Wagish wrote to say that he "has observed the workmen building my new home placing ladders against the window panes rather than against the brick wall. Is this safe?"Very simply -- NO. The reason workmen do this is that it allows them to caulk both sides and the top of the window without moving...
Tony in Burlington has extremely small (8" x 31") basement windows (that sounds more like a gun turret than a window) and he wants to make them bigger. If he cuts into the concrete and makes them bigger will he need reinforcement for new vinyl windows?If existing windows are showing no signs of ...
Valerie from Charlottetown, PEI writes: "We are building a new home and would like to use clay coloured vinyl windows, thinking that the clay colour would show on the exterior and also on the interior of the home. Today we were told that the colour is only on the outside and the interior of the ...
In this TV segment we followed a sound proofing specialist through a home, testing it for problems, and indicating some solutions. Elsewhere in this database you will find more through discussions on soundproofing various parts of your house.The photo shows the use of Z-bars or resilient bars on...
Temporary caulking is a transparent caulking specifically designed to be put on a window frame in the Fall and then peeled off in the Spring. It is used to actually caulk old windows, usually sliders, shut for the winter because their weather-stripping just isn't keeping the cold out. Remem...
Loretta from Nova Scotia inquired of Jon how to straighten her sun porch doors and windows. Erosion from street run-off has undermined the corner of her concrete slab-on-grade porch, dropping that corner of the sun porch. The problem is now solved, but the openings are out of line.The frame o...
People often find that old guillotine windows have to be propped up with sticks and the like to keep them open in the summer, because the counter weight sash cord has broken.Jon went through the process of how to open up the hidden cavity where the weights move up and down. There is always a ...
Sliding windows and sliding doors are prone to intrusion. There is now a wide variety of hardware to solve this problem. Hockey sticks are a good first line of defense, but there are things that are much better and more discrete.Most important is probably the spacer wedges that can be placed...
Locating where water gets into a wall can be very difficult as often it only leaks when there is a driving rain from an unusual direction that puts more water than usual on a given wall. In this case the problem was clear, once we got high enough on a latter to see the top of the window. The ca...
No matter how you cut it -- a good window is still a lousy wall. Glass has almost no thermal resistance (RSI - 0.16; R - 0.88), and a single-pane window in Canada not only makes a lousy wall in winter, but it makes a lousy window too -- you can't see through the thick layer of ice! But a ho...
