360renos: Deck Disaster

How to make your home stand out when selling

We can help your house sell quickly and at a good price -- even in a slow market.

It takes a lot more than sparkling windows, scented candles and chocolate-chip cookies to sell a home in today's market.

Improvements should be made so that the property shows well, is consistent with the neighborhood and does not involve capital investments.

Beyond any doubt, the best investment you can make is new paint. Painting can make a room or an exterior façade look brand-new, and totally transform the look and feel of a room or the entire residence. It is always wise to be somewhat restrained when choosing colors for a home-staging paint project. Avoid choosing colors that are too individual or flashy and favor neutral colors and schemes. This does not mean painting everything white, however.

Use subtle color schemes to accentuate the home's strengths and minimize weaknesses. Dark colors, for example, tend to make a room feel smaller, while lighter colors and pastels can make a room feel bigger.

There is another benefit to painting as well: the process of preparing the interior or exterior surfaces of a home for painting automatically allows us to go over the entire area receiving paint in great detail, and this can often expose items or areas requiring repair. It seems you always discover where the caulking has let go, where the wall is dinged.

It is always preferable that we discover and deal with these items before the real estate agent (or worse, the prospective buyer) points them out to you!

Dave - 360renos

Subscribe in a reader

Saturday, July 11, 2009

Deck Disaster

A 2 month old deck that was installed by a home owner and subsquently had major structural problems.

Hard to see in this picture but the cedar deck boards are not secured at every joist with 2 screws per joist. In some cases there are only 6 screws in a 10' board when there should be 48+. This will lead to major twisting, cupping and bowing of the deck surface.

The 4x4 post for the second floor deck in the picture is not plumb vertically. It had to be removed from a hole 5 feet deep and it was in concrete and a new post intalled.

The beam is buried in the ground when at minimum it should be on deck blocks but preferably on concrete piers. This major structural weight bearing point will therefore fail much sooner due to sitting in wet earth. The joists are not attached to the rim joist and where attempts were made in some areas to attach them, the screws missed the joists completely.

The ledger board was not attached to house correctly. The board was not level and the anchor screws were not tightened completely.

The joist hangers did not have the nails completely hammered in and there should be 6 nails per joist hanger. Some only had 4 or even 2!!

That is why there is a permit process to ensure decks are installed correctly to ensure a homeowners safety and subsquent owners of the home know they have a well built product. Home owners should always understand and inform themselves of how to complete a project correctly. Lots of advice out there for DIY handy person, you just need to track it down.

Dave - 360renos

No comments:

Post a Comment

Which Paint Is It - Latex or Oil?

Determining, definitively, whether a given paint was oil or latex has always been a bit of a problem, but an important one as you can paint oil over latex, but not latex over oil unless you use a special 'super adherent primer' first.

I used to recommend taking a bit of paint thinner on a clean contrasting colour cloth and wiping hard. If any colour comes off, it is oil based paint. If nothing happens, it is latex. But that didn't always work. Sometimes if the paint was very old, nothing at all came off.

Now a product has come out that reverses those rules. These swabs have acetone in them and they have no affect on oil based paints, but do take off latex. If the surface is stripped, it is Latex paint. If it just cleans or polishes the surface, it is Oil/Alkyd paint. Instead of the special swabs you could just use acetone and a contrasting coloured rag, if the paint colour shows up on the rag, it is latex. Acetone will do nothing to oil based paints. Old fingernail polish removers were made with acetone, and many still are -- look for a bottle that does not say 'without acetone'. You should test it first on a surface that you know is latex paint to be sure you have acetone in your liquid.

By the way, if you really want to paint latex over oil -- you can do it if you sand off the gloss and apply a "super adherent latex primer" first. Then you can continue with ordinary latex paint!

Dave - www.360renos.ca