In this segment we took a look at a very interesting product where thin "bricks" made out of concrete extrusions are hung on metal racks. The end result is very similar to a fancy brick wall.How does it keep the rain out? Actually the same way a regular brick-and-mortar wall does, or a vinyl...
Annia asked about getting rid of some mould in her basement bathroom. I have often discussed mould and mould clean-up and in every case I point out that you must have an exhaust fan in the bathroom. So today I thought I would talk about just how you get the exhaust fan duct through the base...
The siding on a shed will potentially take more abuse than siding on a house -- the first couple of feet of the side of the house is usually concrete foundation, but the shed goes right down close to the ground, and gets hit upon by bicycles, shovels, lawnmowers and everything else that moves in ...
Insulated Concrete Forms, or ICF construction, is a growing and viable way to build houses. Initially sold just to make insulated foundations, whole homes are now being built out of concrete because of these techniques. ICF actually stands for the whole field of pouring concrete into forms ...
Although the Canadian building codes list about 160 acceptable ways to soundproof party walls, it all comes down to taking care of three basic things.Low frequencies travel through the structure, so the more you separate the structure of one apartment from the structure of the other, the more...
Straw is considered an agricultural waste product, which makes it quite inexpensive when people want to use it as a primary house building material. Straw bales, covered in stucco have been used in the dry prairies for hundreds of years. It is now becoming a serious alternative house buildi...
When the mortar on your brick is breaking up a bit, or scaling off, you cannot simply put a skim coat of new mortar over the old, it will not hold. If someone has done that before on your house you know it doesn't hold, that is why you are redoing the job now.Mortar sticks to the brick, not t...
As with most trades, when a tradesperson lays a brick, it looks so easy, and when you (or I ) try it, it doesn't work so easily. So I went to the trades training section of George Brown College in Toronto, Ontario to pick up some of those little tricks that make it all so easy.First trick I l...
Often designers, or your own artistic urges, call for a curve in the riser of a stairway or perhaps a whole wall, and you have to figure out how to get that done.There is a great new invention for making the structure of curves walls. It is like the bottom track of a metal stud wall but it ha...
A couple of years ago we went to Canada's primary earthquake zone, Vancouver, and saw a lot of details about how hot water tanks and just about everything else in the house can and should be tied down to avoid damage during an earthquake. This time we went to near-by Victoria to see how to st...
