Not every project goes as well as planned. We would be happy to spend a few minutes answering your questions.
Current Articles | RSS Feed
After you install an access ladder, you will have a fairly unattractive rough finish. You can dress it up alot by installing molding around the perimeter of the opening. Think of how your front door would look if you didn't have any trim around it. You would see gaps and wood shims around the perimeter. It's the same thing with an attic ladder.
To trim out an attic ladder, cut the wood shims so that they are flush with the ceiling. This will make it so that the trim will sit flat against the ceiling.
You can select whatever size and style of molding you like, but it is very helpful to have a power miter saw to cut the angles at the corners. You will have to measure and cut 4 lengths of molding, with a miter cut of 45-degrees on each end of each piece of molding. Instead of cutting all pieces at once, I cut the first piece and move around the opening one piece at a time. It makes for a much more accurate installation.
To secure the molding to the ceiling, Use a nail gun if you have one, otherwise you can use 4d finishing nails and a hammer.
When you are laying ceramic tile, you will invariably run into a situation where you need to cut a notch out of a tile. If you are tiling a portion of a wall, you find this when you encounter an electical outlet. For this application, the cut doesn't have to be perfect as the outlet cover will hide any flaws.
To make the cut, a tile saw is the easist method. Depending on the type of saw you have, you may be able to turn the tile over and push the tile into the saw blade. If the tile is too large, you can lift the tile up into the saw blade. This will give you the outermost cuts. Now you have to remove the material in between the cuts.
High end saws have a plunge feature that will allow you to connect the 2 previous cuts by turning the tile over and cutting from behind with the plunge feature. For the rest of us that don't have a plunge feature on their tile saws, you can nibble out that materal with the saw.
You can make successive parallel cuts with the 2 cuts you have already made until you have a line of cuts. Then you can push the tile perpendicular to the blade so that the spinning blade erodes the skinny strips of tile. Just be careful and wear proper protection. What you will end up with is a notch in your ceramic tile.
PEX plumbing lines will have to be extended when you install a comfort height or handicapped toilet. Since these toilets are higher than normal, the distance from the water supply line to the bottom of the toilet tank where the line connects to the fill valve is greater.
PEX is cross-linked polyethylene pipe and it’s very popular with builders. PEX requires special fittings and crimping tools. PEX piping is secured to a fitting with a collar or sleeve. The fitting slides into the end of the pipe and the collar is compressed around it with a special tool. Different manufacturers use different methods of crimping; some use a copper ring, while others use a stainless steel sleeve. Generally speaking, one manufacturer’s method is not compatible with that of another.
Fortunately, you don’t have to worry about expensive tools. You can use some plastic parts and screw them all together. Not all home centers carry a variety of PEX parts so you may have to look around. You can also use sharkbite fittings.
Your toilet’s water supply line looks like a pipe with a female adapter on the end. You can screw the adapter onto the fill valve sticking out of the bottom of the toilet tank. A crimp ring will hold the adapter onto the pipe.
You will need to cut the plastic pipe in the middle somewhere and splice in a length of pipe. Give yourself about four inches from the end of the fitting and cut the pipe squarely. You can use a tubing cutter or a utility knife, but the cut must be square and free of burrs.
Cut a piece of piping longer that you need for the splice. Now you can join these pipes together with screw-on fittings. First slide on the large nut, small end first, onto the pipe.
Next, push the grip ring onto the tube, flat side first, so that it is about one-eighth of an inch from the end (the grip ring looks like a skinny washer with little fingers sticking out of it). Now, slide the cone washer onto the tube, large end first. The cone will push the grip ring back into the correct position. The cone is in the correct position when it is one-half inch past the end of the tube. Slide the mating piece of the fitting onto the pipe and tighten the nut. Tighten it by hand until it starts to squeal and then give it one additional turn with a wrench.
You can hold the pipe up to the toilet and measure where you need to cut it for length. Make the cut at the desired location and repeat the process to attach the end of the pipe with the adapter on it.
Removing A Door From Its Hinges
You may have occasion to replace a door or just remove it for painting, etc. Removing a door from its hinges is easy. I use a hammer and a screwdriver and its out in under a minute.
I usually start with the bottom hinge and move upwards and try to disturb the door as little as possible. When you get to the last hinge, if you are careful, you will be able to lift and move the door easily. If you remove the top hinge pin first, the door can flop over and fall when you remove the last pin.
Starting at the bottom, tap a small screwdriver into the bottom hinge pin and move the pin upwards slightly. Use a standard screwdriver and place it just under the head of the hinge pin and further tap it out of the hinge. The two halves of the hinge may be under some tension and so if you move the door slightly, you may find it easier to lift the pin out.
Once you get to the last hinge, be alert. Tap the last hinge pin about halfway out of the hinge. Hold the side of the door with one hand and lift the pin out with the other. With both hands you can hold and move the door.
You press the button for your garage door opener and it hums but won’t open or close. What do you do? Well, you hope that the carriage is disengaged from the rail.
There are a couple reasons why the opener’s motor operates but the door doesn’t move. Look for a manual release on the rail of the garage door opener. It is a handle attached to a short length of rope. It is possible that the manual release was activated which will make it so that the motor runs but he door doesn’t move. This happens if, for example, you have kids that like to get into mischief, or sometimes the handle can get caught in a roof rack of a tall SUV. Pull the handle back and re-engage it, press the button and cross your fingers that it works.
