Our old house gets a new door and more

Makeover old furniture, textiles, and almost everything else with some handy spray paint art tips.

We have finally agreed that we need to replace our original front door to our 100+ year-old American Foursquare home. Mark has been pushing for…

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…

Deciding on a front door color can be frustrating. Theresa shared a tip in this month’s Better Homes & Gardens.

Doors mean different things to different people. Topping our list of the many elements integral to what makes a door make an entrance are detail,…

Our house has a side yard whose main feature used to be that it didn’t have any nice features (Figure 1). This tiny, unattractive bit…

Snow guards are those…you know…’thingies’ you see at the edge of a roof. And I love them. But what are they for? I usually see…

Over the years I’ve spoken to hundreds of homeowners about why they find selecting colors for their home so challenging and it always seems to…

Molding in the bathroom is an often overlooked design feature. Who thinks about crown molding or raised panels in the john? But our question: Why…

So a homeowner calls you and asks you why the windows in his new (and expensive) home don’t have any trim like the house he…

A P-Ar-What-O-La? A P-Ar-GaDe-O-La. The Mission of this project is to battle the blandness of the all-too- often overlooked side-yard of so many houses. You…

We use a nailing technique to make sure we get a really secure connection between the crown molding and the walls and ceiling. But for the ceiling, it can get trickier. You might not have much behind the drywall. So we use a pneumatic nailer to get an X-nail connection to the ceiling. Check out how to X-nail, and more reasons why Mark uses this technique for crown molding, in this quick tip video.

I saw this tool in the Woodworker’s Supply Catalogue  (yes, I still “read” paper catalogues) and it looks like it makes all the sense in…

Skylights are a terrific addition to most living spaces, especially if they open. The natural light they let stream in is better than anything that…

Owning a home means giving constant attention to the building products that go into protecting the structure of your house. While we’d like to believe…