Prier P-118 Installation Video
This is the Prier P-118 hot/cold outdoor hydrant hose bib. It's very easy to install. I offer phone coaching if you get stuck.
Labor Cost to Install a New Front Door
Labor Cost to Install a New Front Door - This is the quick long-distance estimate I created for Irene to help her understand why it costs thousands of dollars to install a new front door and repair water damage. The bid assumes $80 per hour for labor. The estimate was produced in January, 2026. Copyright 2026 Tim Carter
Labor Cost to Install a New Front Door - Many Small Numbers Add Up
I talked with Irene on the phone a few days ago. She lives in Connecticut and used my affordable phone coaching service. She needed to make sure the bid she received to repair wood rot next to her front door was reasonable. Irene was about to have a new front door installed. Irene said at the end of the call, “Oh my, investing in this phone call was the best thing to do. I now feel comfortable that I’m not getting ripped off!”
I believe you’ll understand why I recommended Irene, and I, talk after you read what she sent to me in an email: “I'm getting a new front door, but before it can be installed, I'm ashamed to say that there's been water damage under the tile right when you enter the foyer through that door. Overall, the area where the tiles need to be removed/replaced, and new plywood installed, is around thirty square feet. A contractor gave me an estimate of $4,300.00, not including the cost of the new door. I went to ChatGPT, and it says that his number is too high. What would you say about this?”
I replied to Irene that we should talk on the phone. She placed the order for the call within an hour. I decided to produce a detailed breakdown of the costs of this job. I did many such jobs for customers, and knew that there’s no one aspect of the job that’s a big number. The trouble is, all the small numbers add up to a big one.
I discovered, quite by accident, forty years ago, how to sell more jobs to my customers. This is why I knew my phone call with Irene would put her at ease. Creating the detailed breakdown of her job would only take me a few minutes. It was a fast exercise to see if the contractor’s bid was realistic, too low, or higher than kite flying at the beach.
Here’s why I closed more deals than all my competitors years ago. It was my secret weapon. I was asked to bid on a room addition project for a homeowner. Business was slow at the time. I had scads of time to do an accurate takeoff, obtain tight bids from my subcontractors, and time to make sure each and every cost item was covered.
I was very lucky to be the last contractor to make the presentation. Inside my briefcase was a fat folder that contained all my material takeoffs, the bids from subs, and a dot-matrix printout of a basic spreadsheet showing all of the costs along with the total cost. It was normal practice at the time for me to just share the total job cost. There was zero transparency. No one got a look inside my magic folder.
I shared my number. The homeowners’ cheery red faces transformed to pasty white. My number shocked them. The temperature in their dining room seemed to fall ten degrees. You could hear a pin drop. I said after an uncomfortable pause, “My number is high, isn’t it?”
The husband cleared his throat and said, “Yes, you’re the highest bidder of all three contractors.” I was desperate for the job. I could feel that they wanted me to leave. Their body language spoke volumes.
I said, “I can prove that my number is accurate, and that the other two contractors just guessed at the price. If you award the contract to one of them, I guarantee you’ll be hit with change orders, and the total cost will exceed what I just quoted you. Would you be willing to give me just ten minutes to prove this to you?”
They exchanged glances, and the wife said, “Sure.” I opened up my briefcase, removed the folder, and spread out all my documents on the table. They were immediately shocked by the amount of detail. The transparency was like a warm ocean breeze blowing through their home. You could smell the salt air!
Within minutes, they discovered that no one aspect of the room addition was that much. They could clearly see that the total of all the costs, plus a reasonable profit and overhead, added up to my quote. The transparency short-circuited the bum’s rush from their home.
Thirty minutes after sitting down at their table, I had a signed contract in my hand. I adopted this full transparency approach in all my subsequent presentations. My closing rate went from 25% to 60%. From that point forward, I was booked out nine months in advance, never worrying about how I was going to pay my bills.
Here’s a quick snapshot of Irene’s front-door job. Each and every one of these tasks has to be accounted for: demolition, temporary weather enclosure since the door must be taken out, replace the rotted wood, install the new wood floor, install the new flashing under the door, install the door, install the tile, grout the tile, install all the door trim, and paint/stain all the trim/walls.
All of the above are what I call hard job costs. Most homeowners are unaware of the soft job costs. These happen away from your home. Examples of soft costs are: time spent bidding, time spent looking at your job before the contract, picking up materials, going to the dump with refuse, loading and unloading the truck before each day, etc.
There are more soft costs you’re unaware of. Self-employed contractors pay double what you see taken out of your paycheck for Social Security and Medicare. You probably don’t realize it, but your employer matches what you pay. Contractors like me have to pay for both parts!
Think of what it costs to operate that 3/4-ton truck the contractor drives. The current cost per mile is somewhere between 80 cents and $1.00 per mile. The 2025 IRS allowance, which is always low, is 70 cents per mile. A contractor might travel 30 miles each day to get to your house and then go back home. That’s $150 a week in costs just for his truck! A contractor needs to charge you for wear and tear on his tools, insurance, Workman’s Compensation payments, etc. All of these costs, which are invisible to you, must be accounted for. You want your contractor to make a small profit so he stays in business when you need him again.
