Being a Las Vegas handyman requires one to work in pretty extreme conditions. In the wintertime when it can hover near freezing, you can always add layers of clothing and drink something warm. But it’s the summer heat of the desert that really makes me suffer. The following are things I do to make sure I make it safely through the day.
If I know I will be working outside for extended periods of time, bring the right clothing. In addition to sunscreen, wear a wide brimmed hat and sunglasses, and wear loose fitting light colors…even a long sleeved shirt. There is a reason you see so many landscapers working with long-sleeved shirts on; they keep the sun off of your skin and still allow you to sweat which will evaporate and keep your skin cool. You can also keep a wet rag around your neck to help cool you.
Take advantage of ANY shade you can find. For example, if you are prepping a new sprinkler valve for installation, do it under a shade tree rather than leaning over the sprinkler box directly in the sun.
Finally, and most importantly, you must hydrate. Drink plenty of water frequently. If you sip water throughout the day and maybe have a regular snack for energy, your body will function better. If you get to the point where you feel thirsty, you are already in trouble.
I learned a valuable trick when installing a sprinkler system in 110-degree heat many years ago. Fill a one gallon jug of water about 2/3rds full and put it in the freezer overnight. As the water freezes and expands it will fill most of the bottle. When you head out into the heat the next day, remove the nearly full jug and add water to fill it up. As you work throughout the day, the ice will slowly melt leaving cold water for the majority of the day. It sure beats drinking warm water.
If you've got a loose railing or a wrought iron fence that sits on top of concrete or concrete block, there is an easy way to reattach it. If you are like this Las Vegas handyman, you want to try the easy things first. The railing will be held to the concrete by a fastener, typically a concrete anchor. If you are lucky, you can tighten it up and be done. There is a nut that holds the railing to the concrete, simply tighten this nut and cross your fingers that it works.
You may have to use a larger anchor. If that is the case, you will have to remove the old anchor and drill the proper sized hole according to the size of the anchor you are using. You can use a standard drill with a masonry bit, which will take longer, or you can use a hammer drill which will quicken the job.
Once the hole is drilled you can use a redhead anchor. This anchor drops in the hole and has bolt threads sticking out of the top. Once the anchor is in the hole, set the railing on top of the bolt and add the washer and nut. Tighten the nut down to firmly hold the railing in place. As you tighten the nut the anchor grabs the walls of the hole you drilled for a solid installation.
If that corner in your room is beckoning you to do something with it, you might try installing a corner shelf there to put pictures, books, or maybe even a TV. So here is how a Las Vegas handyman goes about it?
You can buy a corner shelf at a home center, but these tend to be a little small for storing or displaying anything of substance. You can certainly make one out of solid wood, MDF (medium density fiberboard), or even melamine, but you will have to install a decorative edge on the melamine or you want to curve the shelf. You need to figure out the size and whether you want the shelf curved or straight across. After that it is a matter of determining how you want the shelf to appear...paint, stained and varnished...you decide.
So all that is left is to install the shelf in the corner. I like to use 2 ledger boards for this. You can use 1"x2"s and, after making sure they are level, screw them at your designated height into the wall studs. The shelf will sit on top of these boards and get secured to them with countersunk screws.
If you need a little extra support for a heavier object (like a TV), you can install some cross braces using the same 1"x2"(or larger) wood supports that span from one ledger board to the other. These cross supports will minimize deflection and give the shelf more stability.
Little kids love using the soap dish as a handle to pull themselves out of the bathtub. It's also the perfect height for a women to rest her foot on as she shaves her legs. So a soap dish takes a lot of abuse, until it finally comes off of the wall. So what do you do then? Well, you can call your favorite Las Vegas handyman, or you can grab a few items and stick it back on the wall yourself.
Some soap dishes are simply glued to the existing ceramic wall tile, and other ones are glued to the cement board or green board and then the ceramic tile is placed around the soap dish. Whichever style you have, you may be able to reuse it or you might have to purchase a new one.
If you are sticking it back on to the ceramic tile surface, use mastic and get it nice and level. Once you have the soap dish in place, use some blue painter's tape to hold it there until the mastic dries, and then remove the tape.
If you are installing the soap dish into the pocket created by the surrounding tile, after you clean out the area, you can use mortar or mastic, again using the tape to hold it in place.
Sometimes when you are looking to hang something on the wall, there isn't a wall stud where you need it to be. A Las Vegas handyman deals with these types of issues all the time. I personally don't like plastic hollow wall anchors. These are plastic cone-shaped inserts that do into the wall to hold a screw. These are geared more for small screws with small threads.
You've probably bought products that get secured to the drywall that come with these hollow wall anchors. These anchors get tapped into the drywall. Once the anchor is imbedded into the drywall, you can install the screw which tightens into the hole at the center of the anchor. There are good and bad with these anchors.
