When you're thinking about changing the windows in a house, you need to make one fundamental choice: whether to slide the new window into the old window frame (the first photo), or whether to remove the old window right down to the structure of the house (the second photo) and replace the whole t...
Resin in softwood knots can stay active for years, and bleed slowly through most paints, even if the wood has been kiln dried. The only way to really stop the bleeding is to use a shellac to seal in the resins.Shellac is not a very strong finish but has the unique characteristic that it allows n...
Sealants, caulking and other confusing vocabularyThere are all kinds of "sealants" used in construction.What we normally call a "caulking" is properly called a sealant -- a thick material that cures to a flexible solid designed to "seal" the space between two materials -- particularly two materia...
-- Take care of air barriers, ventilation and vapour barriers before insulating. Check out these three topics in the Search Tab above.-- Don't block the eave vents with insulation.-- Do cover the top of the outside wall.-- Don't put plastic foam on top of porous insulations (batts, loose fill) a...
Peggy is moving from Calgary to Vancouver and in her new province she says she can't locate the SuperSpacer windows that she loved in Calgary. That brings up the whole question of what are different window spacers, and why some are available in some areas of the country and not others.Thermal pa...
-- Oil base, resin base and polyvinyl acetate caulking do not hold up. There are far too many better caulkings available to waste time and money with these old formulations.-- Latex based caulking is inexpensive, can be painted and has medium durability. It is acceptable for baseboards and caul...
Debbie from North Bay, Ontario has electric heaters sunk right into her floor. Very few people even know that these things exist, but if you have a baseboard heated house you know how hard it is to get heat in front of a patio door or some other place that needs heat but there seems no way to ge...
Ray from Woodstock, Ontario writes:For 20 years we had no ice problems on the roof. Heating was radiant heating in the ceiling. Then we installed a forced air furnace. The contractor ran all the ducts through the attic and we have had terrible ice dams ever since. The contractor refused to...
Foam guns are the air sealing tool of our epoch. We all use them. We all kill them. We all wish they would last longer and clog less. Of course there are as many different qualities of single component poly-urethane foam guns as there are different qualities of foams — at least we can be happy t...
This article deals with a block wall above grade. For a below grade block wall see Basement Perimeter Drainage and Leaking Foundations.
Bryan is faced with a totally un-insulated cinder block wall with 1x2 strapping and a plaster covering. He is thinking about stripping it back to the block...
