I am always amazed at house construction where so often things are half built or more while people are running around beginning to think about "extras" that should never be though of as "extras" but as part of the essential system. So time for one of my lectures -- (you asked for it).Heating is o...
Many viewers ask if they can put carpet over a concrete floor. The answer is a qualified Yes.There are three different concrete floors to consider: those in upper floors of the house that are always high and dry, those in the basement that may possibly run into moisture problems and those outdoor...
When a floor wears down through the finish, even through the stain and to bare wood you have a serious refinishing problem.Bernadette wants to re-stain the warn spots without having to sand down the whole floor.Well, the bad news is that you probably won't be able to do a good job. Sand down the...
In a previous show we watched the salvage operations of a group called Logs End from Bristol, Quebec, where they were fishing up old growth timber that had sunk to the bottom of the Ottawa river a hundred years ago.This week we visited the saw mill.That great stack of timber tells a lot of storie...
Any wood product will expand when it gets wet, some worse than others. Today we have a wide variety of wood or wood like flooring products.Massive HardwoodFirst you should understand that even massive hardwood, if allowed to stay wet or overly humid for too long will swell up and potentially buc...
Drum Sanders, disk sanders and scrapersWhen professionals need to remove a lot of wood in either a new rough floor installation, or a major refinishing where they need to get right down to bare wood, they will use the traditional drum sander, and associated disk sander for the edges, and scraper ...
People often ask the question, what drives invention? For Charbel Khalaf it was a health statistic: Carpet installers have 50% more knee problems than tile installers, yet they are working on a softer surface. Why? Because carpet installers attach the edges of wall-to-wall carpets with a dev...
I was invited over to shoot a re-tiling job for the TV show. The camera got there before I did, so they recorded some things that I thought would be good to show you so that I could point out why you should not work this way.Safety Glasses pleaseFirst our worker was hammering straight down on th...
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...
Ania removed a pedestal sink that had been kept stable with a cedar shim and now she wants to know how to get rid of the stain the cedar has left on her linoleum floor.The bad news is that, if it is really linoleum and not vinyl, linoleum is more porous than vinyl and stains can go deeper. The u...
