For most homeowners, plumbing means turning on faucets (dishes, the shower), appliances (dishwasher, washing machine) or flushing the toilet. We only think about plumbing when there’s a leak and few homeowners understand how we get hot and cold water when we want it. Fortunately building codes establish design guidelines that insure our home’s plumbing system is properly designed and safe for our families.

Water pipes initially were made of wood until cities began to use cast iron for water mains. We still expect our home’s plumbing to be made of copper and that’s where PEX or cross-linked polyethylene (PEX) enters our story. PEX was adopted first in Europe but with escalating copper prices, it’s now gaining popularity in the US according to the NY Times article, If Copper Pipes are Too Costly … READ MORE

Kitchen cabinets are meant to be functional and beautiful. Electrical outlets, even the new styles, are still more about function – you need to turn the lights on, plug the mixer in when baking, and more. There is a place for each of these features in a kitchen but they simply don’t play well together!

When visiting a kitchen product website, I was looking at the cabinets in this photo. I wanted to see if the cabinet styles matched even though the homeowners picked a beautiful cherry for their island, to provide contrast with the white cabinets in the rest of the kitchen.

That’s when I went, oh they ruined the clean look by putting ugly white outlets on the island side panel and the wall too. This is absolutely unnecessary but homeowners need to get involved to make sure this doesn’t happen. Learn how to avoid this problem

As winter approaches, you need to shutoff exterior faucets to avoid problems if/when the temperature drops below freezing. Typically you’ll have 1 or more outside faucets for watering the lawn, washing the car, etc. Each exterior faucet should have a shutoff valve inside the house where you can turn off the source of water to the outside faucet.

Sometimes a homeowner will close the shutoff valve and forget to drain the pipe from the shutoff valve to the faucet, leaving water in the pipe which can freeze. Make sure you drain the outside faucet, close it and remove the garden hose. The outdoor shower to the left, has an extra valve inside to drain the system. Lower than all the other pipes, the red valve is turned to let water in the system drain through the pipe below the valve. Learn more tips about shutting off your water supply …

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Water freezes when the temperature falls below freezing, like making ice cubes in your freezer. When water freezes it expands,and in a pipe it may expand enough to burst the pipe depending on how much pressure builds up in the pipe. If a plumbing pipe bursts, the water escapes and goes in many directions and may cause serious damage … and the worst case is when the pipe bursts inside the walls, where you can hear it but can’t see it. That’s when you need to shut your water off as quickly as possible (read Learning to Shut Your Water Off).

Houses in northern climates are built to withstand freezing temperatures. Pipes have insulation between the exterior wall and the water pipes, protecting them from freezing weather. The biggest risk is where there are holes or cracks that allow cold air to enter the home and cause the temperature surrounding the pipe to drop. Water pipes in warmer climates are more likely to lack adequate insulation to protect them from freezing temperatures as they occur infrequently and homeowners aren’t as aware of the problems. READ MORE

Our most famous holiday decorations come at Christmas, with Halloween close behind. Do you wonder why so many holidays fall at the end of the year? First Thanksgiving, followed by a busy month celebrating Christmas, Hanukkah and Kwanzaa and a week later there’s New Years.

My favorite holiday is Christmas with all the decorations, lots of singing (or listening to Christmas carols) and hoping for my first winter snow in New Hampshire. With Christmas lights, you get to enjoy not only your own decorations, but those put up by friends and neighbors. We’ve got some great tips for how to use what you already own to make your front door sparkle with holiday spirit! READ MORE

We take electricity for granted in the US, from alarm clocks to wake us, cell phones recharged for another day, the refrigerator, coffee pot, a hot shower and so much more. It’s hard to imagine many activities where we don’t use electricity except sleeping.

While home owners often like to handle small home repairs, a word of caution is appropriate when working with electricity. You MUST know how to turn off the power to a light fixture or appliance before you begin work and you should always test to make sure the power is really off as switches at the box can be mislabeled. If you are not absolutely sure how to do both of these things, then don’t!

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Bathrooms and specifically showers and bathtubs are prone to leaks. Do you have a shower door that leaks or do the corners of the glass enclosure leak every time you take a shower?  If you answered yes, you may have noticed water damage on the sheet rock or baseboards outside the shower.  The problem and solution to shower door leaks may be less complicated than you think.

Dealing with water leaks is a common problem addressed by my handyman business, and often after the homeowner has tried to solve the problem unsuccessfully. Fortunately homeowners use their bathrooms regularly so they spot these problems quickly but have trouble figuring out what part of the shower or tub is leaking. READ MORE

In theory a garage is for your car but very few people have room in their garage as they use it to store things and for activity centers that don’t fit in the house. You might have a ping pong table like my home in California where we don’t have basements. A homeowner handyman is likely to have their workshop in the garage or maybe a gardening center for tools and getting seeds started in the spring.

When you’re storing lots of stuff in the garage, you want to be sure everything is safe so a drain might be needed if you occasionally get water in the garage. This article outlines several drain covers available for a garage floor (most drain covers are for bathrooms or industrial/commercial applications), so here is what I was able to find for one of my handyman customers. READ MORE

When you open your freezer, it’s not really that cold … but it’s cold enough to create ice cubes. It works great because an ice cube tray is designed so when water freezes and expands, there is space for the ice cubes.  The principal behind ice cubes is the same for water anywhere and sometimes that can be a problem.

If you forget to drain pipes that lead to your outside faucets, they are likely to freeze over the winter although you might not find out until you turn the water back on in the spring. In cold weather climates, one of your home maintenance checklist items should be shutting off outside faucets … and draining the water that may be left in the pipes. It’s also a good idea to insulate exposed pipes in case you lose your heat and keep the thermostat at 55 degrees or higher. READ MORE

Homeowners expect their home insurance to cover any type of accident but that’s no longer true as each year it seems like there are more exclusions, and then for some things you have to buy an extra rider. Even more confusing is when you have work done by a contractor and there’s an accident while the work is being done … or harder to determine, shortly after the work was conpleted.

I recently a story about a friend who’s pipes burst and another post shows how to protect pipes in cold weather. This friend lives in another state but called me for advice given my broad base of knowledge about construction, homes, common problems. He wanted insight into the tangled web of insurance claims. READ MORE