My quick cost estimate for Irene showed she was getting a great deal from her contractor. I estimated the total cost for the job, not including the cost of the front door, to be just under $5,000.00.
If you need my help to make sure a bid you get is fair, I’m happy to do for you what I did for Irene. Just go here to set up our phone call: http://go.askthebuilder.com/talktotim Be sure to type go followed by a period in the URL.
Column 1648
Relocation Checklist
Relocation Checklist - You may dream of living in a home with a view like this. Wait until the July 4th weekend when boats equipped with sound speakers the size of a VW Beetle cruise past your house at wake speed. When this happens at my home as I sit on my deck, it rattles my glass of iced tea. Copyright 2026 Tim Carter
Relocation Checklist - You Need One for a Long-Distance Move
Brian lives with his wife on the East Coast. He’s been a subscriber to my free newsletter for years. Brian is in a select group of virtual friends I’ve made over the years. It’s a delight to have email exchanges with these high-tech pen pals using electrons instead of ink.
You may be like Brian. He’s about to retire. He and his wife plan to do a long-distance relocation. It’s going to be their final big move, from what I understand. His last email exchange with me touched on this as he was asking for a bit of advice, knowing that I had done the same thing moving from Ohio to New Hampshire (NH) in 2008.
Brian shared that he and his wife are attracted to a community in Pennsylvania that has all sorts of amenities. He and his wife would become part of a homeowners' association (HOA). I’ve lived in one of these for the past seventeen years and cautioned him against making that choice.
I understand the lure of an HOA as you get older. Offloading any number of maintenance headaches to someone else is very attractive. But it often comes with a huge price tag that rises each year. I shared how my HOA dues started at $60 a month in 2008, and are now $200 a month. That increase is far greater than the rate of inflation over that same time period. His dues would be close to $5,000 a year. Imagine what they’ll be like fifteen years from now when money in his budget may be tighter than a banjo string.
The other issue, in my opinion, with HOAs is that I feel there’s at least one control freak who is the unpaid self-appointed bylaws enforcement officer. I have one in mine. This woman has a magical built-in radar gun in her head. She can somehow tell when you’re speeding down our private roads. She's not too bright because what she fails to realize is we don't have official speed limit signs on my street. We have the yellow/black recommended speed signs! You seed these signs on public roads below a sign telling you a curve is ahead.
You can view thousands of videos on YouTube of Karens like her who spread angst each day in HOAs like the wind scatters dandelion seeds.
My email exchange with Brian started to touch on other aspects of moving. Soon, I realized that the conversation should be shared with you. Moving within a city or town is stressful enough. That stress has a force multiplier when you move hundreds of miles away to a strange city or state you’ve never set foot in.
Finances should be one of the things you consider. Some states, like NH, have no sales tax or income tax. The state you’re thinking of moving to might have low property taxes. I was a real estate broker in Ohio for over twenty-five years and feel there’s only one way to compare property taxes. All you have to do is divide the annual property tax by the fair-market value of your home.
You’ll be stunned to discover that one city or state might have a tax rate three or four hundred percent higher than another. In my case, my property tax is only 0.6% of my house value. Brian’s current tax is 1.6% of his fair market value. That’s almost 300 percent higher than mine in NH.
Water - Wells vs. Recycled Sewage
Brian and I exchanged thoughts about water. He and his wife were reluctant to drink well water. I remember having the same reservations when I moved to NH. I had consumed the recycled sewage from all the upstream cities on the Ohio River for fifty-five years. Not only was chlorine added to the water, it needed to be filtered through huge activated charcoal to remove chemical pollutants like benzene. You see, there are big chemical plants up in West Virginia and Pennsylvania.
Layer on top of this flouride was added to the Cincinnati, Ohio municipal water supply. It's recently been connected to all sorts of health issues.
Well water, for the most part, can be very pure. It depends upon where you are, of course. You can test well water with ease, and it's very inexpensive. You can make this part of a sales agreement and back away from an offer if the test results come back unsatisfactory.
I feel it’s important to create a list of things you dislike about your current home and city. For me, I had become numb to the horrible traffic, potholes, pollution, background noise, etc. of my fifty-five years in Cincinnati. I thought that most places were like this. I was wrong.
You then have to create a list of things you desire. Perhaps you want to be close to thousands of miles of hiking trails. Maybe you do want the big city life. You may want to be close to the ocean or a large lake as both often offer lots of recreation opportunities.
I casually mentioned to Brian that should he and his wife give NH a serious look, he needed to avoid houses that are located on a Class-five road. A Class-five road is just dirt and gravel. Forty-nine weeks out of the year, you can travel on them with no issue. However, when mud season arrives in the spring, some can be impassable unless you have an Abrams tank. In the summer, everything outside your home is covered with dust created by passing cars and trucks.
This mud is frozen, but when it warms up you better have great tires on your 4x4. The roads become impassable in the worst cases. Copyright 2026 Tim Carter
You should consider climate, wildlife, and insects. My wife and I wanted to escape the insufferable humidity one suffers through in Cincinnati from June until September. NH has much lower dew points in the summer. That said, it also has wretched black files in the spring. These miserable tiny insects inflict a vicious bite for two or three weeks. The mosquito has been nominated to be the NH state bird many times.
