At one time or another every renovator, professional or weekend warrior, has tried to determine what might happen if they remove or make a big hole in a wall – is it holding something up? This is not always easy to determine but you can get some help from this article.
Getting this right is imp...
Concrete, outdoors in the Canadian climate, has a particularly difficult time surviving. Walkways, patios, driveways and the like must have as much as 4 to 6 inches of gravel as a drainage base to minimize the effects of shifting from frost movement in the soil. Drainage around these areas has to...
Glue or Adhesive?
What is the difference between a glue and an adhesive? Only vocabulary, although often Glue is the term used for DIYers and Adhesive for professionals -- or for some Glue is liquid and Adhesive is gunned from a tube with a caulking gun or applied with a notched trowel. Whether...
Frost Protected Shallow Foundations
The foundation for a house is generally poured below the soil grade level so that the footing itself is well below the frost depth for any given region and soil type. This protects the house from frost heaving caused by expanding soils beneath the foundation....
The world of tiles is changing rapidly.
Twenty years ago we generally had a range of tile sizes from 1 ft x 1 ft down to tiny mosaic tiles. This made tiling relatively simple because slight changes in the flatness of the surface could be adjusted for at the next grout line. In fact that is...
Floors spring or vibrate when they are not rigid enough for the distance they have to span between their supports.
You can always put another post in the basement under the center of the area giving you problems. That solves the problems easily on the top, but often creates an unwanted obstruc...
The old days of stacking structure
In the old days, before we had specialized hardware like joist hangers, we would always create beams, or low lying ledger boards and place the joists on top of them with some kind of toe-nail attachment.
The arrival of joist hangers
When joist hangers came in...
Probably one of the best ways to learn about good and bad building techniques is to work on the renovation or restoration side of the construction picture. Here is where you see the results of everything done before, especially when the results are a failed system. In the world of ceramic, stone ...
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...
This was the first part of a special three part series designed to give you some insights to the business side of renovation because hiring a contractor and getting the job done right is a business deal. In this segment we tried to give you an idea of the advantages and disadvantages of each diff...
