I get a lot of questions about choosing and applying a finish to a hardwood floor.First understand that there is no one right answer -- there are a lot of products that each has certain advantages over the others and you need to select the properties that are the most important to you. There are...
No flooring company recommends any kind of wooden floor in a bathroom, and even fewer (fewer than no?) who would recommend it in a basement bathroom where you might not only have water constantly spilling from the top but maybe moisture coming up from the floor.You want to do it anyway? OK, here...
Tina wants to install pine flooring in an unheated cottage. Different lumber yards were talking about curing the pine for as much as a year before installing it.Getting wood to a stable moisture level is important for flooring and if it is locally milled you must either kiln dry it, or air dr...
Karen Runstedler from Minwax demonstrated several of their finishing and refinishing products.Of note: if a finish is an older lacquer or shellac finish, you may be able to restore it without stripping off the old finish and without bothering the colour of the wood below. The secret is to use ...
A scratch in a piece of furniture is usually impossible to eliminate completely without refinishing the piece. However, you can often hide it pretty well with any of a variety of stain pens or coloured wax crayons. They can simply be rubbed in, or melted, even colours mixed during melting and f...
Have you ever wondered what the end product difference is when you use one or another of the blades for making dado cuts?The perfectly square cut comes from using a straight router bit, or a specific single size square tooth dado saw blade. Don?t try that dado blade in a cross cut as the top s...
Kathy from Kamloops, B.C. writes:We are in a 60 year old house. When we moved in 38 years ago there was hard wood flooring in the living room and you didn't replace boards in the worn out places at that time. So we had a guy glue (which is black) down then felt paper then glue and then a woo...
Dry rot is actually a fungal growth that destroys the cell structure of wood. In order to grow it requires moisture, oxygen, and warmth. Once started it will not grow in the winter, but it will survive and continue to grow during whatever periods of time provide its three necessary conditio...
Wood in contact with slightly humid concrete can easily develop dry rot. (search keyword "rot" for the title "WHAT IS DRY ROT?") This often happens to studs laid on the basement floor or standing up against basement walls. A perfectly dry basement will present no problem -- but how many ba...
Open fireplaces are not heating systems. They have traditionally been built on an outer wall, creating sealing problems for air barriers and wasting lots of heat through the back of the chimney. Fireplaces should always be built on the inside walls -- if you build one at all. The problem w...
