Are your doors acting a little strange?

Is it just me, or do you sometimes feel like your home is occupied by an unseen force capable of opening or closing your doors at will? There are a couple of possibilities that come to mind. It could be that there are indeed spirits living with you and they feel a particular need for a door to remain open or closed, perhaps it is a little drafty on the “other side”. Perhaps your previous owner or realtor neglected to inform you that your house sits on a sacred native american burial site.

Although these could be possible answers to your problem, I think I have the real answer. When installing a door, it is important to secure it in a vertical or “plumb” position, meaning it is straight up. What happens most of the time is that the door is slightly out of plumb making the door lean inward or outward causing it to swing from its own weight. If your door moves quite a bit it is leaning more than it should.

So where do you go from here? You could hire a carpenter to remove and re-install the frame, causing the need for re-painting the jamb and trim and any possible number of things that could suffer collateral damage. You could do this yourself with the same results, or you can do this simple repair.

Remove one of the hinge pins of the affected door, usually using a hammer and nail to the underside of the hinge pin to drive it up and out of it place. Take the pin and place it on a hard surface like the concrete sidewalk or driveway, (guys, don’t do this on the kitchen counter without first concocting a good story for your wife about the counter got that mark on it), and hit the middle of the hinge pin with the hammer. This will put a slight bend in the pin. Place the pin back in the hinge and drive it back in fully, the bend in the pin will add friction to the motion of the door and will stop it from moving on its own. If your situation warrants, do this to more than one pin, or perhaps by bending it a little more.

This is an easy fix to a common problem. I hope this helps.

Water torture and your house

One home maintenance subject that strikes terror in many people is that involving the plumbing system, specifically the water end of it.  Like most everything else in life, your plumbing system will have problems when you least expect it, and as a result, can cost you an expensive trip from a plumbing repair service.  Not to mention the inconvenience of changing your plans and wasting your time.

Performing a regular inspection of what you can see, as well as doing a few simple tasks during the year can put you in position to know before there is a problem.  We are all at the mercy of what we cannot see inside our walls or under the concrete slab.  To be honest, there simply is not much that can go wrong there unless there was some installation error or some special condition.

So, what can we look at?  Here is a short list of things to do.

• Find your main house shut off valve, usually located somewhere in the front yard.  It will be a pipe coming up from the ground and entering the house.  Each year you need to close and re-open the valve to make sure it operates properly.  I can tell you that when I remodel any house, there is about a 50% chance that the water shut off will not work, causing us to resort to closing the valve at the water meter.  Most utility companies don’t like you to touch this at all, and people usually do not have the proper tool to do this anyway.  Theres nothing like having a large leak in your house with no way to shut it off easily.  If you do need a replacement, I recommend a ball valve, it is by far the easiest to operate.
• Look under all sink faucets for the hot and cold shut off valves.  Each year you will want to do the same thing, shut and re-open them to make sure they function.  While you are down there, take notice of any signs of water drips from the valves or faucet.  It is easy to find indications of this.  If you are in need of replacing any of the flexible lines from the valve to the faucet, I recommend using a stainless steel braided flex line.  Replacing these lines are fairly easy for any homeowner to do, if a valve needs to be replaced, although harder to do, it still can be done by any handy person.  Same holds true with an old faucet.  Look, not only is this good for your plumbing, but it’s not a bad idea to clear all of that junk and expired stuff from under your sink once in a while.
• Don’t forget the washing machine and refrigerator.  Same needs to be done with these valves.  From personal experience I can tell you that you do not want your washing machine supply hose to burst open in the middle of the night  That is probably when it will happen, unless you are on vacation of course, then your chances really go up then.  My recommendation for both washers and refrigerators is to replace the supply lines with stainless steel flex lines regardless of how they may look.  I know it is a hassle to move the refrigerator, but you can clean those dust bunnies and dead bugs while doing this.

By doing this each year you can get to know where everything is located should there be a problem in the future, and know everything is in working order.  Get your kids involved with this, it doesn’t hurt to get them up to speed in case anything happens while you are away.  Water torture is not only reserved for special operatives trying to gather information, you can keep your water system from torturing you by doing some simple tasks.

Where there’s smoke there’s fire?

Today I am speaking of smoke detectors.  A very important safety device in our homes that is also one of the most ignored is the smoke detector.

I am not sure when smoke detectors first made their debut, but I remember in 1982, when I first got involved in the building industry, installing them in new homes.  At that time they were required to be installed in hallways outside the bedrooms, and were direct wired to a 120 volt circuit.  They were very sensitive to smoke from any source and were unpredictable as to what would set them off.  At that time, the kitchen exhaust hoods were notorious for removing very little of the smoke generated on the cooking surface, setting up an alarm any time you were cooking something on the cook top.  I remember taking down a detector or two to put it out of its misery, and like most people, rarely got around to putting it back up.  I still go into some older houses and see the familiar open electrical box in the wall or ceiling where the detector once was located.

