Month: July 2018

I generally advertise myself as a “small project guy,” and this is a perfect example of the kind of problem I like to solve.  A customer called with a rear screen door that had flown off its pneumatic closer attachment.
This had been a somewhat cheesy attachment to begin with, just sheet metal screws screwed into the door.  Also the chain up top designed to prevent the door from being blown away was all out of adjustment, it was so loose as to be useless.  So I fixed that,

Then I drilled all the way thru the door and installed some stainless steel (ALWAYS use stainless steel on exterior stuff) bolts and lock washers and nuts . . .

The outside you can see the heads . . .

And finally I sawed off the excess lengths of the bolts, and filed them down so no sharp edges.  And, VIOLA.

Tis the nature of this work that people will ask me to do all kinds of stuff I have never done before.  The other day a lady called and asked if I could fix her vinyl siding:

I couldn’t quite figure out what caused this.  Woodpeckers?  Oh well.  Again, I had never done vinyl siding before, but I watched Tommy on This Old House do it and it seemed simple enough, so I bought a zip tool and off we went.

So the biggest part of the job was finding replacement pieces.  They did not make this color any more, so I got something close.  Once I figured that out, off came the old:

After I took out the bottom piece, I realized I had enough of it to replace the top piece with original color, so the only piece not matching is the bottom:

And, now I know how to do vinyl siding patches.

So one job I get asked to do now and then is to patch something like siding or tile.  And I always tell the client, 80% of it is finding a replacement piece to match.

I often envy people who do all new installs– they don’t have to hunt down sources of off white tile or siding,  be told “they don’t make it anymore, and here is something close but doesn’t match exactly.”

So anyway, a regular client has a small bathroom in her office condo.  They had switched from hot water heat to forced air, and the baseboard heating unit had been removed, and this left her with a godawful ugly hole in her bathroom floor.

So as is so often the case, I did not know very much about tiles, but I set out to solve this tiny blemish and learned as I went.

We were lucky enough to find some tiles that almost matched.   And it took me a week to learn how to cut tiles . . . and I put in the patch pieces.  Pix below.

I could not use thinset because the tiles were mounted on a wooden subfloor (this is why I ask endlessly questions at hardware stores– there are traps everywhere).  So I covered the hole with a wooden patch, screwed it in, and attached the tile patch pieces with liquid nails.

And, with the baseboard installed (I did not do this) it looks magnificent.