Showing posts with label did you know. Show all posts
Showing posts with label did you know. Show all posts
Friday, September 16, 2016
Paint preserving trick!
My least favorite thing about painting is the clean-up process. My friend Steve was lamenting that he had a lot of painting to do and it's difficult to find a chunk of time to do it all. [BTW - Happy Birthday Steve!] Who wants to spend an hour or two painting followed by 30 minutes of clean-up just to have more painting to do the next day? I recently filled him in on a tip I learned when I was doing a lot of the painting in my house. When I perused my blog posts on painting I didn't see it. I can't believe I haven't shared this yet!
This tip come from my friend Cori who was a huge help when I was painting my house! In addition to doing a lot of the painting (including ceilings which she does FAR superior to me), she showed me that you can wrap rollers and paint brushes with plastic wrap to keep the paint wet if you need to do more painting the next day!
Steve can attest that it works. In fact, here's an email I got from him the other day:
"I finished painting a bedroom yesterday. Your plastic wrap suggestion worked like a charm. Thanks for the advice."
Wednesday, April 1, 2015
SHARK BITE! The DIY, affordable way to fix copper pipes.
Apparently I'm not the only one who drills into water pipes! Thanks to a blog reader/friend, I've learned of how to fix holes in copper pipes the easy way... no soldering necessary. I'm still glad I saw what the plumber did because I would have made much more of a mess and probably would have been second-guessing myself the whole time. Here's what to do.
For humility's sake, let's put up an image of the pipe again. Yep... hole right in the middle. I did that.
If this happens to you, here is what to do...
1) Sprint to turn off the water main! (hopefully you are reading this BEFORE drilling into a pipe because if you are googling "how to fix a copper pipe" and your water main is still on, then you are going to need professional help).
2) Clean up the mess and put a towel under the pipe where the hole is.
3) Drain your system by turning on your hot and cold water faucets in the bathrooms especially in the lowest level of your house.
4) Get a pipe cutter, deburr/depth gauge tool, and shark bite push-fit coupling from your local hardware store.
5) Cut the pipe on either side of the hole no more than 2 inches long. Be patient with cutting the pipe. It may take a while.
6) This short video shows you the rest of the steps. And dude had an accent so that's extra reason to watch.
I hope this saves someone $200+ in their next plumbing emergency!
For humility's sake, let's put up an image of the pipe again. Yep... hole right in the middle. I did that.
If this happens to you, here is what to do...
1) Sprint to turn off the water main! (hopefully you are reading this BEFORE drilling into a pipe because if you are googling "how to fix a copper pipe" and your water main is still on, then you are going to need professional help).
2) Clean up the mess and put a towel under the pipe where the hole is.
3) Drain your system by turning on your hot and cold water faucets in the bathrooms especially in the lowest level of your house.
4) Get a pipe cutter, deburr/depth gauge tool, and shark bite push-fit coupling from your local hardware store.
5) Cut the pipe on either side of the hole no more than 2 inches long. Be patient with cutting the pipe. It may take a while.
6) This short video shows you the rest of the steps. And dude had an accent so that's extra reason to watch.
I hope this saves someone $200+ in their next plumbing emergency!
Tuesday, March 4, 2014
asBESTos news!
My house is old, which means there's a risk of scary stuff... like asbestos. Asbestos isn't a big deal if it's left undisturbed, but as you may have figured out by now, my whole house needed revamping. If there's asbestos in my house... it's going to be disturbed. The basement - in its wood paneling glory - eventually needs to be gutted and remodeled and is the prime location for potential asbestos hazards in my house. Even though I won't be fixing my basement until I finish most other projects, I have some smaller ones coming up that require removal of ceiling tiles in the basement. I decided to throw on goggles, a mask, and gloves to get samples of the ceiling tiles and vinyl flooring tiles to send to a lab to be tested. It just made sense to test both pieces at the same time. You can buy kits for sending your samples away, but I read reviews that they are a waste of money because most labs just need the samples in ziploc bags.
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| Ceiling tiles |
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| Vinyl floor tiles |
The lab needed each sample in a separate marked ziploc bag, a chain of custody form, and a check or credit card to pay for the samples. I shipped it in a regular padded envelope and waited.
A few days later I got notice that they had received my samples and would get results to me approximately 9am on March 4th. Well, at 9:39 this morning in California an email was sent to me with the following great news!
I'm relieved that I don't have to hire professionals to gut my basement. Demolition is the most fun part, right?
