Darren Barrett from the Hardwood Flooring Store in Markham, Ontario and a long time expert in hardwood floors joined me in the TV studio to discuss the evolution of hardwood flooring. We set aside for this discussion all the plastic laminates with press board bases that have become so common. N...
To my mind old fashioned hardwood floors are far more trouble than they are worth, especially now that we have better and better Engineered Floors available. An engineered floor is not a cheap plastic laminate on masonite floating floor. It is a very stable, usually pre-finished, real massive h...
Before you try to paint the walls, you must properly prepare the wall and the most important step in that is probably to properly clean the walls of all the grease and smoke and dust that they collect over the years.Regular detergent tends to leave a soapy residue, even after careful rinsing, and...
-- Oil base, resin base and polyvinyl acetate caulking do not hold up. There are far too many better caulkings available to waste time and money with these old formulations.-- Latex based caulking is inexpensive, can be painted and has medium durability. It is acceptable for baseboards and caul...
One amazing note: in 2012 all four of the tools shown here are still available. The Makita will be a special order, but they still make it and I still love it.PICQUIC - the best multiple head storage & screw driver.Picquic has been around for a long time and besides a decent screwdriver and...
Earlier in this TV segment we installed a threshold between an old and a new floor. In that case we actually cut away to a flat base that allowed us to put our threshold down flat. If you cannot do this or for some reason need to fill in a low spot in a floor before putting in the threshold its...
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...
Any insulation that is properly installed to provide R-20 of insulation will save just as much energy as another insulation installed to R-20. So why have I accepted to do media work for one insulation company over another?Because there are many ways that we loose energy in a home and therma...
I recently had the occasion to try and figure out why all the downspouts around a home were completely blocked. When I finally decided to take them completely apart, I discovered that the workman who installed them had a really nifty way of making the colour match between the aluminium sidin...
Foam guns are the air sealing tool of our epoch. We all use them. We all kill them. We all wish they would last longer and clog less. Of course there are as many different qualities of single component poly-urethane foam guns as there are different qualities of foams — at least we can be happy t...