It’s very important to consider crime statistics. There are quite a few websites that track this information. Study these facts to see what crimes happen where you plan to move. Is crime growing or lessening?
My advice to Brian was simple. Narrow down the choices to two or three places. Then, research the times the weather is best and worst. Travel to each town or city and rent a house for a week. Start to scout around to see if you like it. Stay in the city or town to see if you like the weather extremes.
Note the distance to stores and shops. Do you have to travel a great distance to get your car repaired? Do you like to dine out? Are there abundant great restaurants that will satisfy your appetite?
Drive by the worst parts of the city or town. Are there lots of homeless people? Are you a person of faith? If so, visit the places of worship to see if you fit in.
Think about how you buy a new car or truck. You often take it for a test drive. You need to do the same thing when you plan to put down new roots. Rent a house in the town for at least four weeks over a period of a year and see if you really like what you experience.
Column 1647
Indirect Bathroom Lighting Ideas
Indirect Bathroom Lighting Ideas - Three different lights create a look you’d might expect at a five-star hotel suite. This bathroom is on the third floor of a quaint home on Mt. Desert Island. Copyright 2026 Tim Carter
Indirect Bathroom Lighting Ideas - My Daughter is an Expert
It’s very hard to keep up with all of the improvements in building materials and products. Thousands of new things hit the marketplace each year. You need to focus on just one or two verticals to stay abreast of all that’s new.
Lighting is a category that might keep you busy twelve hours a day. Designers and architects who specialize in lighting design must be in hog heaven. Not only are there new lighting fixtures of all types introduced each year, but there are also new bulbs that help them achieve the exact look they’re shooting for.
Several months ago, I was tasked by She Who Must Be Obeyed to gather several new interior ordinary light bulbs for lamps. I knew she wanted a warm bulb in the 2700K range. Much to my surprise, I was able to purchase affordable LED bulbs that allowed me to choose the color temperature of the bulb myself.
These are great bulbs.
These A19 standard bulbs came with six settings: 2700K soft white, 3000K bright white, 3500K true white, 4000K cool white, 5000K daylight, and 6500K daylight deluxe. That’s a huge range of color temperature. Other types of bulbs are available with these same settings.
Layers of Light
Are you about to tackle a bathroom or kitchen renovation in the new year? Perhaps you’re building a new home. You have a unique opportunity to create layers of light in one or more rooms. This layering effect is what many lighting designers do to create that feel when you see dramatic photos of custom homes or lavish hotel suites.
Read this past column about how I helped a friend create a WOWZA kitchen lighting setup.
Lighting and color temperature are powerful tools you can employ to set the mood in a room. My son and I did this in his basement speakeasy. He was going after the 1920’s Prohibition-era look. The lighting needed to be subtle, warm, and soft. We achieved this using stunning pendant fixtures that hang above the bar. Each fixture has an old-fashioned light bulb featuring clear glass and a bulky tungsten filament that you’d see if you jumped out of a time machine into a hidden, smoke-filled bar one hundred years ago.
Soft LED light strips attached to the underside of the overhanging bar top in the back-bar area provide enough light for the bartender to do his job. Overhead, tucked up behind a soffit, we hid two spotlights that produce a soft cone of light on the shelves used to store the spirits. It goes without saying that all the different lights are switched separately.
Updating Condo Lighting
I stayed in my son-in-law’s condominium in Bass Harbor, Maine, over Christmas. He’s making improvements room-by-room over the next year. I helped him over the phone a month ago, solving a switching conundrum in his daughter’s bedroom. The original builder didn’t install any overhead lights during the transformation of an 1880’s sardine factory into eight residential condos.
He decided to install small track lights on either side of a giant roof-support beam. Two of the fixtures are aimed at a craft/desk area, and the other two will provide soft lighting over the two single beds. Track lights allow you to install light fixtures that can do very specific jobs.
He’s going to install an interesting variety of lights in his lower-level office. There needs to be separate lights for his desk area, one or two over a large racing simulator, ceiling lights that highlight shelves on a wall, and another light or two that shines on a wall-hung display case.
Are you starting to imagine how you can do many of these things in your own home? You can do lots of this in an existing home with minimal surgery to walls and ceilings. A competent electrician can use a fish tape to get cables to places you’d think impossible.
My daughter rounds out this lighting discussion. She just completed a bathroom finishing project in the past month. Years ago, I roughed-in a full bathroom on the third floor of her home. It was time to finish it off.
She’s always had a flair for decorating and design. She even wrote a book about it fifteen years ago called The Meghan Method. She’s an expert when it comes to lighting design.
That's my daughter. This book will BLOW YOU AWAY. The photos are stunning.
I feel she outdid herself in this modest bathroom. She loves to use furniture for her sink areas instead of traditional bathroom cabinets. You can count on the furniture to have 6-inch tall legs. This allows her, or you, to install an indirect light under the furniture. A soft, warm glow of light washes over the white marble floor in front of the sink area.
