Category: Home Improvement

There’s a gray shadow on the ceiling over the bookshelf. The wall behind the TV looks a little dingy. And the carpet along the baseboards has these dark lines that won’t vacuum out, no matter how many times you go over them. You’ve never had a fire. So what is that? Soot, most likely. You…

Rutherford wears its history well. The William Carlos Williams House on Ridge Road was built in 1913, and the poet and doctor lived there for half a century. Over on Felician’s Rutherford campus, the historic Iviswold building sits at the center of it all. It’s a town full of houses with real character. So when…

When we picked CertainTeed shingles for our house, the salesperson kept saying the roof came with a “lifetime warranty.” That’s true, as far as it goes. But once we read the fine print, we learned the CertainTeed warranty has more layers than the headline suggests. Here’s what we found, in plain terms. Standard SureStart Has…

You run the dishwasher. You open it. The glasses have a white film on them. You run them again. Same result. It’s not the dishwasher and it’s not the detergent. It’s the water Hard water is water with a lot of dissolved calcium and magnesium in it. When it dries or gets heated, those minerals…

Press a hand flat against one of your walls. If it feels hard and cool, more like stone than cardboard, there’s a decent chance it isn’t drywall. Some homes have veneer plaster instead, which is a thin coat of hard plaster troweled over a special gypsum board. From across the room, it can pass for…

Once the damaged material is out of a fire damaged house, you’re looking at bare framing, subfloor, and sheathing. That skeleton has to be cleaned before anything goes back over it. Skip it and you get a house that still smells a year later. There is no fix at that point that doesn’t involve opening…

Most carpet does not need a professional. That is not what people expect a home maintenance blog to say, but it is true for a good stretch of a carpet’s life. Vacuum weekly. Handle spills fast. Put mats at the doors. Do those three things and a synthetic carpet can look fine for years without…

There is a specific flavor of dread that hits when you hear that first drip during a storm. You are standing there with a bucket, watching a brown ring bloom across the ceiling, and you have no clue whether this is a fifty dollar fix or a five thousand dollar one. Good news: what you…