could be used for unexpected home repairs, and 52 percent have basic home maintenance or repair books.

An so on.

In addition to the questionable approach to surveying a cross section of homeowners likely to yield the results reported, the survey's findings don't jibe with what home buyers discover in the real world when they slog around looking for a home that won't cost them an extra $10,000 to $40,000 in fixes and upgrades after they've closed the deal.

People say they know how to take care of their homes, people say they do take care of their homes, some homeowners are more prone to take care of their homes than others, but in too many cases homeowners don't complete the repairs and maintenance they should, according to professional home inspectors.

More than 40 percent of previously-owned homes on the market have at least one serious defect, according to HouseMaster, a major home inspection company with offices in more than 390 cities in the United States and Canada.

"Just drive down the street. How many homes have you driven by and seen where you can't put the car in the garage because of all the crap? Some say people move every seven years just to clean out the garage. Any survey that says most people maintain their house is a bunch of (expletive deleted)," says Jerry McCarthy, of Building Systems Inspection and Analysis, in San Mateo, CA.

McCarthy is a retired building inspector who works as an expert witness, building code instructor and as the Northern California spokesman for the California Real Estate Inspection Association.

His survey sample is comprised of 10,000 homes he traipsed through during his career.

McCarthy witnessed:

Published: November 26, 2003

Use of this article without permission is a violation of federal copyright laws.

Broderick Perkins parlayed a career in old-school journalism into a contemporary digital news service that really hits home. The award-winning consumer journalist, originally from Wilmington, DE, is founder, publisher and executive editor of the bootstrap DeadlineNews Group, a Silicon Valley-based editorial content and consulting service specializing in residential real estate, consumer news and related editorial consulting services. The DeadlineNews Group includes the Web site, DeadlineNews.Com, offering real estate editorial content and consulting services, and its back shop, the Deadline Newsroom, an open house on news that really hits home. Perkins obtained his formal journalism education from University of Delaware and a journalism boot camp, the Institute of Journalism Education at the University of California-Berkeley. He went on to 20 years of service as a daily newspaper journalist at the Wilmington, DE News Journal and San Jose, CA Mercury News. Perkins covered housing on the San Jose Mercury News reporting team which earned a General News Reporting Pulitzer Prize in 1989 for coverage of the Loma Prieta earthquake. He has also produced real estate, consumer and small business content for the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, RealtyTimes.com, Nolo.com, Better Homes and Gardens, the National Association of Realtors, Homestore/Move and Intuit/Quicken among more than three dozen publications. In addition to managing the DeadlineNews Group, Perkins most recently served as chief editorial consultant for "Nolo's Essential Guide To Buying Your First Home" (Nolo $24.99) and writes real estate television scripts for RealtyTimes.com.