Wanna be on HGTV?

Readers:

Dezmon Landers, a casting agent working for HGTV, recently sent me this information:

HGTV is looking for an On Air Handyman

The highly rated HGTV series “Carter Can” is back for another season and casting for a talented and dynamic ON-AIR handyman!

You will be working with a construction team headed by host Carter Oosterhouse to help the selected families plan and implement a small-scale renovation that transforms into a big “wow”.

Handymen should be prepared to make miracles happen on a small budget and have the know-how, creativity and imagination to assist with home improvement projects and help brainstorm cool custom construction projects specific to the homeowners’ situations and personalities.

Handymen must have a great ‘can do’ attitude along with a personable and outgoing personality. On-camera or behind-the-scenes home design TV experience is a huge plus. The position starts in June and there is a professional salary.

If you are interested please click this link: http://www.gotcast.com/casting-calls/HGTV-On-Air-Handyman/50470

About Gotcast.com

GotCast.com is the Internet’s premier casting website. We discover incredible talent through online casting competitions tied to specific on camera roles. Members of our community create unique talent profiles and audition for Hollywood roles while Casting Directors and Agents search for undiscovered stars.”

Thanks!

I am SO not above admitting I’m wrong. If only I realized it in time.

Measure HOW many times is it again?

Twice, right?

Better make that THREE.

I have been attempting – because I am, apparently, a fanatic, according to my lovely daughters, to build a table. A fanatic, because as my 11-year-old states lucidly, there are plenty of perfectly good, already built tables in perfectly good, already built stores.

THAT’S no fun.

Especially since I already “hand-crafted” the table-top, out of a terrifically convenient slab of plywood that was the perfect size in my garage – already lying around. I covered it in batting (I quilt, too) and fabric, so it’s soft, is an ideal surface for the optical mouse that rests upon it (secured handily with my trusty staple-gun), and funky, too: it’s got girly-purses and hippie flowers on it, so I thought: what’s not to love?

The trouble is, the crates I have it resting temporarily on while I construct a more solid apron and legs – which I thought would be as quick to put together as the top – are none too sturdy.

Which means the laptop which is poised perilously on top is in eminent danger of smashing into smithereens at any moments.

Yikes.

Better measure that third time. Fast.

Next time I undertake a project – and at this point, I am SO not buying a table, darn it – I better THINK three times before I even break out the work belt.

Sigh. (It’s going to be cool, though.)

Looking for a stud? I’ll help you find one.

Know what a Union foreman does to an apprentice carpenter if he shows up on his first day of work with a wooden handled hammer?

The foreman saws the handle off and hands it to the apprentice. “Here’s a souvenir,” he might say. “Tomorrow, bring a tool that won’t kill anyone when it breaks.”

Notice this hammer is NOT made of wood.

It’s an Estwing. It even sports a warning to wear safety goggles. How cool am I?

Okay, down to business: for those of us (and full disclosure, it’s not really MY hammer, it’s Peter’s; I learned that story when he retired MY old wooden hammer.)

Another thing I learned: how to locate a stud without gadgetry, blinking lights, or banging on walls and listening like the Lone Ranger or Tonto for the cavalry. (Although Peter can do the banging on walls thing and locate a stud FAST.)

Guess what? Studs are almost always either 16 inches, 24 inches, or 48 inches away from an electrical outlet. Why? Because electrical outlets are almost always anchored to studs themselves, and studs are almost always 16, 24, or 48 inches apart. (Most commonly 16 inches apart.)

To find a stud FOR SURE – and minimize the risk of a six-foot shelf collapsing onto your laptop docking station… (not that that actually happened to me, or anything… <aHEM…>)… just poke around for the nearest plug, unscrew it from the wall, and, well, LOOK.

Is there a stud? Cool. You’re in business. Measure carefully, make your pencil mark, and you’re good to go.

Aren’t you glad you’re now as cool as I am

Happy to help.

(Hope you’re not TOO disappointed I didn’t mean the kind of stud that wants to buy you a drink. Now, if you folks locate the kind of stud that wants to buy you a house… oh never mind. I already have one of those.)

It’s Fallen, and I Can’t Get My Picture Up.

NOTE: This is NOT really my house.

:: :: :: :: ::

Okay, who here lives in This Old House?

Or ANY Old House?

I do, I do!

Thank goodness I know how to fix things, or I’d be in a word of trouble. I wouldn’t get to live inside my house, that’s for sure. It would either be falling down all around me, or I’d be so broke hiring people to fix it that I’d have to live in a tent in the backyard.

That is, if the new owners were kind enough to allow me to do so.

At any rate, among the many hassles of owning a 100+ year-old home is that it boasts very charming — but up until recently (to me) frustrating plaster walls.

