Photo: Kohler
It’s always a challenge to clean shower doors, but that doesn’t mean you have to use powerful cleansers made with ammonia, bleach, and other harsh chemicals. Without much trouble, you can effectively clean shower doors in ways that are much safer for your family.
Photo: JProvey
My son recently asked for help installing vinyl flooring in his bathroom. So we took a trip to the local home center to pick up materials and supplies. What I found surprised me.
I knew that vinyl flooring had come a long way since the days when I was a young father, but even within the past few years, there have been eye-popping advancements. No more boring patterns or unconvincing imitations of wood, tile, and stone. The products we saw were virtually indistinguishable from ‘the real thing.’ Even better, all we needed to do the job was a carpenter square and a utility knife.
My son chose a rustic pine plank-style flooring, ideal for areas that get wet. (Did I mention my grandson’s penchant for splashing at bath time?) In addition to being waterproof, the vinyl planks had the texture of real wood grain, were heavy enough to feel solid underfoot, and had a convincing look complete with knots and splits.
Photo: McNear Brick
Brick has a timeless appearance and requires little maintenance, making it a popular material for a variety of applications. Once a structural component, brick nowadays is more commonly used as a veneer, with concrete blocks, poured concrete, or wood laying under it.
Photo: coastalthemehome.com
It’s always amazed me to see workmen sanding all the paint off a home’s exterior just because some of the paint is peeling. All that work and expense, and rarely is it necessary. Generally, new paint isn’t going to adhere any better to bare wood than it would to a layer of old paint.
Before climbing the ladder, sander in hand, take the time to answer a pair of essential questions: 1) Why is the paint peeling, and 2) is it really necessary to strip all of it?
Photo: trueshinememphis.com
When it comes time to clean concrete, you don’t need to be delicate; after all, it’s a very hard material.
In order to clean concrete outdoors, you can rent a pressure washer for use in combination with a biodegradable detergent. Indoors, your supplies are likely to be a bucket, detergent, and scrub brush, with or without a wet/dry vac at job’s end.
These approaches will enable you to get a long way toward removing ground-in dirt, mildew, spilled paint and most food stains. But the bad news for the fastidious homeowner is that concrete is a porous material with innumerable tiny voids that can harbor dirt, mold, and all kinds of deep, stubborn stains.
Photo: allthingsconcrete.com
Hurricane Sandy proved to be a trial for many of us. My wife and I were fortunate, and our home suffered no major damage. The storm did, however, test the paint job I’d recently completed in the basement of our new co-op.
This apartment complex—a set of brick buildings with slate roofs and stone foundations—was completed in 1918. When moving in just a month before the hurricane, our basement looked as though it hadn’t been touched, or even cleaned, since the ’40s.
Photo: tchaffordbasementssystems.com
I grew up in a split-level, the house style that dominated suburbia in the decades immediately following World War II.
The middle floor—the one that “split” the upper and lower levels—was built upon a crawl space. You could get to it from a hole in the wall that was covered by a plywood panel, but as children we rarely ventured through.
When my elderly parents sold the house a few years ago, it fell to me (with some help from my step son) to clean out the space before the new owners moved in, and I was reminded of what a creepy place it was.
Batts of soggy fiberglass insulation hung haphazardly from the joists. Dim light filtered in from vents in the walls. There were some unpleasant signs of rodent activity and what looked like mold covering some of the joists. The damp concrete walls were as bare as when they were poured more than 50 years prior.
In those days, common building practice was to insulate the floor above the crawl space and to leave the crawl space’s wall vents open, so any moisture buildup would vent to the outside—a monumental design flaw, as it turned out.
Photo: Apartment Therapy
The first time I heard about someone painting a wood floor I was skeptical. Would it last? Could you scrub it? And why would you do it to begin with?
Some years later, my wife and I moved into a house with stairs with wooden treads that were worn, stained, gouged and splintered. With not much to lose, we decided to try painting them. To our pleasant surprise, the finish has held up through six years of daily use. The paint also hardened the wood surface, preventing further abrasion.
Painting wood stairs and floors requires the same preparation as for any interior paint job. If the surface has been finished previously, such as with stain and polyurethane (or old paint), lightly sand the entire area with 100-grit abrasive paper.
Photo: Usona Home
It’s not difficult to add a closet, but doing so will probably be more costly than reorganizing an existing one. So exhaust all other storage options before taking the plunge.
There are several ways to add a closet to your home: purchase a freestanding wardrobe, build in a wardrobe, opt for an open closet, frame out a new closet, or create one from “found” space. The path you take to adding a closet depends upon the amount of space you can afford, the amount of money you wish to spend, and whether or not you need a permanent or temporary solution.
Original flooring. Photo: Joe Provey
Recently my wife and I moved into a co-op. It’s kind of like a condo but with a few additional restrictions about what you can and can’t do without approval from the co-op board. One thing we didn’t need permission to do was replace the wood flooring in the living room/dining area.
The 280 square feet of narrow oak strips was 95 years old and pretty beat, with scratches, stains, and even a few missing boards. Nevertheless we thought long and hard about whether to install a new floor or simply refinish the old one. We’d seen worse floors look good upon being sanded, stained to a medium tone to hide blemishes, and finished with polyurethane.
