Pro Handyman Blog

Here is the desert we get many unique plumbing problems. The water here is harder than a tax collectors heart. Many of us here have water softeners to make getting out of the shower less itchy.

Lots of people have water softeners (aka water conditioners), but don’t know or can’t tell if they are working. To me it’s pretty easy to tell if I have soft water, but I can understand how some people can’t tell.

You can perform a simple test to determine if you have soft water. You need a small container with a lid ( a baby food jar works great), water, and 1 drop of liquid soap. That’s it. As far as the container, if you don’t have a baby food jar, you could use a canning jar or something along that size or less but it must have a lid.

Fill the jar half full of water and drop in 1 drop of liquid soap. I like dishwashing soap, but you can also use hand soap in a pinch. Use water from a bathtub or shower and not the kitchen sink, as water softener loops are typically plumbed to avoid the kitchen sink. Screw on the lid tightly and shake the jar like it owes you money. If you have suds in the top half of the jar you have soft water. If your water settles back down with no soap suds you have hard water.

This is what I would call an “acid test”, in that it is not going to tell you the degree of softness, but rather an unscientific determination of whether or not you have soft water.

If you’ve installed wallpaper before you know it can be messy, but the finished product is very nice. The last think you want to see on your newly wallpapered wall, in a plain looking builder-grade white wall switch cover. Boring! Here is how you can dress it up and make it blend in.

You can cover the wall plate with wallpaper to match the paper on the wall. Use a piece of wallpaper that will perfectly match the pattern. You can cut a large square and place it in the general area of the switch plate to make sure. If you have a complex pattern you will have to be more exact, but if you have, for example, vertical stripes it will be fairly easy to match up.

You are going to dry fit the wallpaper over the switch plate cover, so you will need to remove the cover and turn off the power to the switch. Cut the paper to fit around the cover leaving about an inch of overhang. When you have the pattern matched up, you can use contact cement on the cover. You will need to work fairly quickly as the cement dries fast. Fit the paper and hold it to the wall to make sure the pattern lines up. For the openings in the wall plate, use a blade and cut an “X” at the opening, folding the flaps through the opening and around to the back Let everything dry, and then you can screw it back on the wall. For a finishing touch you can paint the screw heads the same color as the wallpaper.

Usually when someone tells me that his toilet handle is broken, it’s not really the toilet handle that is broken. It is usually the chain. Over time, the chain will either corrode and break or the chain will pull out of the rubber flapper. Either way, when you push down on the handle, you get little resistance. You can feel that the flapper is not being lifted to flush the toilet.

The solution here is to remove the toilet tank lid and see what has happened. If the flapper is torn and the chain is no longer attached to it, you will need a new flapper. The flapper will come with a chain and it needs to be attached to the handle and adjusted, and you are back in business.

If the chain is corroded and broken you will need a new chain, but since these come with a new flapper, buy a new one and install it. The old flapper will lift off of the ears on either side of the flush tube and the new one snaps right back down on it. You are going to have to play with the chain to get the length right. Hook the chain on the end of the toilet handle so that there is a little slack in it. Flush the toilet and see how well it works. If the flapper doesn’t lift all the way up, shorten the chain. If the chain is so taut that the flapper doesn’t completely stop the water from exiting the tank, lengthen the chain.

There are going to be times when you have to replace a water valve, be it a ball valve or gate valve. Plumbing hint: use a ball valve. The design is far superior to that of the gate valve meaning it will work when you need it to. All this for only a few dollars more.

When soldering a valve onto a copper pipe, care needs to be taken so that you don’t damage the valve with the torch, specifically the heat of the torch.

When soldering the valve, (aka sweating copper), you certainly want a good connection, but you don’t want to damage any of the internal mechanisms. The heat of the torch is intense and so you must prepare the valve to avoid this heat buildup. The easiest way to do this is to open the valve to allow air flow.

To allow air flow for the ball valve, turn the handle so that it is in line with the valve, in other words, not perpendicular. For the gate valve, you want to turn the handle counterclockwise to lift the gate out and allow air flow. Here is an article on how to solder copper pipe. Always have a bucket of water nearby. It’s also good practice to dunk a rag in the water to cool the valve and piping down after you remove the torch.

This is a carpentry job that is more of a band-aid approach that a permanent repair. If you look at the desk you are sitting behind, chances are it’s made of particle board and laminate (unless you really forked over some money). This furniture usually needs to be assembled in steps. It goes together simply using a cam system that fits into a small hole. When you turn the cam, it causes pressure to be exerted inside the hole to hold the two pieces together. Moving the piece of furniture can cause some problems. Occasionally, the parts will separate and leave the cam system broken.

Without the cams to hold the pieces together, I’ve found that angle brackets work pretty well. If the desktop separates from the side, use a 90-degree bracket and some screws with large threads. The large threads are important as they will bite into the particle board better than those with small threads. Just make sure the length of the screws aren’t so large that they poke through the surface on the other side.

Clamp the two pieces together and hold the bracket into position. Pre-drill small holes and then install the screws to hold everything together. Tighten the screws until snug only. If you over tighten the screws, they may destroy the particle board that the threads are biting into.