A nearly invisible thin LED light was installed on top of the marble backsplash. It’s designed to cast light up the wall, not into your face blinding you. The shower area has its own set of lights, as you might expect. The mirror over the sink comes with its own soft LED light built into the mirror.
You can get additional inspiration by peering at hundreds of photos online. You can do image searches on all the major search engines. Be specific about what you want to light. Use those keywords in your search. This small amount of effort will pay vast pleasure dividends once you see what’s possible in your home. Be sure to save the photos so you purchase the right fixtures. The photos will also help the electrician who will be installing the cables and wires to make your lighting dreams come true.
Column 1646
DIY Staircase
DIY Staircase - The flat stair treads are mortised into the angled 2x12. That angled board is called a stair stringer. It serves the same purpose as the floor joists in your home. Copyright 2026 Tim Carter
DIY Staircase - Use My Ebook
You may be like most folks. I’m guessing you give very little thought to the stairs you go up and down on a regular basis. They might be constructed from wood, steel, or concrete. The vast majority of stairs in residential homes are made from wood.
One of the first books I wrote was how to build a DIY staircase. CLICK HERE to get it.
Loretto Chapel Gaslighting
Wood is very easy to work with, and it can create very strong stairs. I stood just ten feet away from a marvelous circular staircase made from wood. It was in the Loretto Chapel in Santa Fe, New Mexico. This staircase has no center support column. Many feel that’s a miracle, but the truth is no central support column is required. The two twisted helical stair stringers that support the treads are the structural beams that support the stairs and anyone going up and down them.
The owners of this staircase want you to believe it’s a miracle that it doesn’t collapse because of a lack of visible support. Any carpenter worth his salt knows what’s holding it in place. ©2026 Tim Carter
I feel it’s important for you to understand the structure of a set of stairs before you get out your saw and framing square. This basic knowledge will allow you to construct a strong set of stairs. These stairs will support you, your buddy, and that 300-pound refrigerator. Think about the concentrated load of two corn-fed boys/men plus a heavy appliance! Weak stairs have collapsed under similar circumstances.
Simple stairs have just two components. The flat part your foot steps on is called a tread. The treads connect to side stringers and sometimes one that is in the middle of the stairs. The stringers are no different than wood floor joists, steel I-beams, or steel-reinforced concrete beams that support many tons of weight.
Stringers and Runners are Angled Floor Joists
I’m sure you can relate to wood floor joists. The building code permits the use of 2x8s in houses. They must meet certain specifications. These 2x8 floor joists can create a floor that resembles a trampoline, and still be code-compliant. It’s unnerving to walk across a floor that bounces up and down, in my opinion.
You can choose to use 2x12s or even giant floor trusses to create a wood floor system that has no springiness. The floor resembles walking across bedrock with absolutely no give whatsoever.
Now think about a set of stairs. A narrow set usually has only two stringers, one at each end of the treads. These stringers are not level. They are angled up or down in an opening so they connect one floor to another.
Imagine if you lifted the lower ends of the stringers and made them parallel with the upper floor joists. Then imagine the treads were rotated to sit on top of the stringers. Your stairs are nothing more than a narrow, tilted floor, much like a child’s slide at a playground.
I see stairs all the time that have stringers that have the strength of weak 2x6s! Perhaps you have a set of these leading from your deck down to the ground. I’m talking about stairs where a solid 2x12 was used for a stringer. However, you or the carpenter proceeded to notch the wood, creating the flat spots to attach the treads. These notches resemble the teeth on a saw blade. They transform a strong 2x12 to a much weaker 2x?, depending on the width of the lumber leftover from the notching process.
Create Mortises for the Treads
I avoid this issue, and you can too, by creating shallow 1/2-inch-deep mortises in the 2x12s. The treads fit into the mortises and are attached to the stringers by driving nails or screws through the outer face of the stringers into the ends of the treads.
The mortise method preserves all the strength of the 2x12. It’s a bit more work to create the mortises, but it’s worth it in the long run. You need a framing square, a circular saw, a router, and a wood chisel to make perfect mortises.
For the sake of discussion, let’s say you’re building a simple set of stairs for a deck, basement access, or up to an attic. You’ll just be using 2x12s for both the stringers and the treads. This lumber will make a very strong set of stairs.
The framing square is used to lay out on the face of the stringers where the mortises will be. The front nose of each tread must be the exact same distance from the edge of the stringer. I prefer to create stairs that have a 7.5-inch riser and a 10-inch tread. Using a 2x12 as the tread provides the code-compliant 1-inch overhang for foot safety.
A normal 2x12 is 1.5 inches thick. I create a mortise that’s just under 1 and 5/8-inch wide. I do this because the 2x12s are often not flat. They may have a hump or dip in the center. The larger mortise allows you to insert the tread into the stringer with minimal effort.
I set my circular saw blade depth to 1/2 inch. I then start to make parallel saw cuts within the 1 and 5/8ths
inch lines. Each cut leaves a thin wafer of wood that’s about 1/8-inch, or less, wide. These wafers snap off when tapped with a hammer.
