Here is a British site that offers an interactive question-and-answer service, with access to qualified tradesmen, as well as practical tips and advice for all your home-improvement projects. Try to ignore the poor spelling and amateurish design, and concentrate on the quality of advice gleaned from years of experience. Worried that your newly painted door sticks when you close it? Wait until it dries, then rub a candle along the edges. Never tile over wallpaper; and use a carrot to remove a bulb that has broken in its fitting. DIY projects are listed alphabetically, and it has a useful list of suppliers, a books section for further help, and plenty of links to related sites. This is a brash, cheerful website you should definitely have in your Favourites folder.

LEARN HOW IT'S DONE
www.diynet.com

The Do It Yourself Network is a pleasure-garden for DIY devotees who love getting their hands dirty: it covers practicalities such as using vinegar in warm water to remove limescale, and the best way to paint the front door. There are also 300 tutorial videos to make fiddly instructions understandable when laying wooden floorboards or installing french windows. A 2-D room planner enables you to set the dimensions of any room and fill it with resizable furniture and accessories. You can arrange and rearrange without busting a gut. The site offers more practical advice than a convention of agony aunts, but it is American, so you may have to translate — it uses words such as “faucet” where we would say “tap”. If you are more Handy Andy than Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen, you should have plenty of fun here.

CALL IN THE PROS
www.homepro.com

Unless you are a DIY supremo, there may come a time when you have to Galmi — “Get a little man in”. Or woman, of course. Sorting out the craftsmen from the cowboys has always been the home improver’s bête noire, but HomePro comes to the rescue with a database of vetted home-improvement specialists. As well as verifying legal histories, it gathers references from former customers, awarding marks out of 10 for professionalism, politeness and cleanliness. Choose the profession you want, type in your postcode and HomePro offers a list of people in your region and shows what vetting procedures they have been through.

SEE HOW IT LOOKS
www.armstrong.com

One reason people seek help from frilly-shirted interior designers is that they find it difficult to visualise what their home would look like with different flooring, fabrics, wall colours and furniture. Well, software is now coming to the rescue. Armstrong, an American manufacturer of floors, ceilings and cabinets, offers a “design a room” facility on its website. You can choose generic high- resolution pictures of kitchens, bathrooms and living rooms, and change most aspects of their appearance at the click of a mouse. Select the area, then choose the material and colour. You can also download software (£5.30) or buy a CD-Rom (£7) that enables you to apply the same techniques to digital photos of your own house. You cannot change room layouts, and the products are all Armstrong’s, but this is still an invaluable visual aid.

DESIGN IT YOURSELF
www.e-interiors.net

The main difficulty about shopping online for home furnishings is the fact that you cannot gain a real sense of what objects look like from all angles. After all, it is tricky to walk around a 2-D picture. With broadband connections and the growth of computer-aided design (CAD) software, however, the online experience is becoming much richer. E-interiors offers a superbly organised database of home furnishings that you can search by product category, brand or designer. You can download technical specifications, as well as 2-D and 3-D images of favourite designer objects, from taps and tables to baths and bidets. Given the apparent sophistication of the site, the lack of definition in some of the thumbnail pictures is disappointing. Be warned: the service is aimed at dedicated amateur and professional designers who already have CAD software, such as Auto CAD from Autodesk, loaded onto their computers.

FIND THE RIGHT COLOURS
www.dulux.co.uk

If you are fed up with “matchpot” paint squares disfiguring your walls as you agonise over new colours, the paint supremo Dulux may help. You can ask its “colour consultant” to come up with suggestions based on the atmosphere you want to create. There is also an online scrapbook in which you select pictures of rooms and paint them by dragging and dropping colours into selected areas. If you register a username and password, you can save your ideas and return to them later. These are not sophisticated services, though: for example, it would be better if you could see what your chosen colours would look like from several aspects rather than just one. Come here for inspiration on where to start.

HALF-BAKED DREAM
www.mfi.co.uk

We are all familiar with in-store kitchen- design software, where your dream kitchen is modelled on screen. Now a similar design facility is, theoretically, available online from the furniture and kitchens giant MFI. You need to have the latest version of Shockwave to make proper use of the function, but I had difficulty even downloading and con-figuring this software, so let’s hope you don’t. After loading Shockwave successfully, I still had trouble getting the kitchen planner to work, and the program froze when it came to producing the plan. My dream kitchen remained a dream. I encountered the same complications on another computer. As an online catalogue and shop, MFI’s site isn’t bad; as a DIY design tool, it is pretty hopeless.

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