Yay, plaster. Until you try to hang something up on it.

Okay, if Peter comes swaggering along with his Mighty Yellow Cordless Screwgun (OK, we ALL adore the Mighty Yellow Cordless Screwgun — and the fact that it has two — count ‘em, ladies and gentlemen, TWO, batteries, one backup, fully charged at all times) — well then, yes, PETER has such a deft touch that he NEVER cracks the plaster and makes it fall down in a soft, floaty pile on the hardwood floor like I do.

Then again, I have yet to see Peter ever use an actual nail. Only screws. Three-and-five-eighths every time, and he can pick ‘em out at any distance from a tub of every conceivable size.

But I digress.

Those of us who wish to hang human-size pictures on a plaster wall are familiar with that awful crack, the hole in the wall, and the nail coming down with it.

AAARRRGGH!

Here is your salvation: cellophane tape. In an X. X marks the spot where you want to hammer your nail. Right on the wall.

Yes, it really is that simple.

Hold the nail – carefully, folks – right on dead center of your X – and hammer away.

No cracks. No falling plaster. No falling nail. No vulgarity for which, later, to apologize to the children.

There we go. Your latest and greatest Cool Tool Girl Tip.

Aren’t you lucky to have me?

-elizabeth

How to unclog a drain

FUN STUFF!

Plungers and Peril

Don’t you just LOVE it when you go to brush your teeth and all the yuck doesn’t drain out of the sink?

Even nicer when you go to brush your teeth and you notice that someone ELSE’S yuck didn’t drain, and they DIDN’T notice.

Good morning.

Time to pull out the gear. Fortunately, you may not need too much, if you’re lucky — and luckily, you usually are.

If you’re an instant coffee (or tea) drinker, you may be even luckier: you’ve already got the teapot on it’s way to boiling. So grab it (with a potholder — remember, you might only be half awake) and start pouring.

Yep, a little VERY hot water might be all you need to get that drain going again.

If that doesn’t do the trick, grab the plunger. (If you’ve thought ahead — and you just might want to do this for next time, if this sink tends to be tricky — you’ll pick up a smallish plunger, just for sinks, so you don’t have to resort to the toilet plunger.)

Plunge the little devil. Careful, though, that water might still be hot.

Did that do it for you?

Rats. Try again, a little harder this time.

No?

Oh well, time to disassemble the cleanout pipe underneath the sink. Don’t worry, you don’t really need to shut the water off for this — just DON’T turn it on while you’re working, and DON’T forget to shove a bucket underneath FIRST THING, because a lot of schmutz is going to come tumbling out as soon as you put wrench to pipe and twist it off.

Once that curved pipe underneath is off, and the slop is done(ish) dripping, you can take your choice of implements to scrape out the gunk:

• old screwdriver
• wire hanger (one of my faves, since I don’t own an auger)
• or, a real, live, drain auger. If you do use a drain auger, the best method for this is to feed it in a little way, then twist it again. This allows you to shove it in a lot further.

Once the mess is cleared (and you’ll find that most of the mess has collected in the bottom of the curve), you can simply re-assemble the pipe, clean up whatever didn’t make it into the bucket, put your tools away (I’d say the wire hanger can be thrown away), and then break out the Comet and hand it to whomever left their yuck in the sink. THEY can be responsible for THAT part of the cleanup job.

Share and share alike, after all.

For YOUR part? You get to swagger out of the bathroom, pretending that what you just did was incredibly difficult, only to be hazarded by experts like yourself. You are now the new household hero(ine).

Feels good, doesn’t it, being a Cool Tool Girl (or Guy)?

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

All the best,

elizabeth

For the want of a nail…

If you listeners have as much fun as we do, then we’re really on to something here. Even my eight-year-old had fun today; when I came home we both laughed about the show — which you can catch Saturday mornings on WBNR/WLNA 1260/1420 AM from 10 a.m. to 11 a.m., by the by.

How DO carpenters end up running out of nails when they’re framing a house, anyway? I mean, what gives? Nails? What are they thinking? “Nails. Now, are THEY something I’ll need?”

But like Mike said — and he TRULY ought to know — carpenters DO simply reach into their workbelts, and when they come up short, look to the go-fer — “Hey! I’m out!”

And they just never, ever look on the ground — where there are, literally, sprinkled hundreds of nails.

Leave it to Lee, the Friendly Neighborhood Architect — the ENVIRONMENTALLY Friendly Architect — to go around picking them all up, one by one. 137 nails he gathered for a record. Still, I’m sure there are more to be had. Leave it to our guys to save you money, listeners. Every time.

