My Handyman and Creative Problem Solving

Spring is great for working around your home. The weather is warmer and people seem to crawl out of their caves after a long winter. Home owners enjoy getting outside and feeling the sunshine, preparing the garden for planting and some owners like tackling the odd repair jobs that every home needs like cleaning gutters, washing and re-staining the deck, mulching the shrubs, etc.

There are plenty of routine home maintenance projects that most home owners can handle easily. There are even more home related maintenance and repair jobs that most home owners shouldn’t try because they’re far more likely to create a bigger problem which will cost more in the end.

Here’s a quick summary of the projects we’ve handled at Mr Handyman over the last few weeks:

• Replaced interior door damaged by wheel chair traffic which destroyed the door jambs … and needed to be fixed before putting the home on the market. A better solution would have been to widen the door for the wheelchair originally, or possibly replace the door with a pocket door.
• Replaced exterior wood rot that was repaired by the painter last summer. Unfortunately the wood filler that might work fine inside, didn’t hold up to the weather this winter proving that your best painter … might not be a good carpenter.
• Oops, the builder didn’t finish securing the dryer ductwork to the dryer vent, and the dryer vent wasn’t secured to the exterior of the home. This meant that lint and moist air were ending up in the space between the inside and outside walls, and mold was growing there. This was a quick repair but the potential health problems were easily avoidable.
• A bathroom fan had no ductwork at all. The typical problem here is the ductwork runs into the attic where it creates a moisture and mold problem, as these must be vented to the exterior.
• We replaced a water pipe that burst over the winter. Normally the homeowner shuts off all exterior faucets but forgot to do this last fall.
• Repaired gutters that were bent due to excessive ice build up this past winter.
• We are dealing with lots of siding repairs due to ice dams, which when they hit brittle vinyl siding, ends up with holes and/or cracks. Ice damms … soffit vents
• A long standing customer needed us to prep and paint her front porch, which she’s been doing for several years now. We finally were able to show her that the repeated painting was due to poor quality paint as a reliable paint like Sherwin Williams should last at least 2 to 4 years.
• An unusual situation where deck joist hangers rotted out. Normally it’s the wood that rots before anything else. The repairs were challenging as the deck wasn’t attached to the house, so when we jacked up each section to replace the metal joist hanger … the entire deck moved up.
• First the toilet leaked in an upstairs bathroom, with enough water coming down to require replacing the ceiling sheetrock. The home owner tried to make the repairs himself but left too big a gap between the old and new sheetrock. This made taping and mudding much more difficult and finally he called (actually he called 3 times as noone else would go out for such a small repair) to have us redo the repair.
• One customer called when the mesh screens in her gutters came down … 3 winters after we installed them. We tried to be courteous and went out to replace the screens but found out there had been damage to the gutters which would cause the problem to re-occur.