While there are new homes being built all over the US everyday, the typical American house is still about thirty-four years old. What type of condition that house is in depends on the owners and how well they maintained the residence over the years. Many things can and will go wrong with a home through the years and there are certain items a homeowner can look out for depending on the age of your particular home.

In the initial years most major repairs or flaws resulting from potential construction errors will surface and will show themselves as needing repair. The exterior paint job will probably need to be re-done in the first four or five years since builder grade paint is often thinner than paint sold at home improvement and home & garden centers. And the heating and cooling system, also known as the HVAC system should be inspected and serviced in years four to seven to have any heat pumps and air conditioning compressors recharged.

In years eight to fifteen in the typical home, items that had been maintained on a regular basis in earlier years will now be starting to wear out and need replacement. Depending on their frequency of use the dishwasher, disposal, and laundry equipment may be worn out and need replacement. Water heater elements usually fail after eight years too, and tanks rust out in about 12 to 14 years even if they are drained of sediment on an annual basis.

The years 15 through 25 are a critical period because most key components must be replaced during this timeframe. Keep note any unwary buyer of a 15 – 25 year old house can be hit with a series of large replacement expenses. This means that homes in years 25 to 30 are usually enjoying a second prime period in their useful lives because all of the key components have been replaced and (somewhat) recently installed.

Homes over thirty years old will have components that have been replaced on such a varied time schedule that it is hard to determine with any accuracy when or if one item or another may fail soon. The recommendation for homes over thirty years in age is to maintain a regular maintenance schedule as much as possible and stay on top of the major components of your home.

Thank you to Lew Sichelman and the Los Angeles Times for much of the information contained in this post.

Last week we talked about a product we stumbled upon for installing tile without using mortar. Well now it seems that everybody is on the bandwagon and there is another product called SimpleMat available at Home Depot that claims to do the same thing.

According to the SimpleMat website, “SimpleMat is a double sided, adhesive mat specifically designed for bonding tile to countertops or backsplashes. The back of the mat has a flat adhesive which bonds to the backsplash wall or countertop. The front side has a raised adhesive which bonds to tile or stone. SimpleMat replaces traditional thin-set mortar or mastic adhesive.”

Again, if the product works as advertised then this is a great product for the homeowner and do-it-yourselfer. You will still need to grout any project where SimpleMat is used but tiling a backsplash or countertop will be in the realm of possibility for many more folks with a product, or shall we say, products like this on the market.

We often hear the question from our customers about what trim piece should be used when installing ceramic beveled subway tile in one’s home. This question is an easy one to answer though not so obvious to those who may be tiling their kitchen or bathroom for the first time.

Our beveled ceramic subway tiles are unique because the edge of the tile slopes down on all four sides of the tile so the edge now is thinner than the center body of the tile. A bullnose trim piece can normally be used with standard ceramic tiles but since there is no beveled slope on a bullnose trim piece the beveled field tile and the bullnose trim tile will not match up together. Therefore, one can and should only use Quarter Round 1” x 6” trim pieces as your edge piece when installing together with a beveled ceramic subway tile.

If you have any additional questions after reading this post feel free to call the AnchorBayTile team and we would be glad to offer assistance, suggestions, and any other advice on your ceramic tile project.

I have seen grout bags in the store before and wondered why on earth people would want to use them. It seemed like such an unnecessary step.

Then I bought and installed an unsealed slate like floor. Cleaning up the grout off of the tile was a nightmare. The next floor we installed we sealed the tile first, and while that helped, it did not eliminate the problem since the tile has a very uneven texture.

Typically grout bags are used when the grout will stain the tile or where it would be difficult to clean the grout off when finished with the job. So even though some installers don’t like using grout bags because they feel the grout does not get properly pushed into all of the crevices, leaving air pockets that can cause the grout to chip out or leave the tile unprotected and cause the corners to crack.

To make sure that doesn’t happen, I still use the tile float, but try to contain the mess as much as possible.

Use the grout bag in the same way that you would use an icing bag.

Then using your grout float push the grout into the spaces.

The first step of wallpaper removal: NEVER put it up to begin with. Please. If you are ever thinking of moving out of your house, don’t hang wallpaper. You might think that there is no way someone won’t love your paper, but trust me it is a guarantee that someone will hate it.

And if you can’t follow that advice. Please, for the love of all things holy, don’t paper every single room. Confine yourself to one or two rooms.

Because one day you will sell your house. And the new owner will be faced with room after room like this:

And they will wonder how you could have ever thought that was worthy of hanging on the wall. Does this wallpaper make you weep like it does me?

Then when they are removing it and it has adhered to the plaster and tears the plaster off the wall in chunks, they will curse you slightly.

Hopefully whatever wallpaper you are trying to remove has been hung properly.

There are many different ways to remove wallpaper. Some people use a steamer, a method I personally don’t reccommend. Unless you like to be aggravated and burn yourself periodically.

Step One: Acquire your tools

You will need:

A scraper, I prefer to use a five-in-one tool above all over scrapers. (That link will being you to a site that sells them 5 for under $30. You can buy them and invite your friends over to help!)

A product such as DIF wall paper remover

Paper tiger, or something similar to score the wallpaper. If you are doing a small area using the pointy side of your 5-in-1 tool to CAREFULLY score the paper will work fine. But for larger areas you are much better off using a tool designed for the purpose.
A large sponge

Step Two:
Using your paper tiger score your wallpaper. Score it as much as possible. It makes the next steps easier.

Step Three:
Apply the wall paper remover using a roller and apply like you would wall paint. Allow it to sit until it has soaked under the wallpaper. Work in smallish areas because you do not want the remover to dry on the walls.