The router is used to create a smooth face inside the mortise where the wafers used to be. The wood chisel is used to square up the two inside corners of the mortise. I have to tell you creating these mortises is therapeutic for me. The process creates an enormous feeling of satisfaction when you see the treads fit into the mortises like a hand fits into a glove.
I wrote a short ebook filled with photos showing the step-by-step process of marking out and creating the mortises for a set of simple stairs. You can get a copy for just $7 by visiting this link:
Column 1645
Exterior Painting Tips and Tricks
Exterior Painting Tips and Tricks: There’s a great chance the paint on this window would have lasted 30 years without peeling if the homeowner had followed my advice. Copyright 2025 Tim Carter
Exterior Painting Tips and Tricks - Think Clean
Exterior painting tips and tricks can be discovered in the strangest places. I had the distinct pleasure of touring a huge paint factory in Southern California several years ago. I was allowed to peer down into this massive vat as the solid components of the paint were added. Thousands of gallons of paint were about to be blended to perfection. I was stunned at the sophistication of the operation. Computers, sensors, and engineers in white lab coats controlled every aspect of the mixing process.
I believe I was the only member of the press on that tour who had a deep appreciation of what we were seeing. It turns out no other editor or media talent on the tour had applied thousands of gallons of paint over a period of thirty years as I had. Little did I know how complex it was to make a durable exterior paint.
Paint is Colored Glue
You might not realize it, but paint is nothing more than colored glue. The chemical formula of many basic paints is almost identical to that of strong yellow carpenter’s glue. My first business partner, John, shared this with me while we ate lunch one day on a job site. John and I painted houses in the summer. We used the money to help pay our college tuition. John went on to get his physical chemistry Ph.D and ended up working for the largest paint manufacturer in the USA.
The adhesive component of paint is often called the resin. Many different adhesives can be used to make paint. Vinyl acetate is one. Acrylic is another. My personal favorite is urethane. Have you ever noticed how clear urethane sticks to wood floors and furniture like the strongest Velcro®️ strips you’ve ever tried to peel apart?
I painted my Cincinnati, Ohio, house with an exterior urethane-resin paint in the late 1990s. Drive by the house today, and it looks as good as the day I applied it. It’s not peeling, and it has not faded. I used the same paint to coat my current house in central New Hampshire fifteen years ago. It looks like the paint was applied last week. You should buy paint with the best resin if you want it to last.
Please Read the Label
The first step, and I feel many ignore it, is to take five minutes and read the instructions on the paint can label. Be sure to follow them to the letter. You’ll almost always see this sentence: “Apply to a clean, dry, dust-free surface.” Let’s talk about clean and what it really means.
Think about cleaning your body. When you shower, I doubt you just stand under the stream of warm water and twirl around. Instead, you take your hands and rub your skin with soap. You may even use a washcloth or microfiber towel. This motion, or agitation, is what gets you clean. The soap helps remove dirt and oil from your skin.
I maintain that pressure washing your house is the same thing as just standing under your shower head. I can prove it. Take your dirty car to a carwash equipped with a pressure-washing wand. Clean and rinse your car with the tool. Drive out of the bay and park your car. Let it air dry for a few moments. Wherever the dirt was the worst, pull a moist finger across it. I guarantee you’ll get dirt on your finger. Dirt the pressure washing left behind!
Pressure Washing Leaves Dirt Behind
I prefer to wash the exterior of a house like I wash my car. I use a wonderful brush that RV owners use to clean the large flat surfaces of their motorhomes. I pre-treat my siding with a mixture of oxygen bleach and liquid dish soap. I always clean in the shade, not direct sunlight. Once finished, my siding and trim are squeaky clean.
Cracks that allow water to sneak behind siding or along windows and doors must be caulked. It pays to purchase the most expensive water-based caulk. These products have better ingredients, in my opinion.
I allow the caulk to cure for 24 hours before painting over it.
Some modern paints don’t require primers. Some do. Pay very close attention to the label instructions for the primers. You may see they dry to touch in as little as an hour, and can be recoated soon after that. This is a very important point that most overlook.
Coat Primer Within Hours
Applying the finish paint as soon as the primer says it can be recoated is the best practice. This ensures the primer doesn’t get dirty, and you often get a physical and chemical bond whereby the primer and finish paint interlock as if they were one paint. You only want to prime as much surface area as you can finish coat on the same day.
The paint label may also say to work in the shade. Many years ago, I discovered the hard way how important it is to do this. I was painting the detached garage of my second home. The trim color was flat black. I was painting in the middle of the afternoon on a hot, cloud-free day. The sunlight was hitting the garage trim like a spotlight on a fleeing prisoner.
Within an hour of applying the paint, blisters appeared on the trim. The hot sunlight boiled the water in the paint, creating water vapor under the fresh paint skin. It was a huge mess.
High-quality brushes make all the difference. The paint will flow better, and you’ll get a better appearance. Get the brush wet before you dip it into the paint. This will help prevent hardened paint from building up on the metal ferrule. Be sure to watch my video demonstrating the secret and proper way to clean paint brushes. I have brushes that are thirty years old that look almost brand new!
