MyFixitUpLife home improvement
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The biggest challenge I have drilling holes–everywhere from deck building to residential remodeling–is keeping the bits sharp. Don’t ask me how, but I invariably hit a nail, staple, or other hidden obstruction while drilling. Whether that’s for deck hardware–where I also manage to drop my drill from time to time–or plowing 1 inch holes through [...]
So here’s not my favorite job: scraping paint and coatings and repainting them. But to underestimate the importance of a proper paint job is to ruin the works underneath it if you ask me. Paint is what people see. This means that the work starts with prepping the surface beneath the old paint–something unavoidable, especially [...]
Maybe it’s because one of the most formative periods of my home improvement life was building swim-floats and docks in Cape Cod’s salt water bays and rivers using pressure treated Southern Pine 2×6 that I like the stuff as a decking material. After all, we dumped it in the ocean year after year and it [...]
Dear MyFixitUpLife, a question: I’m designing a pergola. Instead of using 4-by or 6-by posts, I want to laminate a 2×8, 2×6, and 2×8 together to form a sort of I beam. This way I’ll get a different look than most pergola’s with square posts and I think it’ll be easier to build. I also [...]
With the massive weather events from fire to tornado scouring the US with what seems like increasing frequency and intensity, it’s almost easy to forget severe weather that doesn’t reduce a neighborhood to rubble is still brutal on your house. For homeowners in areas that regularly experience severe weather–anything from super cells to hurricanes to [...]
Want a healthier, greener lawn without having to do any extra work? Of course, who doesn’t. One of the simplest tricks I know is to set the wheels of the mower to their highest setting. Doing this doesn’t mean you have to mow more (or less), rather what mowing tall does is exposes more of [...]
Here’s a cool contest being run by the pros at Bosch Power Tools. Enter your worst–or best–jobsite solution for a chance to win a Bosch PowerBox jobsite-tough radio/charger/mp3 player and boss tune-cranker. Here are the details. Good luck__ Click below to read more on HGTVPro.
Theresa and I love designing and building pergolas. One of the things that fascinates me about them is that for such a simple—and old—structure, there seems to be a limitless variety of designs to choose and create. I like the one pictured here which is–no joke–in my grocery store. I like its graceful use of [...]
As much as I love installing a crisp and long-lasting trim job on a house—for which I often use PVC and urethane trim—I find that I utilize PVC for more than decoration. Its uniform structure makes it ideal for laying out round shapes, which I’ve used on everything from decks to bathtub steps to landscaping. [...]
So here’s one for the died-in-the-wool architecture aficionado. If someone were to ask you what shape is shown in both of these photos, what would you answer? I know that I would have given two different replies. For photo # 1 one it would be “arch” and for photo # 2 it would be “arc.” [...]
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