One of our viewers lives in an apartment over a noisy basement suite and wants to know what are their options to blocking the noise.Soundproofing is never a perfect thing and although each possible action can have an important effect, the sum of all the actions together can be less than you expec...
Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) does not recommend the use of any blown-in insulating material inside "enclosed vertical cavities" (that's a fancy way of saying "walls that are not open"). They feel that techniques of installation and verification during installation are not good ...
-- 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 East York, Ontario has a problem with a basement leak that apparently is caused by a crack between the sidewalk and the wall. Her contractor patched it last year, but it leaked again.If there is any movement of the sidewalk, from frost or just swelling and or shrinking clay, then no ...
Rob wrote in saying that he had an Energy Audit done on his house and as part of the energy tune-up, they caulked his window trim down to the wall. Yet he thinks this was a wasted effort because he put the trim on himself and it was just decorative.In most window installations, the trim actually...
Last year we had a viewer who had a burn hole in a counter top from a hot pot. We showed how you can use the router to cut out the burn and create a recessed hole for a tile or a cutting board. See "The Plunging Router meets the counter top burn" .This year we got the same question again but th...
False. If you increased the sealing of the house and did nothing to ventilate or control moisture generation, humidity would build up and force more moisture through the unsealed cracks. But window condensation and air quality demands forces us to keep the humidity in the house to a constant co...
False. Fiberglass is what air filters are made out of -- it cleans air but doesn't stop it. It can be used to fill a crack if it is then coated with caulking to seal it. Stuffing fiberglass tightly into the space between the window rough and finish frames will not even insulate very well, as c...
Air leaks through the moving parts of windows accounts for as much as 14 per cent of the heat loss in a typical Canadian house. Picking the right kind of windows can certainly help:-- Fixed windows with no moving parts can be completely sealed. -- Fixed window panes with small moveable section...
Doors are large openings in the wall which fall somewhere between windows and walls as far as the heat losses go. You can lose as much heat through a door leading to an unheated garage or basement as you can through the front door.It is now common to buy insulated metal or fiberglass doors th...
