Does your home have rotten wood? Does the paint feel soft and spongy? Do you suspect the weather is getting into your wood and causing problems? Does the house/cabin smell ‘funny’ when you open the door? Then you might have some rot somewhere… I have spent almost 40 years working on old homes like yours and I am perfecting the art of carefully removing only the rotten parts and replacing them with new wood. Often the damage is only local, you don’t have to tear down the whole wall just …
Quick tip today and to say a belated Happy New Year! Sorry I’ve been a bit quiet here lately, it’s been all work, work, work, plus it seems parenting a pair of teenagers requires a lot of work also lol! Now, I’ve been adding a magnetic bit holder to my drivers for years, ever since they started to move away from Pozidriv (most common in the UK) screws towards Torx (the T series: sizes T10, through to about T60). Now a typical work day will probably include T20 and T25 …
I probably don’t need to tell you that measuring diagonals is an excellent, fool proof way of checking something for absolute squareness. There is even an app for it these days… (just search for ‘construction calculator’), just put in the two side lengths and it will calculate the diagonal length for you, but ya still gotta’ physically measure it and that’s where the fun starts… I don’t know if I actually ‘invented’ this method, but I’ve never seen anyone else do it, so I’m going to claim it until a …
And the challenge is twofold. One: not ignoring it, thinking oh, it’s nothing, and two: finding out what is actually wrong. Oh; maybe I should say triple fold, because sometimes, unconnected things are connected in ways you hadn’t thought about… Let me tell you a story of a tiny observation (that I had largely ignored) that could have had serious consequences. My old runabout car passed its government safety test only a few months ago and after repairing a few issues all was good. But, recently I’d noticed the car …
Although there are many different sized cabinets these days, sometimes you need a size which just isn’t available. Being able to modify a cabinet gives you more options. Bear in mind though that it’s often not just the cabinet you’ll need to modify, but the doors also. Arguably the doors are much more problematical. This week I needed a cabinet 2.25cm tall, a figure in the middle between the 210cm and 236cm IKEA offers. Right, time to pull out the saw. First up, you’ll need to decide whether you’re cutting …
Sometimes you need to remove the nails holding a piece of wood rather than just pulling the whole thing off in one violent go. Getting nails out first allows you to carefully remove a whole piece of wood, without damaging any surrounding planks. It’s best to just show you with an example, I think. This morning I had to remove the bottom few rows of some ‘double lap’ or shiplap type cladding because it was past its best. But I wasn’t taking it all off so I had to be …
We all know water and electricity don’t mix, but many of us forget this includes some of the small things we use daily. House alarm key fobs for example. As my son found out this week to his cost (well, my cost obviously!). The story starts a while back when he came home from school soaked to the skin (I warned him about the weather forecast, but he is 14 so knew ‘better’…). Everything he had on was wet, but after getting showered and changed, we thought no more about …