Caulking is the universal duct tape. It heals what ails you. Visiting a customers house and just keeping the old eyes open can yield plenty of maintenance that has been neglected. Case in point: walk outside and look around the perimeter of your windows and doors.

It is customary to caulk the area where trim meets the wall. For example, when you install a door, you will have brick molding or stucco molding that goes around the perimeter of the door. Where the brick or stucco mold meets the wall, you lay down a bead of caulk and work it into the area with a wet finger. This prevents water from entering the wall even though the stucco mold might have been installed right up to the molding. The same goes for windows. On older windows, you may have molding around the perimeter of the windows. A bead of caulking will go a long way in preventing water damage. Modern windows in newer houses typically don’t have this type of molding as the stucco will go right up to the window. However, it’s a good practice to caulk where the window frame meets the wall material.

Once the caulking dries, you can paint it to match the wall material and it will blend in. Once caulking starts pulling away from the surface, it needs to be completely removed and replaced to prevent water intrusion.

A potential customer called and was wanting some specific questions answered about cabinets. Apparently, she was buying a foreclosed home that was missing a bank of cabinets on the wall. It wasn’t a huge kitchen, but the base cabinets were there and the wall cabinets were gone. She wanted to know about getting exact matches for the missing cabinets.

The house was 5 years old and although there wasn’t a manufacturer’s label on the cabinets, they were certainly builder-grade. The customer was planning on renting out the property for the long term and had no plans to move into it. She was absolutely bent on getting an exact match. In order to do that you would have to get the right color, species of wood, style and finish. That’s the equivalent of a cabinet trifecta

I explained to her that although you probably couldn’t get an exact match of the base cabinets, you could certainly get them close enough that a prospective tenant wouldn’t notice. After all, there is a gap between the base cabinets and the wall cabinets.

If you are looking for a match, you can remove a cabinet door and take it with you. You can go to home centers and specialty cabinet suppliers who will be able to come very close to the existing cabinets.

As an alternative (albeit an expensive one), you could install wall cabinets and then reface the cabinets that don’t match.

A lot of us have concrete patios, but some forego the maintenance-free concrete and go with the more cosmetically appealing patio pavers. As a handyman, I’ve done a few of these and if you like backaches, then this job is for you.

Patio pavers are hand placed into position. Pavers can be from a variety of materials, from stone to brick. Pavers are set into a bed of either concrete or sand. When you find a loose paver, it is typically one set in sand rather than concrete.

It’s not difficult to repair a loose paver in sand. Typically, the perimeter of the paver has worked its way loose as the sand that fills the gaps has gone. Remove the paver and add or subtract sand from under it to get it level with the surrounding pavers. You can used washed sand for this. Add small amounts at a time, spread it around and push the paver into its space with a slight twisting motion. Make sure the gaps from the paver to its neighbors is all uniform and then fill in the gaps with more sand. Normally if you were installing an entire patio, you could use a vibration compactor, but for a couple of pavers it’s not worth it.

Use a push broom and push the sand around the gaps to fill them. You can tap on the pavers to get the sand to settle or even sprinkle some water on them and then refill any voids.

Removing the wobbling motion of a ceiling fan can be easy or difficult. The easy part is adding weights on the top of the blade or blades that are out of balance. Great. The challenging part is if you have already done that and the fan still is out of balance. There are a couple of things you can do even before adding weights to balance the fan.

First, check to see that the fan is securely mounted to the junction box in the ceiling and that the junction box is rock solid in the ceiling. Sometimes a homeowner will install a heavy ceiling fan into a junction box that was designed for a light fixture. Well, the ceiling fan is much heavier than the old builder-grade light fixture and consequently it moves. If the box in the ceiling has the slightest bit of movement in it, the ceiling fan will also move. Try installing a brace bar that spans the ceiling joists. These are made for ceiling fans and has a junction box that can be moved along the bar to accommodate the position of the ceiling fan.

Lastly, pick a spot on the ceiling and hold a tape measure up to touch it. Slowly revolve the fan around, one blade at a time, to see where the tip of each blade strikes the tape measure. They should all hit the same spot. If one blade is too high or too low, the fan will wobble. Use rubber washers at the front or rear of the mounting bracket to align the tip of the fan so that all the blades are on the same plane.

If you need to remove sink faucet handles, you might be scratching your head. Manufacturers do a pretty good job concealing the means to remove them. There are some tell-tale signs though that they are made to be removed. Generally, the less expensive the faucet, the easier it is so see how to remove the handles.

Most faucet handles are held in place with a screw through the top of the handle and then covered by some type of cap. Sometimes the caps are very conspicuous and sometimes they are the entire top of the handle. Look for a small seam that you can pry up with a small screwdriver or blade. Be careful here though as you want to pry off the cap, but don’t want to scratch the faucet handle.

Other faucet handles are held in place with a small setscrew. These are not obvious as a set screw, but rather reside in a small hole somewhere on the handle. Look for a small hole near the base of the handle that you can insert an Allen wrench into to remove the setscrew and pull off the handle.

Finally, some faucets have lever-style handles where the base of the handle screws off of the faucet. This one is the least obvious methods of holding the faucet handle to the body. Grab the bulbous end near the base of the faucet and unscrew it. With the handle off, you can service the faucet.