Floors spring or vibrate when they are not rigid enough for the distance they have to span between their supports.
You can always put another post in the basement under the center of the area giving you problems. That solves the problems easily on the top, but often creates an unwanted obstruc...
Miter Saw stands are generally categorized into 4 types of support systems for miter saws:
1) Rail systems that look much like saw horses;
2) fixed or portable tables with the saw bolted into place;
3) hybrids of rails and tables and finally
4) part kits that assemble around a large 2x wood c...
The old days of stacking structure
In the old days, before we had specialized hardware like joist hangers, we would always create beams, or low lying ledger boards and place the joists on top of them with some kind of toe-nail attachment.
The arrival of joist hangers
When joist hangers came in...
Certain parts of Canada, particularly in the Winnipeg region, have a traditional construction technique that presents serious challenges when you want to insulate a basement -- the ends of the joists are actually embedded in the concrete foundation wall. Chris, from Winnipeg, asked for some f...
It is frustrating when walkway or driveway paving stones heave with frost, or drop with erosion. If properly built, this doesn't happen. Actually what I have written here about paving stones applies to asphalt driveways as well.
A GOOD COMPACT SUBSTRATE IS ESSENTIAL IN A COLD CLIMATE
You nee...
Decks need to be built strong enough to not fall down or have deck boards break for lack of support. In addition, although they do not need to be as solid as a floor in the house, they should not bounce like a trampoline. The structures of most decks in Canada are built with pressure treated wood...
A squeaky ceramic floor is a particularly difficult problem because you really cannot fix it from the top down, and if you don't fix it, it will eventually break the grout if not the floor tiles because of the movement of the floor.
Squeaking is caused by something rubbing, often the floor board...
Ultra Soft -- the Montreal store that still solves LAPTOP problems
I keep finding myself going back to the first laptop store in Montreal, now a tiny basement workshop at 16 Westminster Ave in Montreal West called UltraSoft. After all the big stores and websites have stolen away the market f...
In this 2004 HGTV episode, we collected several different viewer questions about supporting outdoor structures so we could compare one to the other. At the bottom of this article I have added, in 2015, the Helix screw piles that may just have replaced all the rest.
Elephant Feet
The first vi...
