From PEOPLE Magazine Click to enlarge
Seconds after arriving home, George Tenet spotted the woman on his rooftop. "I was panicked," says Tenet, 49, now director of the Central Intelligence Agency, of the 1991 incident. The woman was his wife, Stephanie Glakas-Tenet, busy fixing the chimney. "My husband is brilliant at national security," says Glakas-Tenet. "My strength is home security."

She does more than chimneys. Teaming up with fellow CIA wife Julie Sussman, Glakas-Tenet, 46, wrote Dare to Repair, a just-published 253-page guide for women who want to do their own dirty work—from plumbing and electrical problems to installing a peephole—on the home front. Says Sussman, 42: "We were careful about choosing repairs any woman can do."

Sussman says that whenever her husband, Jerry, also 42, left on an overseas assignment, "Boom! Something would happen" in their Centreville, Va., house. After discovering that "most repair books were written for tool-belted men," she got together with Glakas-Tenet. Sussman handled the words; Glakas-Tenet, whose father, retired State Department official John, now 85, gave her a toolbox when she was a preteen, provided the expertise.

While taking time out to raise their families—the Tenets have a teenage son; the Sussmans have a 13-year-old son and a 10-year-old daughter—the two women surveyed 500 female acquaintances to determine which repairs to include, and tested them all.

One glaring omission: any work that requires climbing onto the roof. It's okay for Glakas-Tenet to do it, but for beginners, says Sussman, "it's just too dangerous."