The good point of these anchors is that they are easy and convenient. However, I dislike them for any kind of holding power. Since they are plastic, you can't fully tighten the screw in the anchor. If the item you are hanging has any kind of weight to it, it could pull the screw out of the anchor.
There are certainly stronger, more reliable anchors to use such as molly bolts (aka butterfly bolts), and EZ anchors. They will hold considerable weight and are easy to install into the drywall.
That's right, my ANNUAL power bill. I've been a convert for 2 years now, and I never thought I would say this without feeling like trailer trash, but I love my swamp cooler. Before you get visions of me in a trailer, let me tell you that I was converted by some neighbors. I'm lucky to live in a nice neighborhood with many of my neighbors being self-employed or professionals. Yes, they use swamp coolers too. If it makes you feel better, you may call them evaporative coolers.
As a Las Vegas handyman, I am both blessed and cursed to live in a hot, dry summer climate. This combination of dry heat is perfect for a swamp cooler. For those of us that live in a desert climate, we tend to use the bulk of our annual power during the summer months. So naturally, the summer is target-rich for cutting your power bills.
My power consumption went down so dramatically that the power company paid me an unannounced visit on a holiday Saturday to snoop around and make sure I wasn‘t stealing power from them. I'm not sure if they love me now or hate me.
So, I've established that a swamp cooler will save you money over a traditional air conditioning system, but I will be the first to say that a swamp cooler is not for everyone. It's not the type of thing you plug in and forget about. You will need to replace the cooling pads and keep an eye on it and the weather. Humidity is the arch-nemesis of the swamp cooler, but if the air is dry outside you might want to keep the winter coat handy.
A well-tuned swamp cooler should be able to drop the temperature by 30 degrees, so if it is 100 degrees outside, look for inside temps of 70 degrees.
The biggest challenge for a homeowner is where to install a swamp cooler. Ideally, install it on the north side of the house (where it's shady) through a window that raises up-and-down. If you have to install it where the sun will hit it, arrange something to cast shade upon it. If the sun hits the unit, it will warm the air by a few degrees, which is very important. I like a side-draft unit installed through a ground floor window, but you can certainly cut a hole in your wall to accommodate it. Of course, you need to take precautions so that security in maintained with window locks, etc. should you choose to place it in a window.
Using a swamp cooler takes a different mindset too. Basically, you are pressurizing the house like a balloon. You must exhaust the air so that you get airflow. This is accomplished by slightly opening some windows or by using up-ducts (trademarked as "Up-Dux"), which ventilate air into the attic. You can plan on venting 1-2 square feet of space for every 1000 cfm (cubic feet per minute) of air the swamp cooler produces. If you don't want airflow in a particular room, don't ventilate air in that room (i.e don't open the window or install an up-duct). To determine how much cfm you will need, take the volume of air in your house and divide that number by 2. For example, if you have a 1,400 square foot house with 8 foot ceilings, you would need 5,600 cfm of swamp cooler output (1,400 x 8=11,200. 11,200 /2=5,600).
After I install a swamp cooler, I will level it and fill in any gaps with weatherstripping. If you have a side-closing window you will need to fill in the top portion with a material that makes you comfortable...many people use plywood although this isn't very attractive. I let the unit run and check the wetness of the pads. If the pads are not uniformly wet, you are allowing hot incoming air to mix with the cooler air that the unit has produced, which will raise the temperature of the air entering the home. Every degree counts. If there is a dry area on the pad, I will recheck for level, and if necessary drill more holes in the water supply trough that feeds the pads.
At some point you will have to perform maintenance on the unit. Here is some information on how to replace a swamp cooler pump and how to replace a swamp cooler motor.
There are certainly times during the summer that I have to shut off the swamp cooler and turn on the traditional air conditioning. This lasts for about 3 weeks, from late July to early August, and is due to the "monsoon season" and the high humidity levels.
It used to be that when you bought a house, there was a plastic cover over the pre-wired location for the light fixture. Boy, have times changed. As a Las Vegas handyman, now we find dangling wires coming out of the ceiling where the light fixture was, since the previous owner removed the fixture when the bank forced him out during the foreclosure process. Regardless of a ceiling cover or not, the new light fixture installs like it always has. By the way, it's a good idea to test the wires to make sure they aren't live while you are working on them.
You will find three wires coming out of the ceiling, a black hot wire, a white neutral wire, and a green wire (or bare copper wire) for ground. You might also see a red wire. If you do, you can install a ceiling fan and have separate switches to run both the fan and light independently. If you won't be using the red wire, screw a wire nut on it and neatly tuck it into the junction box.
