This Old Dump: Renovate Without Decking Your Mate

by Laura Jensen Walker

Laura Jensen Walker knows the trials and triumphs of do-it-yourself remodeling--how it stirs up, dismantles, and remolds relationships, She's stretched her marriage while stripping wallpaper, dripping paint, and ripping out eye-sore fixtures. She's also collected friends who've sloshed around in gushing water, lived without bathrooms, paid for disastrous floors, and stalked unreliable contractors. They all survived, and with her trademark humor and honesty Laura shares their funny, encouraging stories. Walker encourages eager and beleaguered renovators not to lose heart while tackling the challenges of turning a fixer upper into a cozy home. Couples can survive a house rehab without wrecking their relationships.

156 pages, Paperback

First published August 15, 2004

About the author

Award-winning author Laura Jensen Walker has written several books, including the Lefty nominated historical fiction, DEATH OF A FLYING NIGHTINGALE. Dubbed "riveting and affecting" by NYT bestselling author Susan Elia MacNeal, this book spotlights a group of real-life overlooked women heroes--the Flying Nightingales--from WWII. An Air Force veteran formerly stationed in the UK, Laura had the great honor of interviewing the last living Flying Nightingale, before she passed.

Bibliophile Laura fell in love with mysteries after reading Trixie Belden in the fourth grade, Her cozy mystery debut, MURDER MOST SWEET (2020) was nominated for an Agatha Award, and her next cozy, THE ALPHABET SLEUTHS, releases in Feb. 2026. Publishers Weekly says about the book: "Walker's feisty, funny, and fully realized seniors easily sit beside the casts of THE THURSDAY MURDER CLUB and THE MARLOW MURDER CLUB in the coy pantheon. Readers will be charmed."

THE POSTMISTRESS OF PUDDLINGTON, Laura's second historical novel, features women on the home front in WWII England and releases in August 2026. She is currently at work on a women's fiction novel (aka book club fiction.)

Laura flew a typewriter across Europe in Uncle Sam's Air Force in her twenties, and lived in England for three years where she became a lifelong, tea-loving Anglophile. Shenow lives in Northern California with her Renaissance-man husband and their two rescue pups.