Jon in Winchester, Ontario has a free standing natural gas stove and wants to get that heat distributed to the rest of the house.
First, what not to do
Do not try to put a grill in a return air duct of a forced air heating system over the stove as you see in the photo, especially forbidden fo...
One of the most reliable ways of both keeping our walls dry, and allowing them to dry out if they do get wet, is to construct the wall with an outer shell that we call a rain screen.
Rather than trying to make the siding on the house absolutely waterproof, which never works for a very long tim...
I have reproduced below an article from the construction professional publication Solplan Review November 2008 because it was such a good article on this complicated subject. Click here for SolPlan Review information. For an animation on what is a rainscreen, follow this link.
Changes to the Bu...
Jill writes: HI, my mom lives in a house built in 57'.She has a big crack in the wall above the doorway. How do you adjust the telepost to accommodate the settling of the property. Which way do you turn the post to adjust it, how much etc,
-------Response
I assume that the cracks are right abov...
Should you have a contract or not for every renovation? According to David Foster, author of the pamphlet Get It In Writing, except for the simplest of maintenance tasks, you need a contract, and for a lot of reasons that you may have never thought of.
If you would like to read the other two par...
Overload protection
Fuses and circuit breakers will stop the electricity in a wire when the load is excessive or there is a short circuit. They prevent overheating of wires from too much electricity trying to flow through a wire that is not large enough to handle it.
Stray current protection
G...
Some rooms are colder than others, or a forced air system works well for heating but not air conditioning. Although such problems may require repositioning ductwork, or adding booster fans -- the first thing to check is that the ductwork is balanced and balanced differently for the two differ...
How do you get enough space above the wall and below the roof for both massive insulation and ventilation? One way in new construction, or even in the rebuilding of a roof, is what we call a Raised Heel Truss. This design forces the overhang of the house further out from the house, but does gi...
More and more people have domestic power washers, allowing them to quickly clean all kinds of things around the house. Of course one of the first things we want to use it for is to clean off the siding on the house. CAUTION -- you all know that you need to be careful not to damage wood or spra...
An ivy covered wall
John from Mississauga, Ontario writes: "We recently bought a house that was half covered in ivy. We didn't like it and we were told to cut the roots and let the ivy die and then just tear it down from the walls. We cut the roots and let the ivy die but we noticed all these li...