Step Four:
Pray that the person who installed the wallpaper used sizing so that the wallpaper comes off quickly and easily.

Step Five:
If you are like 95% of the homeowners removing wallpaper you will discover that they person who installed the wallpaper decided to skip the step of applying the sizing to the walls.

Step Six:

Using your 5-in-1 tool gently scrape the wallpaper off the wall. You might need to reapply your wallpaper removing product.

Step Seven:

Continue around the room until all the paper has been removed. At this point you might notice that there are bits of wallpaper glue still stuck to the wall. Using your sponge and a bucket of hot water, sponge down the walls to remove the residue.

Step 8:

Allow the walls to dry for a few days before you do anything else. Now you can decide if you want to wallpaper again or paint.

After all this, I am guessing you choose paint.

Drilling into your brand new cabinets in order to install the hardware is daunting. What if you make a mistake? It’s not like you can just fix it. Not to mention that cabinets are an expensive investment.

When it came time for me to put the knobs on our cabinet doors I made a little template to help ensure that the knobs would be aligned correctly.

I made this from a piece of scrap wood.

I first measured exactly where I wanted the knobs to be on the cabinet doors. Then I transferred this measurement to the scrap of wood.

For the love of all things, make sure that you label your template. You might think that you won’t forget, but you will.

As you can see from the photo I am holding up the template for the right door.

The best part about the template… when you flip it over it works for the left door.

You can now also use it on your lower cabinets, like I am doing in the photo above.

This is why labelling is so important.

Viola! Perfectly aligned knobs every time.

All of the hardwood floors in our house were painted. I think it is because it was originally a summer house and it was probably less expensive and easier to have the floors painted than to have them finished.

We have sanded floor after floor in our house. If I never see a floor sander again, I will not be upset.

When we got to two of the chidlren’s bedrooms we thought, why not just repaint them? It would add a little character. And, okay I will admit it, it would be much, much easier.

The bedroom above already had a grey colored floor, the same color that is used on the exterior porches of the house. And so I decided to just go with that color and see how it loooked. I have to say that I really like it.

My younger son’s bedroom we are going to go with a barn red color.

The first thing that you need to do before you begin to paint to scrub the floor. I recommend using a TSP solution to cut the grease, grime, and dirt that might be on the floor. (*If your floor has polyurethane on it you will need to sand the floor in order for the paint to adhere properly. Unless you are doing the floor painting as a temporary measure.)

After the floor dries crawl around and look for any paint splatters or areas that might need a light sanding. Those little imperfections will show through the paint. You might think that paint will cover it all, but trust me on this, it will not.

Once you have done that, give the floor a final vacuum.

It might seem like this is a lot of prep work, but really the prep work is the most important part of any project.

I chose a porch and floor paint by Benjamin Moore. I have used this paint for exterior applications before and figured that if it can withstand the outside elements that it can hold up to the abuse of little boys.

I first cut in around the room with a brush and then roll the rest of the floor with a roller attached to an extension pole. Let the floor dry for 48 hours. You might be able to get away with letting it dry for less time. Or you could be like me and walk into the room and leave your footprints. It is much better to be safe than sorry. After 48 hours, roll on a second coat of paint.

Depending on the coverage you get, you may want to put on a third coat.

If you want to add some more personalization to your floor, you can stencil around the edges, paint checkerboards. or any other design that strikes your fancy. I painted a rug on the porch floor of my old house. It held up for years with no additional protection, until I finally painted over it.

Installing an apron front sink is not easy.

Cutting into your brand new, expensive cabinets is not for the faint of heart. Or the inexperienced. Though that did not stop us.

We learned that it also depends on the sink you buy. The first sink that we had was a Belle Foret. It was pretty much a rectangle. The outside was completely finished and smooth. My three year old saw it and asked if it was a little tub for him.

That sink ended up being too big for the sink cabinet. The lesson here is to remeasure everything even when you have “professionals” doing things for you.

We returned that sink and bought a Kohler. Not because we wanted a Kohler sink, but because it was the only sink that was in stock, in the size that we needed, in the entire tri-state area.

Oh, Kohler farmhouse sink how we hate you and your rounded and beveled edges. Sure you look pretty now that you are installed, but cutting the hole to fit the sink was a long laborious process.

The inside of the cabinet had to be fitted with wood braces and plywood to support the sink. The front of the cabinet had to be carefully sawn away. Swearing, while not technically required, seemed to be neccessary more than usual in this diy project.

All of us who own old houses know about unlevel floors. The kind that if you spill something it immediately starts a river running to a certain corner of the room,faster than you can run for the paper towels One of my kids asked once what would happen if you spilled something on a level floor. They want to know if it would just stay there.

Our kitchen floor was very unlevel. It was also made worse my the previous owners who tried to level it, but failed miserably and installed vinyl flooring over a floor so unlevel that it undulated.

We tore off the vinyl. The plywood under the vinyl. The linoleum under the plywood. And then the plywood that was under the linoleum.

And then we wept, because it didn’t look any better and we had no idea what to do next.

Luckily we had a contractor who was working on our house and felt like giving us some much needed advice.

We found the high point in the floor and using a long level attached firring strips to the floor. That part was not that revolutionary to us, we had done things like that before. The problem we usually faced was the spaced between the firring strips left too much bounce in the subfloor, especially if you planned on tiling.

Our contractor, and the flooring expert who was out at our house to refinish some hardwood floor agreed, told us to use the thinset mortar to fill in the spaces between the firring strips. For whatever reason neither of them are thrilled with the stuff that is sold as leveling compound. I am not really sure if there is a problem with the leveling compound perse, or if they just prefer their old school methods.

Once this dried we laid our plywood subfloor right on top.

I don’t think that we have another floor in our home that is as level or sturdy.