Year: 2014

Home | 2014

Listen ye homeowners and you shall hear
That the Christmas holidays are drawing near.
At the end of December, on twenty-five;
Hardly a homeowner is now alive
Who does not fear that infamous day this year.

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Get those small repairs done before the holidays!

Thanksgiving’s over, the guests have left, and hopefully they didn’t notice. After all, they were around for just a few hours, little kids were screaming, and there was a lot of activity and confusion. Surely, the guests didn’t notice that the door bell didn’t ring, the clothes closet door fell off its track, that water stained ceiling above their heads from that time your upstairs bathroom sink leaked, or that you had cordoned off your ENTIRE 2ND FLOOR, a “no go” zone full of honey do repairs that honey didn’t.

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Fix those door-sasters before your holiday guests arrive!

If you’re like a lot of people, you’ve been consciously ignoring some of the problems you have with your doors. Maybe you don’t know anything about door repair. In some measure, you might not have the time to tackle even the smallest door repair project. Or perhaps its mostly because you don’t have a clue who to call to fix them — in part because you realize most contractors do not want to be bothered with small stuff like this.

Do any of these sound familiar?:

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There’s a handful of home improvements we do that totally amaze our customers — things they assumed were impossible. One is installing a ceiling fan or light fixture on a totally empty ceiling — no existing light, no electrical box, maybe not even a switch for it on their wall. Have you been wondering how to install a ceiling fan or light to an empty ceiling in your house? Then you have come to the right place.

So, how do we do it? You see, we have on staff a technician named Samantha, who is married to a hapless advertising executive named Darrin Stephens, and when she twitches her nose… Oh, not young enough to remember the TV series ‘Bewitched’? Sorry, my bad.

Well, the truth is that we install these ceiling fixtures by going fishing. But, this time I’m not kidding. We run new wires through your ceiling and walls by ‘fishing’ for them. What this means is that we find or make a hole to shove a wire behind your walls, then try to reach this wire from another place, as far away as possible, and pull the wire through.

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All you need to know about insulation, pink panthers & winged monkeys A lot of homeowners go through life with a nagging suspicion they might need more of that pink, fluffy stuff known as ‘insulation’ in their attic. That their heating bills are higher than they ought to be because warm air is escaping from … Read more

Sorry, but I have always had this fantasy of hiring a technician named Gorbachev, so I could hear our customers use that line. But, I can’t seem to lure the real one out of retirement and into a Fix St Louis shirt. Go figure.

Anyway, today we’ll be discussing those yucky walls around your shower or tub. If that sentence made no sense to you, you’re free to go. But for the 99% of you remaining, you know what I mean.

Those walls with those sickly, shiny avocado green squares that are supposed to have dry white stuff between them, but the white stuff is missing in places, or the white stuff is actually now black. Maybe a tile or two are sticking-out, missing, or a bulge of wet drywall behind it is shoving tiles out of place.

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In a recent national survey, it was revealed that when it comes to critical activities adults are most negligent about, ‘not staining their deck’ was ranked at the top, 2nd only to ‘not flossing’. OK, so I totally made that up. But, you get the idea. We know that not staining a deck frequently enough … Read more

I don’t know about you, but I pity the poor people who live in places like Hawaii, who will never know that wonderful feeling of walking in from the outside on a hot, humid St. Louis summer day into an air conditioned room. No, you will never hear me, your House Doctor, preaching about the … Read more

You don’t have to live with windows with bad personalities!

Admit it. It’s a problem, but never a big enough problem that ever got you past the mental paralysis caused by not being sure how to get it fixed, right?

Your windows are hard to open or close, or don’t stay open. They get stuck and you have to use increasingly strange methods you’ve invented over time, that only you know, to get them unstuck. When one of them closes, it’s not quite square, so there’s a small gap where air gets in. Or, how about that window that, when you open and let go, it slams down like a guillotine, and you breathe a sigh of relief that no one’s fingers, hand, arm, (or head?) was there at the time. It’s almost as if some of your windows have personalities, and have decided to be difficult.

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Rotted Wood Repair: That Rotted White Wood Outside That You Try Not To Look At

Ever notice there’s more than just siding on the sides of your house, and you’ve gotten in the habit of trying real hard not to look at it? There’s strips of wood painted white, and in some places it’s peeling, rotting, or bulging. Maybe there’s some places where there are whole chunks missing, creating what looks like a hole to you, but is actually the front door of another home –for insects, birds, small animals, or who-knows-what kind of life form.

We find there are usually 2 reasons homeowners avert their eyes from this painted woodwork and, frankly, neither of them is a good one. The first reason is that homeowners often do not have a clue who to call to fix it. We all know what happens whenever you call a window company — next thing you know you’ll have a pushy sales-type at your home trying to sell you on a multi-thousand dollar project of changing-out all the windows in your house. And calling a carpenter doesn’t seem right either, assuming the homeowner can even think of the name of someone who goes by that title since you-know-who about 2,000 years ago.

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