Skills and Techniques - Page 569 of 644

Spend a little time measuring and striking lines, and the rest is fairly easy.

Q: The house I’m living in is a Queen Anne style with open soffits and decorative rafter tails. There are no gutters, and water drips down along the foundation. Another reroofing …

Whenever I use my pneumatic nailer on a roof, I keep a safety line on the nailer's air hose. I use duct tape to attach a rubber tie-down strap --…

Q: Between job sites and the shop, we produce an abundance of plywood scraps that we either burn on site or throw into a dumpster. Does burning plywood produce deleterious emissions…

Faced with installing some 60, 3-ft. by 8-ft. prehung doors, I developed the jamb-setting fixture shown in the drawing. Not only did the fixture keep the hinge jamb and the…

Q: I recently bought a house that’s got an uncoursed-fieldstone chimney. Inside the house, there are water stains and dampness around the chimney. When I went up on the roof,…

Q: Next year I’m building a house, and I plan to install board-and-batten siding. John Birchard’s article on this subject mentions an alternative method to provide nail backing for the boards: Instead…

The next time you're cutting clapboards that run from a vertical window or sidewall to a rake board, try this trick. Cut the roof angle on one end of five…

Applied in layers, alcohol-based dyes and stains make for a beautiful job.

From where and how you build it, to setting the columns underneath, the process goes smoother if you have a system.