If you haven't spent much time poking around our vast discussion board community, you're doing yourself a great disservice. We have hundreds of boards on all kinds of financial and non-financial topics and thousands (nay, tens of thousands!) of board denizens.

The typical board features a bunch of people discussing a topic, asking questions, answering questions, offering advice, and relating experiences. Consider an example -- our Building/Maintaining a Home board. Whether you're shopping at Lowe's (NYSE:LOW) or Home Depot (NYSE:HD) for supplies to improve your home, or thinking about moving into new digs, the Fool members here can help out.

Here are some recently explored topics:

  • Rver43 announced that he/she was on the verge of making an offer for a house with a cracked concrete garage floor. A host of board folks offered guidance on how to evaluate the crack's seriousness and how to deal with the problem. I learned, among other things, that garage floors should slope toward the door, for drainage.


  • dlbuffy asked for opinions on manufactured homes and got several. Many people seem to have them and like them. I chimed in myself, noting how impressed I was at the last Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE:BRK.A) (NYSE:BRK.B) annual meeting, when I toured a Clayton Homes manufactured home.


  • SRenaeP asked for tips to improve her painting technique and got an eyeful. I learned that painter's tape should be removed as soon as the paint is tacky and that many painters prefer to paint "freehand," without tape, as taping presents its own problems, and most people will never notice the slightly crooked lines that paint jobs often have.


  • MrSnarkyPants asked about broken grout on floor tiles and how to prevent further damage and got several responses. I learned that it can be hard to remove tiles intact if you want to reset them.


  • Marcusfan started a discussion about how one should powerwash a house. I learned that there's a difference between just cleaning a house and preparing it for painting -- the latter takes much longer.

You can learn a lot about the ins and outs of buying or selling a home in our Home Center, which also features special mortgage rates. Also, visit our Buying or Selling a Home and Building/Maintaining a Home discussion boards for great insights and tips from fellow Fools. Many will help you spiff up or simply fix your home -- and odds are you'll save a few dollars in the process. Try our discussion board community for free and see how valuable it can be.

Longtime Fool contributor Selena Maranjian owns shares of Berkshire Hathaway.