Q&A / 

How Tall Should a Wall Be? It Makes a Difference Did you know the safest and most comfortable steps to go up or down have 7.5-inch risers and 10-inch treads? Knowing this, how tall should a wall be in a house with a staircase? How do you calculate wall height? Make some room in your […]

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Color Slide and Color and B&W Negative Scanners In August of 2022, I started a massive project of scanning at least 2,000 color slides and well over 10,000 color and black and white 35mm negatives. Years before I had purchased an affordable miniature scanner, but I had let it languish. It was a Wolverine F2D […]

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Solar Panels Return on Investment - Moving Target In August of 2022, Robert reached out to me after receiving last week's newsletter. Here's part of what he said: "Along the line of conservation of resources, what are your thoughts on solar panels on one’s home? I live in North Richland Hills, Texas and have been […]

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DIY Home Projects That Save Money The volume of incoming DIY help requests via the Ask Tim page of my www.AsktheBuilder.com website is rising faster than the Fed can hike interest rates to tame the raging inflation. With the prices of bare necessities such as fuel and food taking larger bites out of your budget, […]

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White Fluffy Mold on Concrete - It's Salt Not too many years ago I recorded a video in my garage as spring debuted. You can watch this video for free on right here on my website. This video gets comments each and every week from folks like you. Most of the comments surprise me because […]

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Window Washing Near Me - DIY Because it's EASY See that window above? See that fog on the left half of the sash? Unless you're paralyzed, you can get professional results in seconds. I cleaned that right half of the window glass using exactly what pros use to clean skyscraper glass. What magic window washing […]

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Cracked Stone Small stones can be cracked with a sledgehammer. But what about solid bedrock that extends through the globe to China? Well, you use a giant jackhammer when blasting is too expensive or there are other houses too close to the blasting site. Part One of this two-part series is below the Cracked Stone […]

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Corner Bookshelves Can be Cool I’ve had enough trips around the sun such that I often find myself thinking of what might be inside future homes. For example, do you think that architects and builders from 100 years ago would have thought laundry chutes would go out of style? They might have thought placing washing […]

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How to Prevent Wood Rot Repair Hours before I began to write this column I was backing my car into a parking spot at church. Just ahead of me was an older garage on the church campus that was being remodeled. New vinyl siding is being installed and my guess is all of the trim […]

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