Column 1644
Garage Design Ideas
Garage Design Ideas - The architect, builder, or designer got one thing right with this new detached garage. But there are many things wrong. Copyright 2025 Tim Carter
Garage Design Ideas - Always Go Bigger
Eighteen months ago, I recorded a thirty-second video that went viral on YouTube. It’s received hundreds of thousands of views and thousands of comments. Well over ninety-eight percent of the comments said I had no idea what I was talking about. I never expected this negative outpouring of opinion. I thought many would agree with me.
This is the garage foundation in my video. Copyright 2026 Tim Carter
I surveyed my 20,000 newsletter subscribers a year ago, once the short video went viral. The response was exactly as I thought would happen. Many of my subscribers have lived in multiple houses over their lives. They were frustrated with the narrow and shallow standard-sized garages that are more prolific than dandelion seeds floating in the air on a breezy late-spring day.
Garages are Too Narrow
The inspiration for the video came to me as I drove past a new home under construction near my house. The foundation had just been poured and backfilled. It was obvious the house had an attached garage based on the 16-foot-wide notch in the foundation for the garage door. The property had a ‘For Sale’ sign posted. This allowed me to inspect the property and foundation without trespassing.
The foundation size and shape communicated two glaring errors to me. I mention this in light of the insatiable appetite of many homeowners, including myself, to accumulate possessions, adult toys, gardening tools, etc. I knew from decades of parking in similar garages that the side walls of the garage were too close to the edge of the garage door. Adding insult to injury, the garage depth would barely allow a common pickup truck to fit with the garage door closed.
You might have hot buttons in your life about any number of things. Perhaps you’re bothered by the design of kitchen tools. Your blood pressure might spike when your life partner once again annoys you with a pesky habit. For me, it’s garage design. Millions of garages, in my opinion, are far too small. The sad thing is that unfinished garage space is one of the least expensive parts of a house to construct.
Educate Architects & Builders
I’m trying to do my part to educate young and old architects, builders, designers, and homeowners about the secondary effects of having a garage that’s too small. My goal is to challenge them to do the math, comparing the cost of building a slightly larger garage versus paying decades of ever-increasing fees for on-site and off-site storage. I’m asking them to ponder the size of cars, trucks, lawn mowers, wheelbarrows, garbage cans, etc. These are common things many homeowners store in a garage.
Days ago, I passed a detached garage being constructed near my home. Once again, I saw the narrow 2-foot-wide concrete walls on either side of the garage door opening. The 2-foot-on-center spacing of the thirteen steep roof trusses told me the outside depth of the garage was 24 feet. Subtract the depth of the 2x6 walls, and the inside of this garage is but 23 feet. The best-selling pickup truck in the USA, with the popular 4-door cab configuration, is just over 20 feet long bumper to bumper. Imagine trying to walk around the truck with the garage door closed!
It’s possible this garage was as big as the local zoning laws would permit. I served on the zoning and planning board of my small village in Ohio for six years. I know a thing or two about zoning and variances. It’s also possible the homeowner didn’t think it through as to what he or she plans to put in the garage.
The detached garage I passed days ago had at least one thing going for it. The architect, builder, or homeowner requested a very steep roof. This allowed for a giant room above the garage to store things. The factory-built trusses had a large rectangular space created within the webbing. The extra price for each truss is about the same as what the homeowner would pay each month locally to rent a tiny 5x5x8-foot storage space!
Stairs Steal Space
Lurking in the shadows of this detached garage is another specter. Without looking at the plans or walking onto the property, I have no idea how the homeowner will gain access to this large space above the parked vehicles. Traditional stairs against the rear wall will shorten one of the two parking slots. A narrow and steep fold-down staircase may be the solution. These can be extremely dangerous if you’re going up or down with a medium to large box in your hands.
Do Storage Math
I priced a few 16x24-foot pre-built outdoor sheds in October of 2025. Each one was more than $10,000.00. These sheds require ongoing maintenance just as your home would. Local zoning laws often stipulate where these can be on your lot. These sheds often have substandard floors that can rot out. The price doesn’t include a strong, level, and square foundation.
You should think about all of these things if you’re building a new home. Do you rent a storage pod for your current possessions, or do you rent an off-site storage space? What are you paying each year for this? How much will the rent go up in the next five or ten years? Based on the prices I see around my home in 2025, I can assure you that people near me will be spending about $40,000 in the next ten years for an off-site storage space that’s less than 200 square feet.
I helped my daughter design a very spacious garage for her home. The garage is 26 feet deep. It has attic trusses above it, creating a huge room. The face of the interior side walls of the garage is 3 feet away from the edge of the 10-foot-wide garage doors. The space between the two garage doors is 3 feet. She can open the doors of her large SUV and not hit the car in the other slot or the shelves along the walls. All of this extra space only cost her $6,000 at the time the house was built.
We did the math before she built. You, your builder, and your architect should do the same. I’m confident you’ll discover it makes much greater financial sense to build a larger garage, assuming your lot will accommodate it.
Column 1643
Trex® RainEscape® Class Action Lawsuit
Trex® RainEscape® Class Action Lawsuit
My Trex® RainEscape® has developed cracks and is leaking.
I recorded this short video showing a few of the cracks.
