Found 17 results for the keyword(s) ‘Floors, Moisture’

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  Creating Drainage Paths Under Basement Walls

    For years we have talked about protecting the sill plate of basement walls from moisture rising up from the concrete.  This could be water in the concrete from plumbing spills, or even from under the slab from a high-water table.  The old standard ways to protect that bottom piece of wood on t...
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  Floor covering in a basement

  I'm asked a lot about covering a floor in a basement. There are several considerations we need to deal with: the hard and cold concrete and maybe with levelling the floor. Of course we need to pay attention to water, either coming from outside the house or from plumbing spills inside the house si...
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  Getting a wobbly toilet to sit flat on the floor

  If you have a wobbly toilet because there is something uneven on the floor the ideal solution is to find a way to level the floor. If it is wood, you could shave it down to flat. If the problem is tiles, you could remove the tiles under the toilet. But often in real life, we don't want to do eith...
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  Prepairing concrete prior to painting.

  "How can I paint my concrete floor when there's white powder on it?" White powder is salt deposits called efflorescence that is there because high quantities of moisture are migrating through the floor. You need to solve the water problem first or no paint will stick. So find out why there is wa...
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  Floor Tiles that drain

  I went to the store and bought a box of really nifty 100 percent recycled vinyl interlocking floor tiles, the kind that stand up above a concrete floor and let the water drain through and under. I needed them to keep boxes off of a basement floor where there was occasional moisture -- and I ended...
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  Hardwood Floors, nailing and shrinkage

  Holly in Wasi Lake, Ontario wants to know why her 1x10 pine tongue-and-groove floors are shrinking and leaving such large cracks. If you look at traditional hardwood floors you will notice that each board is rather narrow. In fact it is difficult to locate hardwood floors that are wider than 4 i...
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  Water oozing up through floor tiles.

  Stephanie saw a show where we were tracking down what was causing water to ooze up through floor tiles laid on a basement floor. She wanted to share her very strange experience with water oozing up through floor tiles on the main floor of the house. She finally discovered that the clothes dryer ...
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  WHY IS THERE FROST ON THE RUG?

  On windy days, houses in the Prairies often develop a small frost line on the rug about an inch away from the wall on the north or west side of the house. Here the wind is succeeding in lowering the temperature of the most poorly insulated part of the house -- the floor boards. In most construct...
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  Myths and misconceptions about concrete and water

  A comment from a reader:"I notice in your section on self leveling concrete that you mention about needing to let the water out before putting anything on top of the new compound. (Self Leveling Concrete) This is a common misconception about concrete, in fact the water does not leave, it becomes ...
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  Overview: Finishing Hardwood Floors

  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...