Home Improvement

In Colorado, if you want to frame your basement, you have to construct a floating wall. Colorado has what are called expansive soils, in that the clay will expand when it gets wet. This can cause the concrete floor of the basement to heave an inch or two. While that doesn’t sound like much, it’s enough to cause some serious problems if you don’t take it into consideration. Imagine your concrete floor rising two inches, then also lifting the first floor of your house along with it. Bad news. Building…
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We live in the small town of Falcon, CO and found that our gas furnace would run almost continuously during a winter storm and struggled to keep the house warm. During cold nights when there was no wind, the furnace would still fire up about once every 20 minutes and even though it ran for a much shorter time, over the course of the month, our heating bills were averaging about $175. The only other appliance we have in the house that uses gas is the water heater, which only…
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Saving money on energy bills is a good thing, especially in very warm or cold climates where the AC or the furnace have to run a lot. It can costs hundreds of dollars a month to make the living space comfortable. However, the garage is a different story. Trust me, I found out the hard way. I will never recoup the money I spent insulating it, and on very cold days, the paint and other supplies still get ruined. Here in Colorado, temperatures can drop into the single digits. My…
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The other day, my 4-year old son was playing in the kitchen and accidentally launched a brand new $1.50 Ferrari under the refrigerator. It was imperative that I retrieve this Ferrari immediately so I popped off the lower front grille and started swooshing a ruler back and forth. In the process of trying to retrieve the famed car I was stunned to see that the underside of the refrigerator had turned into a fuzzy dungeon off lost receipts, pieces of food and a crap-ton of dust. As I slid the…
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