This is but one of the many cracks in my Trex RainEscape system. That sliver of blue is the sky above my deck! Copyright 2026 Tim Carter
Other Trex® RainEscape® owners might have the same issue.
At least one person who has the same problem has left a comment on my video.
I predict, at some point, that Trex® RainEscape® may be named in a class-action lawsuit about this defect.
Plumbing Repair Cost
An inexpensive stainless steel kitchen strainer is in place to capture all of this food waste. Failure to do this can create clogs in kitchen drain pipes. Copyright 2026 Tim Carter
Plumbing Repair Cost - How to Avoid Them
You may think I don’t suffer as you might. I don’t know of a living person who looks forward to an expensive service call. Your AC may quit on the hottest day, your kitchen sink may get clogged with egg shells three hours before your Thanksgiving guests arrive, and/or your furnace or boiler decides to take the night off during a wicked cold spell. I’m going to share a few tips in this column that should save you many hundreds of dollars.
A Birch Tree Leaf Stops a Boiler
I’m not immune to service calls. Just last year, my wife called me on a frigid December morning while I was at my son’s house. She awoke to a very cold house. I had stayed the night before at my son’s house, seventy miles south. I was doing back-to-back days of work, helping him finish his basement.
Our relatively new modulating boiler had stopped working. I rushed home and immediately saw the error code on the digital readout. I tried to restart the boiler. It would light and start to fire up, but then it would shut down. I switched out the ignitor, think of an automobile spark plug, but that did no good. I was out of options. It was time to call in a boiler pro.
My wife has many expensive orchids, and we couldn’t allow them to perish with the dropping temperatures. I called a local company that serviced boilers. Two hours later, a tech was here. Before he crossed my threshold, the price was already $300.00 with it being a Saturday.
He spent an hour trying to get the boiler to work and was running into dead ends. Finally, he took off the clamp holding the combustion-air intake pipe to the boiler. The boiler could now get air from the basement mechanical room. Instantly, the boiler started up and ran perfectly.
Ten minutes later, the tech and I had removed the outdoor cover for the intake and exhaust pipe. A flat beech tree leaf had somehow found a way through a narrow 1/2-inch slot. Each time the boiler tried to fire up, the leaf would be pulled against the intake pipe, robbing the boiler of air. A sensor would shut down the boiler as a safety. Ten minutes later, the tech was swiping my credit card for an $800 service call.
I’ve selected three of the top things you can do with ease to prevent service calls or damage to the delicate surfaces of your home. Let’s get started.
How To Minimize Plumbing Clogs
Plumbing clogs might rank in the top three service calls of all time. There are national companies devoted to nothing more than snaking out drain clogs. Many other plumbers specialize in this much-needed service. In almost all cases, you, the homeowner, do very silly things that create the clogs.
Food waste and grease create the most common clogs. The basket strainer in your sink often has four narrow slots that prevent large food waste from getting into the drain pipes. This is not enough. You should be using a very inexpensive strainer that fits inside your existing basket strainer. This secondary strainer is made with a fine-mesh stainless steel screen. The holes are so small that a peppercorn would be caught in the mesh.
This strainer can save you HUNDREDS of dollars on service calls. CLICK HERE to order a set.
Purchase one or two of these and stop all food waste from getting into your pipes. Food waste often doesn’t make it to the primary building drain in your home. It begins to build up and clog the pipe immediately behind your kitchen sink cabinet. Sop up all grease from plates, pots, and pans with used paper towels. Try to minimize grease going down your drains.
Garage door service calls are no doubt high on the list of unnecessary expenses. Many people neglect their garage doors. It’s very important to keep the roller wheels lubricated and the tracks clean.
It’s vital to keep the powerful spring(s) that lifts the door rust-free. A rusty spring can snap without warning. Springs within miles of saltwater corrode much faster than normal.
You can prevent rust by spray painting the spring(s), or you can spray the bare metal with a penetrating oil. Never ever try to adjust this spring. Leave that to a professional. But you can get on a short step ladder and safely spray this spring with a lightweight oil to prevent rust. It’s expensive to replace a broken garage door spring.
The failure to remember some of the basic chemistry knowledge you obtained in high school can also drain money from your checking account. You can ruin painted surfaces in your home with aggressive cleaning practices. My own daughter did this to our entrance hall walls using a magic pad that’s been banned from my house. She burnished the flat wall paint, trying to clean off stains. Now there are random polished spots that will require me to repaint the walls.
Water is the universal solvent. Food stains, mud, dirt, etc., often contain some amount of water. Stains bond very well to walls and furniture once the water evaporates.
All you have to do is rehydrate the stain, and in many cases, it will come off with minimal rubbing. You can rehydrate a stain by getting a small paper towel wet. Squeeze out the excess water. Apply the towel onto the stain and press it against the stain so the wet towel contacts the stain. Wait fifteen minutes and then try to gently rub the stain. You’ll discover, in most cases, the stain disappears with very little effort.
If you’ve not priced out what painters charge these days to paint walls, there’s a good chance it will take your breath away. Washing painted walls using a simple solution of liquid dish soap and water is all you need to make walls look new. I prefer to use an inexpensive grout sponge when washing my painted walls.