Thursday, June 14, 2012
HVAC drama
This post is brought to you by my friend, Kelli, a homeowner in the state to the south :) This is her first of 3 blog posts about her learning experiences with HVAC systems. This is useful information that I wouldn't have been able to share with you b/c I have a furnace/AC set-up, which Kelli describes below.
In the past few weeks, I've discovered that I have severely neglected one of the largest and most expensive parts of my home - my HVAC system, made of a heat pump and an air handler, or what is called a split system. For those of you who don't know, a heat pump is a machine that heats your house in the winter and cools it in the summer. The air is pushed through the ducts and through an air handler, which cools or heats the air as it goes over a compressor coil ( aka the big expensive part). (Some of you may have furnaces which run on gas - you'd know this because you get a separate bill for gas from your electric bill. You also were probably warned about it from your home inspector.)
As a new home owner, I sort of knew I was supposed to change the filters in my house - I knew these were done when I moved in - but had no idea that otherwise my system needed to be inspected twice per year by HVAC specialists! In part, I didn't know this because my dad is my go-to handyman and he takes care of a lot of that stuff himself, and we never talked about it. Even when my sister mentioned having her system inspected recently, it just didn't click that I needed to do that, too! Silly me.
Two questions for you homeowners:
1) When is the last time you had someone provide regular maintenance and cleaning of your HVAC system? If you don't remember, schedule a tune up! Its much like getting an oil change on your car in terms of preventative maintenance! I haven't done this at all in my house and have no idea when it was done last, and now I have a leak in my system which could have been prevented or detected earlier if I'd had the "check up" done. More on that in a later post!
2) When is the last time you changed your air filters in your return air handlers? (Most people have these unless they have a fancy filter like a media filter or an electrostatic filter inside/connected to their air handler - which requires some different maintenance.) It's recommended that you change these monthly or bimonthly so you keep good indoor air quality that you're breathing in, and you keep dust and other particles out of the HVAC system so it stays clean!
Here's what my air filters looked like after (gasp!) a year of not being changed:
It was super easy for me to change them. I went to Lowe's since it is right next door and bought 2 for $16 total. I purchased the mid-grade of filters (not the $1 ones but not the $16 each ones either) which have a semi-pleated look. My dad suggested that size, and the contractors I've spoken to says its the best plan. The $16 ones don't really do much more than the $8 ones (even though they claim to help with allergies) but instead can actually limit the air circulating through your house and make it work harder. The $1 do help, but don't filter out the smaller particles that the mid-range ones can catch. One contractor I've spoken to says buy these in bulk and change them monthly to help keep your system working well. Others say every 2 months or even every 3 months. My return air handlers and my vents are all on the ceilings, which is good news in that dust and dog hair don't get as easily into those systems as if they were on the floor. Just a few things to keep in mind.
In the past few weeks, I've discovered that I have severely neglected one of the largest and most expensive parts of my home - my HVAC system, made of a heat pump and an air handler, or what is called a split system. For those of you who don't know, a heat pump is a machine that heats your house in the winter and cools it in the summer. The air is pushed through the ducts and through an air handler, which cools or heats the air as it goes over a compressor coil ( aka the big expensive part). (Some of you may have furnaces which run on gas - you'd know this because you get a separate bill for gas from your electric bill. You also were probably warned about it from your home inspector.)
As a new home owner, I sort of knew I was supposed to change the filters in my house - I knew these were done when I moved in - but had no idea that otherwise my system needed to be inspected twice per year by HVAC specialists! In part, I didn't know this because my dad is my go-to handyman and he takes care of a lot of that stuff himself, and we never talked about it. Even when my sister mentioned having her system inspected recently, it just didn't click that I needed to do that, too! Silly me.
Two questions for you homeowners:
1) When is the last time you had someone provide regular maintenance and cleaning of your HVAC system? If you don't remember, schedule a tune up! Its much like getting an oil change on your car in terms of preventative maintenance! I haven't done this at all in my house and have no idea when it was done last, and now I have a leak in my system which could have been prevented or detected earlier if I'd had the "check up" done. More on that in a later post!
2) When is the last time you changed your air filters in your return air handlers? (Most people have these unless they have a fancy filter like a media filter or an electrostatic filter inside/connected to their air handler - which requires some different maintenance.) It's recommended that you change these monthly or bimonthly so you keep good indoor air quality that you're breathing in, and you keep dust and other particles out of the HVAC system so it stays clean!