More challenging fixes follow. If you have a chain drive operated by a sprocket, the gearing may have broken or the sprocket may have sheared off. You will need to take the housing off of the motor and look inside. If you see a lot of white powder, that is the remnants of the teeth of the gears, and they will need to be replaced. That probably isn’t a typical homeowner job and you may consider calling a garage door repair technician.
Here's a great carpentry project. If you are installing chair molding, you can finish it with a return and make it look very professional. A return is where the molding doesn’t appear to have a cut end, rather the profile of the molding returns into the wall. It doesn’t really, but with a couple of well-designed cuts, it looks that way.
Using a return will enable you to start and stop the molding wherever you want, in the middle of a wall for example. You are no longer bound to begin and end at a corner.
To make a return, you will need two pieces of molding, a long piece that runs along the wall, and a short piece for the return. You will cut each piece of molding at a 45-degree angle to form a right angle. I usually cut the long piece first and secure it to the wall. Cutting the short piece is dangerous. Use a piece of molding that is much longer than you need and cut the 45-degree angle in it, then cut it to length. Using a miter saw is perfect for this but keep your fingers away from the blade. Clamp the piece of wood onto the miter box table and cut it rather than using your fingers next to the blade.
Once the pieces are cut, use wood glue and painters tape to hold it in place until it dries. If you use a nail gun, you risk splitting the small piece in half. The glue certainly takes longer, but the appearance is great.
Cutting a hole in the side of your house may seem daunting. If you are going to install a dog door, or something else requiring a hole, you’re just going to have to do it. There are as many ways and tools to cut stucco as there are people that have done it. So don’t be afraid, just careful.
My weapon of choice is a grinder with a masonry blade, but you can use a variety of tools for the job. You can use a circular saw with a masonry blade, or even a carborundum blade in it, but they don’t cut as well as a masonry blade. I would refrain from using a reciprocating saw. They cut very aggressively and can’t cut as shallow as a round blade.
Before you plunge a blade in the wall, do some investigating first. Run a stud finder on the inside of the wall to check for obstructions, look for the possibility of power lines, gas lines, or water lines where you want the hole. If you cut a hole and find these, you will either have to re-route them or cut a hole in a different location.
Draw an outline of the hole on the stucco and cut the hole just deep enough to get through the material. You may have only foam board behind the stucco, or you may have wood sheeting. Use tools that will cause the least amount of damage. Don’t cut too deep without knowing for certain that there isn’t a pipe or other obstruction behind the wall.
A caulking gun makes caulking a shower very easy, and gives excellent results. The gun gives you great control over where the caulk goes and how much of it squeezes out of the tube.
I don’t like applying caulking with a squeeze tube. Squeezing a tube with your hands while trying to accurately place the tip of the tube spells trouble, especially when the tube starts running low. You have to squeeze harder and the results will look poor.
A caulking gun holds the tube and squeezes out the caulking smoothly, effortlessly, and accurately. After you load the tube in the gun, cut the tip of the tube at an angle. You want the hole to be as small as is necessary. You don’t want a ¼” hole in the tube if you are covering a gap 1/8” wide. In this situation, when you smooth out the caulking, you will end up removing more caulking than you need to get a water tight joint. It will also look poor.
Another trick is to apply the bead of caulking in a continuous bead at a constant speed. The only stopping point should be a corner. You may need to twist the gun as you approach a turn, but keep the tip moving.
Once you have a uniform bead of caulking down, wet your finger and smooth out the bead. The idea here is to not only push the caulking into the joint, but give it a nice appearance.
There are lots of reasons you may get water damage around a door. The door may not have been installed and sealed to the slab correctly, the weather stripping may be bad or missing, etc. There are many more.
Look to see if there is a drip edge on the door. This is a lip that juts out of the door and prevents water from running down the door and under it (a sweep can help prevent this, but not in all cases). If your door doesn’t have a drip edge on the bottom exterior of the door, it may have a saw kerf cut into it. A saw kerf is cut on the underside of the door at the front edge. This makes it so that as water runs down the door and underneath, the kerf causes the droplets to fall to the exterior rather that travel across the width of the door and cause damage. A drip edge can also help deflect splashing water as it runs off of the roof.
Installing a drip edge is simple. Some slide along the underside of the door and incorporate a sweep with it. Some fasten to the exterior and screw in. In any case, you will need to pre-drill the holes and screw it to the door to secure it.
At some point, you will have grout lines in your floor that need to be repaired. You will notice voids in the grout. More commonly, you will see cracks in between the grout and the wood baseboards. This may be due to seasonal movement or impact damage.
Grout can be sloppy to install. So the trick is to minimize getting grout where you don’t want it to go. Where the baseboard meets the tile, you can minimize this mess by using wide painters tape. Before you start taping, remove any loose grout and vacuum out the area.
Place the roll of tape flat on the floor and tape along the baseboard. This will make it so that the finished grout line is at the same level as the floor. I also tape along the edge of the tile so that the new grout won’t get on the old grout and tile. It’s okay if this happens, but they you will have two colors if the color of the new grout doesn’t perfectly match the color of the old grout.
So when you are done taping, you will have two pieces of tape with a small gap in between them. Now it’s time to start grouting. Use a grout float and fill the gap in between the tape. Use the corner of the float and push the grout into the gap. Try to remove as much of the grout as possible leaving a near finished surface.
Wait until the grout starts to dry on the tape. It will look much lighter than the grout in the gap. Gently pull the tape and it will leave a perfect grout line level with the floor. At this point you may choose to leave it alone or use a damp sponge to wipe the surface of the grout line.