Try it on just one wall, and you’ll be amazed. Remember, do the same thing with the sponge as you did with the paper towel. Get the wall wet with the soapy water, let it sit for five minutes, then come back with the sponge and rinse the wall with clear water. The five-minute dwell time is enough to produce professional results.
Column 1642
Laundry Faucet Replacement
I’m holding a new laundry tray faucet with paddle handles. You can install one yourself in less than 30 minutes with a few inexpensive tools. CLICK HERE or the photo to BUY this exact faucet.
Laundry Faucet Replacement - It's Very Easy
Laundry faucet replacement is easy. You don't need to call an expensive plumber.
You may or may not know that not only am I a home builder, but I’ve also been a master plumber since age 29. I was drawn to the plumbing craft because of its fascinating three-dimensional nature. Your home has but one sewer pipe leaving your house, and often just one vent pipe poking up through your roof. However, in between these two points is a maze of interconnected pipes that all must work together to keep you and your family healthy.
Many aspects of residential plumbing are complex and difficult. Some are not. Most of the plumbing problems you encounter in your home, you can often fix yourself. My guess is you’re afraid to tackle the repair, thinking you’ll cause a leak that floods your home. You can save many hundreds of dollars if you start to do simple plumbing repairs yourself. Your confidence will grow like a dandelion in the warm spring New Hampshire sun!
I want to share with you a simple repair you can do yourself. I’m about to do the same job this week. I’m going to install a new laundry tray faucet. My existing one is about twenty-five years old. It has traditional rubber washers instead of washerless cartridges.
What’s more, my existing faucet all of a sudden started moving around as you operated the valves. The faucet came with a cheap galvanized metal retention nut that eventually rusted out. A high-quality faucet would have had a rust-proof brass nut, but I didn’t install this faucet. I didn’t build this home I live in.
The first step is to shut off the water to the faucet. I have a shutoff valve for the hot and cold water lines under my laundry sink. Rotating the handles clockwise shuts off the water. Test to ensure the water is off by then turning on your laundry faucet. If no water flows, you’re in great shape. If water is flowing, you’ll have to turn off the main water shutoff valve where water enters your home.
You only need three simple tools to replace a laundry tray faucet in almost all cases. I’ll be using a medium-sized adjustable wrench, a medium channel-lock pliers, and the all-important basin wrench.
A basin wrench is a tool that allows you to tighten and loosen the nuts that hold a faucet to a sink, as well as the nuts that connect the water-supply tubes to the bottom of the faucet. This wrench was designed to work in the narrow space between the back of a sink and the rear wall of a cabinet.
Its unique design features curved spring-loaded jaws that resemble the mouth of a fierce dinosaur. These jaws also swivel 180 degrees, allowing you to use the wrench to both loosen and tighten the nuts in the narrow space you’ll find yourself working.
Seasoned plumbers often don’t use a basin wrench when installing a faucet for the first time. They’ll attach the faucet to the sink, when possible, before the sink is installed in the countertop. With the sink out of the countertop, you have easy access to the nuts that must be tightened. An ordinary adjustable wrench is all one needs in this situation. The plumber will often attach the water supply tubes to the bottom of the faucet at the same time.
My laundry sink is a wall-hung design. Gravity holds it on the wall using a clever French cleat hanger. I intend to disconnect my p-trap from the sink using the channel-lock pliers.
CLICK HERE to purchase my durable laundry sink.
I’ll also disconnect the flexible water supply lines from the shutoff valves. I’ll then just lift the entire sink straight up. I’ll then have easy access to the underside of the sink, allowing me to switch out my faucet in just minutes. I’ll install the new faucet and water supply lines to the faucet before rehanging the sink on the wall.
Let’s talk about the water supply tubes. These flexible pipes have come a long way in just forty years. We had to use chrome-plated soft-copper supply tubes when I was an apprentice plumber. You had to cut them to the perfect length and bend them with precision. It was common for these to develop tiny leaks if you didn’t align the tubes perfectly.
Modern water supply lines are idiot-proof. They have internal rubber o-rings at each end. Leaks only happen if you just hand-tighten the nuts. Once you get the nuts hand-tightened, use an adjustable wrench to twist the nut an additional 180 degrees. It’s very simple.
It’s important to use a small amount of plumbers' putty under the body of your new faucet. My guess is your faucet with come with a plastic gasket that fits the bottom of the faucet body. A thin layer of plumbers' putty on the bottom of this gasket ensures water will not leak under the faucet and through the holes in the sink. This water, over time, can cause wood rot, mold, etc.
Excess plumber’s putty will ooze out from under the gasket as you tighten the nuts that hold the faucet to the sink. Be sure these nuts are quite tight so the faucet doesn’t slide around on the top of your sink. Be careful about applying too much pressure, should your sink be vitreous china. Aggressive plumbers have cracked china sinks by over-tightening these nuts.
Do you think you can do this job? I’m sure you can. If you need help over the phone, I’m there to guide you through this repair.
CLICK HERE to set up a plumbing coaching call with me.
You’ll save hundreds of dollars and you’ll feel fantastic once the job is complete and leak-free.
Column 1641