Here's what my air filters looked like after (gasp!) a year of not being changed:
.JPG) |
| What once was white... |
It was super easy for me to change them. I went to Lowe's since it is right next door and bought 2 for $16 total. I purchased the mid-grade of filters (not the $1 ones but not the $16 each ones either) which have a semi-pleated look. My dad suggested that size, and the contractors I've spoken to says its the best plan. The $16 ones don't really do much more than the $8 ones (even though they claim to help with allergies) but instead can actually limit the air circulating through your house and make it work harder. The $1 do help, but don't filter out the smaller particles that the mid-range ones can catch. One contractor I've spoken to says buy these in bulk and change them monthly to help keep your system working well. Others say every 2 months or even every 3 months. My return air handlers and my vents are all on the ceilings, which is good news in that dust and dog hair don't get as easily into those systems as if they were on the floor. Just a few things to keep in mind.
Friday, October 28, 2011
The joys of living attached
I live in a side-by-side duplex, which makes my place an "attached" house/dwelling. For months the other 1/2 of the duplex has been unoccupied. The owners decided they would try to sell it and the renters moved out. I didn't notice much difference because normally I can only hear people in the other side going up and down the stairs.
I'm not sure if the house has been sold or not (pesky bad housing market), but for the past week or two, people have been renovating the home during the daytime. I only knew this because there was a bathtub in the front yard one evening, and more recently, I have seen the people wrapping up their days' work around the time I get home.
I was teleworking yesterday and all day they were making a racket. I was fairly certain it was the same racket I made 2 years prior... sure enough they were sanding the floors. Luckily for me, no one was living in that half when I was sanding floors since a large amount of my sanding was done while burning the midnight oil. (btw- I'm just using the expression. I know my house was a disaster, so I feel compelled to clarify that I did, in fact, have electricity).
I came home last night to a familiar potent scent that must have permeated through the fire wall. Oh joys!
This is a PSA to be careful when using sealant because if I was able to smell it strongly through cinder blocks, it's evident that it's extremely potent!
I'm not sure if the house has been sold or not (pesky bad housing market), but for the past week or two, people have been renovating the home during the daytime. I only knew this because there was a bathtub in the front yard one evening, and more recently, I have seen the people wrapping up their days' work around the time I get home.
I was teleworking yesterday and all day they were making a racket. I was fairly certain it was the same racket I made 2 years prior... sure enough they were sanding the floors. Luckily for me, no one was living in that half when I was sanding floors since a large amount of my sanding was done while burning the midnight oil. (btw- I'm just using the expression. I know my house was a disaster, so I feel compelled to clarify that I did, in fact, have electricity).
I came home last night to a familiar potent scent that must have permeated through the fire wall. Oh joys!
This is a PSA to be careful when using sealant because if I was able to smell it strongly through cinder blocks, it's evident that it's extremely potent!
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
Check your furnace
Working with contractors has proved to be difficult as my following posts will explain. My house is not their living space, so they only care about it so much (if they were ranked on a "caring likert scale" I'd have them hovering between "not at all" to "little"). Well, early on in the demolition phase of my kitchen the electrician did some of his tinkering. He most likely had to shut off the breaker box to cut all of the power. I'm 100% in favor of taking safety precautions. The last thing anyone wants is a toasted electrician in their house.
My caution to homeowners is: When having any sort of electrical work done, be sure to check your furnace daily. I woke up in the middle of the night extremely cold (I'm lucky construction started in March and not December or January), but I heard my furnace running. I forced myself to face the freezing air to figure out the problem. The thermostat on the main floor was set at its normal temperature. I ventured to the even colder basement to check out the furnace itself. Turns out that at some point that day, the pilot light was extinguished. Even though the furnace was running, it wasn't heating the house.
It's a simple fix, but not something I would recommend having to do in the middle of a cold night. I've added the fix below in case someone would like to know how to light a pilot light.
How To Light a Furnace Pilot Light
The pilot light on a gas furnace can go out because of drafts. To relight the pilot, follow the manufacturer's instructions exactly; they are usually fastened to the furnace. If instructions for relighting the pilot are not provided, follow this general procedure:
Step 1: Find pilot light assembly. It typically has a gas valve with on, off, and pilot settings.
Step 2: Turn valve to off and wait three minutes.
Step 3: Switch valve to pilot setting. Hold lighted match or lighter to pilot opening while you push reset button on pilot control panel. Keep this button depressed until pilot flame burns brightly, then set valve to on position.