Typically the light fixture will have mounting holes in it where it gets secured to the junction box in the ceiling. Loosen the screws in the junction box until they stand proud by ½ inch. Then you can place the fixture over the screws, turn it slightly and tighten the screws down to hold it in place. On some fixtures, you will wire it first and then secure it to the ceiling, but this is challenging trying to hold the fixture will connecting the wires.
To connect the wires, simply hold the black hot wire to the black fixture wire and screw on a wire nut. Do the same for the white neutral wires, and finally the ground wires. Then just install the bulbs and glass globe.
As I pulled into my neighborhood, I noticed a neighbor furiously cutting off a lock with a hacksaw (or at least attempting to). It was on a side gate and he was breaking a sweat trying to remove it. So out of the goodness of my heart I stopped to offer some advice.
Trying to cut through a pad lock with a hacksaw is good aerobic exercise, but it won't do much for removing the lock. You have a couple of options here. You could go to a rental yard (or many home centers rent equipment) and rent bolt cutters. For a case hardened pad lock you will want to rent bolt cutters with 3 foot handles...this will cost under $10.00. Grab the shank of the pad lock with the cutting head wherever it is convenient, and squeeze the handles together (this isn't as easy as it sounds). The long handles provide plenty of leverage but it will leave you out of breath.
The other option is to grind it off. This Las Vegas handyman carries lots of tools and one of them is a grinder. What we ended up doing is using a grinder with a metal cutting blade in it. It makes quick work of a pad lock, and the shower of sparks really impresses the neighborhood kids.
Have you ever gone to open a kitchen cabinet drawer and the front about falls off in your hand? Well, builder-grade cabinets are built builder-grade. If you have a drawer that has a lot of weight in it, like a silverware drawer, a couple of quick pulls will do just the trick to damage it.
Children are the great destroyers of drawers. If they go to open a heavy drawer quickly, the weight of the contents slams into the drawer front. Repetition of this will cause the particle board box to start coming apart. Small children also like to open a drawer and pull themselves up on it to peek inside. It doesn't take much for the drawer guides to come loose from the sides.
Fixing these drawers is not terribly difficult. I would get some "L" brackets and, after tapping everything back in place, secure them to the corners of the box. I would secure the corners of the box with the brackets, but leave the bottom of the drawer alone as this is held in place by a groove on the inside perimeter of the drawer.
If the drawer front (the attractive wood piece) pulls off of the front of the drawer, you can screw that back together from the inside of the box. You must pre-drill the holes (not too deep as you don't want to go through the drawer front), and screw the drawer box to the drawer front.
To stop this from happening again, you might consider some child-proof locks.
Its time to hang your holiday lights, which isn't really a home repair, but is is a job for a handyman in Las Vegas, but you get to stand on a ladder anyway. Hanging holiday lights isn't really difficult, but doing it the first time takes a little more legwork than it will in subsequent years.
For a home with eaves, that is, an overhang, I suggest using plastic hangars, which can be purchased at a home center for less than $5. These are small clips that have a nail driven at an angle through them. Nail these to the inside bottom of the fascia board so they can't be seen. If you space them about 18 inches apart, you can get the cord to pull taut and all of the lights will face one direction. This is a very professional look. The other nice thing is that the lights are easy to take down, and next year you can hang them in half the time.
For a home without eaves, you can get the same look by using electrical cable ties, which cost about $3 per bag. These are the same type of ties that police officers use to handcuff criminals. Although the ties are plastic, they are very strong and can be used to cinch the cord.
Without an overhang, however, you won't have the luxury of choosing where to put the cord. If you hang it in the holes in the drip edge of the roof, just pull the cord tight, making sure the lights are facing the direction you want, then tighten it down. The only bummer is that when you remove the lights, you'll have to cut off the ties. If you can't find any holes, use clothespins to hold the cord at the edge of the roof tiles. Of course, the line will not be as tight, though.
Before you break out the extension ladder, the general rule is that the feet of the ladder should be placed a distance away from the wall of 25 percent of the height of the ladder as it rests on the wall. So, if your ladder is 10 feet tall, set the base 2 1/2 feet away from the wall.
A word of caution: When you're up on the ladder, keep your weight centered over it and don't stretch to reach the last hook. Instead, climb down and move the ladder over. I have a neighbor who broke his hip in a fall off a ladder; it could have been prevented if he had just climbed down and moved it.
Some people like to decorate even more and illuminate their garage door with halogen lights. This practice often results in several calls for help with electrical problems.
Typically, the only problems are due to circuits that are overloaded. If you're going to use a large display, spread the load over several circuits instead of just one. You'll know a problem exists when a circuit breaker in the main panel trips and shuts off power to the entire circuit.
The electrical outlets you'll use to power the display should be GFCI (ground fault circuit interrupter) protected. This prevents some dangerous situations by shutting off power when a ground fault is detected. If you'll be using extension cords, inspect them first to make sure they are in good condition and well-insulated.