Today, the codes have changed, requiring the detectors to be in the hallways as before but also locates them inside each bedroom as well as additional locations depending on the ceiling heights of your home.  Each smoke detector has a battery back-up and all are interconnected so that any unit setting off its alarm will cause all of them to alarm.  I have to say that I rarely see or hear of any detector alarming from the smoke of cooking activity, so the sensitivity has improved greatly.

Like everything with batteries, we need to change them.  How often?  You will hear differing suggestions for this, my opinion is to do it once a year, even though they could last 3 years or more before absolutely needing it.  The detectors will give an audible signal when the battery is low, we have all heard the annoying “chirping” that drives you to get it done.  Like all unexpected things that happen, it will probably start chirping in the middle of the night, and you will have to do something or suffer a poor nights sleep.  Many of us have much higher ceilings than the old days, making it harder to get to them without a tall ladder.  By the way, a low battery is not the only thing that will cause the detector to chirp, a loss of the 120 volt power will do it too.  If there is not a power outage, it is possible that the circuit breaker has tripped.

So let’s get going on this, make it a point to do it once a year, tie it in with New Years Day or something like that, put it on the calendar each year when you get a new one, make a list of household maintenance and hang it by your phone in the kitchen.  Whatever method you think of, just do it, you will feel better.  Remember to keep plenty of 9-volt batteries on hand, we don’t need another excuse for ignoring our duties to our houses.

Time to get busy with home maintenance

All of us have something in common. Regardless of our age, where we work, or what part of town we live in, we all live someplace which needs our attention.  That place could be an apartment, a standard tract home, a custom home, or even a rural farm property, and we all share living in a place which needs our help to stay in good working order.

For the next few weeks I will be going over several areas of your residence that, if maintained properly, can keep functioning as intended and will put you in control of when to take care of things instead of a problem making that decision for you.  It is no different that taking care of your car, how many of us wait until the brakes get down to the metal before getting that brake job because we were too busy?

Listen, I am a general contractor, and like most people’s profession, my home is usually the last place that I pay attention to.  It seems like everyone elses job gets done, but when it comes to my own place, that can wait.  At least that is what my wife tells me I do, and she is correct.

I would invite you to give me your input on any areas I might not address, or perhaps you have some additional pointers for others to benefit from.

My suggestion is to make a list tailored to your home, and spread out your maintenance over the year so you are not trying to do too much at one time.  Perhaps you could post your list in a conspicuous location so you can’t ignore it, of place the items on your calendar or organizer to remind you through the year.  I like to make lists of what I need to do and then place them where they will be buried by other paperwork, finding them several months later with not much I can cross off.  But I do feel better when I place these neglected items on a new list that for sure this time I will take care of.  I am personally now putting them on a list that goes up on the wall where it will have a fighting chance of being spotted.

Start with a list of what you think needs to be taken care of in your house, and as I cover these topics, confirm or add to your list, if I am missing anything, let me know.

How secure is your front door

Last week I got a call from one of my frequently used subcontractors.  His Mom’s home in Peoria had been broken into and she needed someone to repair the damage to her front door.

I have seen this several times over the years, and as with all previous instances, the door was lacking in the needed level of security.  First of all, she had a keyed knob lock and a separate deadbolt, the deadbolt was not locked.  I don’t need to say anything more about the deadbolt, it goes without saying that you need to use the tools you have to make your house as secure as possible.  Basically, one kick and the door was open, allowing the invaders to ransack the house before being spooked by something, probably by the owners opening of the garage overhead door.

I am not a big fan of the knob you use as a handle being a locking type, mainly because of the false sense of security causing many people to not also use the deadbolt.  My opinion is having to perform two operations to get into the house will probably make the normal person skip one of the two steps for convenience.  Your deadbolt is the best chance you have to keep the door from being kicked in.  You should have a heavy-duty deadbolt, the plate that mounts on your door jamb is key to the security of your door.  This plate should be large enough to have four screws inserted, the screws should be long enough to pass through the door jamb and get into the wood studs beyond.  I typically use a screw at least 3 inches long. 

There are many ways your home can be broken into, if someone is really motivated to do so, they most likely will succeed.  Lets not make it easy for the typical individual who just wants to make a quick break in to get something to turn into cash.  My advice is to give your home a good look at with respect to all of your doors and windows, replacing the plate screws is easy and can make you feel more secure.  Adding a second deadbolt will make it very hard to get in.

I hope this information has been helpful.

Welcome to Glenn’s Blog

This is my first experience into the blogging world, so I hope it is easy to follow.  I will be discussing many topics related to residential construction.  As president of Glenn Forstner Construction for 24 years now, I have seen my fair share of jobs and have a lot of information to share with you.  I really enjoy answering peoples questions regarding their house.  So whether you are looking to build a new home, thinking of remodeling where you are right now, or want to know what type of maintenance needs to be done to keep your place looking good and functioning properly, this is the place to come. 

In the future, I will be talking about other interests I have like gardening, hiking and rock collecting, and a variety of other topics.

Hello world!