Step 4: If pilot flame won't stay lit, opening may be clogged. Turn gas valve off, and clean opening with piece of fine wire. If it won't stay lit after several attempts, you may have faulty thermocouple. If pilot flame still won't stay lit, call professional service person.
Some furnaces have an electrical system to ignite the gas; in these systems there is no pilot light. Instead, an electric element heats up and ignites the burners. If this electric ignition system malfunctions, call a professional service person.
(source: http://home.howstuffworks.com/how-to-repair-gas-furnaces2.htm)
My caution to homeowners is: When having any sort of electrical work done, be sure to check your furnace daily. I woke up in the middle of the night extremely cold (I'm lucky construction started in March and not December or January), but I heard my furnace running. I forced myself to face the freezing air to figure out the problem. The thermostat on the main floor was set at its normal temperature. I ventured to the even colder basement to check out the furnace itself. Turns out that at some point that day, the pilot light was extinguished. Even though the furnace was running, it wasn't heating the house.
It's a simple fix, but not something I would recommend having to do in the middle of a cold night. I've added the fix below in case someone would like to know how to light a pilot light.
How To Light a Furnace Pilot Light
The pilot light on a gas furnace can go out because of drafts. To relight the pilot, follow the manufacturer's instructions exactly; they are usually fastened to the furnace. If instructions for relighting the pilot are not provided, follow this general procedure:
Step 1: Find pilot light assembly. It typically has a gas valve with on, off, and pilot settings.
Step 2: Turn valve to off and wait three minutes.
 |
| I recommend using one of these |
Step 4: If pilot flame won't stay lit, opening may be clogged. Turn gas valve off, and clean opening with piece of fine wire. If it won't stay lit after several attempts, you may have faulty thermocouple. If pilot flame still won't stay lit, call professional service person.
Some furnaces have an electrical system to ignite the gas; in these systems there is no pilot light. Instead, an electric element heats up and ignites the burners. If this electric ignition system malfunctions, call a professional service person.
(source: http://home.howstuffworks.com/how-to-repair-gas-furnaces2.htm)
Thursday, August 19, 2010
Grout dries quickly
I've learned lots of things from regrouting my tub.
In addition to "grout dries quickly" I've learned:
- a fine sandpaper (150 grit or higher) does wonders at smoothing rough spots. Use fine sandpaper so you don't scratch the tiles and because lower grit sand paper wouldn't smooth as well.
- clean tools quickly. Mine have some dried grout stuck to them, but I'm going to use the sandpaper method on them since I didn't clean them well enough with water when the grout was still wet.
- a 10lb box of grout is a LOT of grout. I used a 1/3 of the box... maybe? probably not even that much. They don't give cup measurement mixing instructions (it's no bisquick box) so the art of proportions will be needed to get the right consistency. But better that, then to waste a lot of grout.
- my "weekend projects" are never just a weekend :)
In addition to "grout dries quickly" I've learned:
- a fine sandpaper (150 grit or higher) does wonders at smoothing rough spots. Use fine sandpaper so you don't scratch the tiles and because lower grit sand paper wouldn't smooth as well.
- clean tools quickly. Mine have some dried grout stuck to them, but I'm going to use the sandpaper method on them since I didn't clean them well enough with water when the grout was still wet.
- a 10lb box of grout is a LOT of grout. I used a 1/3 of the box... maybe? probably not even that much. They don't give cup measurement mixing instructions (it's no bisquick box) so the art of proportions will be needed to get the right consistency. But better that, then to waste a lot of grout.
- my "weekend projects" are never just a weekend :)
Friday, May 21, 2010
Garbage disposal - didyouknow?
My friend had a broken garbage disposal (or I should say "non-functioning" instead of "broken") and was dreading having to wait for a contractor to come fix it on a Friday evening. She shared her dread with a group of about 10 people. I asked if she had tried the reset button on her disposal and everyone in the room had no idea that garbage disposals have reset buttons. Well... the reset button worked! Now she can do something much more exciting than wait for a contractor to come press a button.
I'm blogging about this because the other people in the room and numerous of her other friends didn't know about the garbage disposal reset button. I want people to know that they might be able to save money if their disposal won't turn on just by pressing the reset button instead of calling a contractor.
Now you know!
I'm blogging about this because the other people in the room and numerous of her other friends didn't know about the garbage disposal reset button. I want people to know that they might be able to save money if their disposal won't turn on just by pressing the reset button instead of calling a contractor.
Now you know!
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