When you tear the surface of drywall, those fuzzy little hairs just keep coming through coat after coat of paint. The reason is that each time you sand it, they simply lie down and stand back up when they get wet with more paint.The way to cure it from the start is to put a coat of shellac over ...
Some things I never buy but always rent, such as the drywall lift that you see in the photo. That puts drywall right up to your ceiling and holds it there until you get it screwed in for under $30 a day. That's a lot less than a chiropractor's visit.
It can also be used for placing the drywall o...
Although I have learned a great deal about paint and painting over the years, it is not my best subject, especially when formulations and even the tools are constantly changing. So I had my good friend and host of HGTV's One House Two Looks, Jane Lockhart, come on the show to answer some of our ...
There is a lot of debate about whether to put a vapour retarder (vapour barrier) on an insulated wall behind shower tiles. The code has not historically been specifically clear on this so we get lots of different interpretations. What the code does say clearly is that we should not have two vap...
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...
Ed writes from Ajax, Ontario : All 3 walls of my bathroom shower stall are finished with 4" ceramic tiles and are in good shape. When I had to remove one of them, I discovered that the drywall was behind it was so wet that I had to put a fan on it over night to dry it out before I could glue...
The books say 32 inches, but there is no reason for that to be a hard and fast rule. However if you make it a lot smaller you will have the impression of being a giant Alice in a tiny Wonderland. If you make it a lot higher, it will dominate the wall.Wainscoting was originally created to protec...
Radiant Heating and Convection Heating are the two primary types of ways we heat our houses. FORCED AIR HEATINGConvection heating means moving hot air -- what we usually call a forced air heating system simply heats air and moves it around the house through a system of fans and ducts. Forced air...
When you are looking for professional tool quality, in a DIY package -- here are two great tools.The Rock-Eater is the best drywall saw ever made. The blade is far more rigid than an ordinary saw to allow it to be of a higher temper. That gives it a much sharper piercing point and best of all i...
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...