My grandmother used to mutter every so often: “For the want of a nail…”

One day I asked her what that meant. She smiled. “For the want of a nail, the war was lost.” At my puzzled look, she explained. “For the want of a nail, the shoe was lost. For the want of a shoe, the horse was lost. For the want of a horse, the rider was lost. For the want of a rider, the message was lost. For the want of the message, the battle was lost. For the want of the battle, the war was lost. And all for the want of a nail.”

This week’s tool will never leave you rider-less.

After all this week’s talk of framing, trusses and joists, you may be left with your head spinning at the lingo, the jargon, the insider-speak. You’ll hear me say over and over again that while Do-It-Yourself is great, when it comes to the big stuff, you want to rely on the expert advice you get from the boys like ours at The ABCs of Home Improvement. Not only do they know their stuff, but they’re boys you can trust — which, of course, is like gold.

BUT: you need to feel like you’re standing on solid ground yourself — and how do you do that? A little education is in order. Not to mention the fact you don’t want to be stopping them every half-sentence like I do, with a “Stop, wait, what does that mean?”

These tools, this week, are basically dictionaries. Easy-to-read, easy to take at your own pace, and between them both, they cover pretty comprehensively every term you’re likely to come across during home improvement projects.

Nice. Even nicer to feel ever-so-much smarter.

I’ll link them up here, or you can always visit our web site at www.theabcsofhomeimprovement.com.

Glossaries of Construction Terms:

http://www.contractorslicense.com/0-24-glossary.htm

http://www.homebuildingmanual.com/Glossary.htm

(Note: These sites are in the business of trying to sell you stuff on their home pages. The glossaries are free, though.)

Happy listening, everybody!

Oooh — and check us out in July’s Hudson Valley Magazine, too. We’re in there.

Love always,

Elizabeth

The Old-Fashioned Way: Or, Mike is surprised.

I love it that I can surprise even the experts. Especially the boys I hang out with Saturday mornings. It’s the highlight of my week, pulling the Cool Tool out of my bag, and watching their faces. They never know what to expect.

This week: the hand drill. No cords — and no batteries, either. Elbow grease, pure and simple. The boys were charmed, and I hope you will be, too.

Mike Asch, my co-host, and one of my favorite people in the world, turned to me today during one of the breaks in our show today (you can tune in Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 11 a.m. on WBNR/WLNA radio 1420/1260 AM) and remarked to me: “The tools you bring in… I either haven’t seen them before or I haven’t seen them in a long time. They ARE really cool.”

I got such a thrill, hearing that from such someone so fast-thinking, imaginative and learned.

We sit at a round table; like schoolchildren in class, always in the same spot — me, next to Nick, the engineer (a nicer guy you will not ever meet); Mike next to me; then Lee Derario, the Friendly Neighborhood Architect, whose passion for green building and reducing waste is as sincere as it sounds; then Bill Barschow, who is so funny I often have to turn away from the mike to keep a distinctly unladylike snort from going over the airwaves, but whose hands-on knowledge of building is vast and deep.

At any rate, here it is: the marvelous hand drill. Perfect for those times when you just don’t feel like dragging out the big guns.

Functions on good old-fashioned elbow grease. Makes any sized hole, and it makes it pretty quick, too — and while you’re at it, tightens those biceps.

Check out the You-Tube video I made for an in-action shot of how the item works.
Love you all,

Elizabeth

Measure twice…

You know me.

Always looking for a way to cross-purpose a tool. Here, I’ve taken something from my art box — something I use all the time, as a matter of fact — and repurposed it for building.

When the top of my daughter Annie’s bookcase started curling up and coming off (caveat: I didn’t build the thing in the first place), there was no choice for me but to take off the piece of warped wood and replace it.

Okay, I could probably have soaked it, pressed it, and made it flat again.

Or I could have done what I did: gone to Home Depot with my obsessively rechecked measurements and had them slice me up a new plywood top (and, incidentally, some nice new shelves for my home office.)

As anal-retentive as I was about measuring, however, I screwed it up anyway, and hung a shelf first: out of the piece that was supposed to be the top of the bookcase.

So I had to remeasure.

Like I said: I didn’t build the bookcase. So it wasn’t square.

So I had to REBUILD the bookcase. Square this time.

Hence, the tool.

The T-Square. VERY handy for artists, since that bar at the end has got an overhang, sticking it nice and tight to the edge of whatever you’re trying to be VERY sure is perfectly perpendicular to the straight line you’re trying to draw.

Got it now?

So Annie’s got a nice new bookcase — square this time, and, as an added bonus, painted cream and decorated with flowers, to boot — and I’ve got some nice, extra long shelves, and you?

Well, you’ve got a new tool for your toolbox.

They’re available in all sizes, too. Not just plastic, either. The bigger they come — several feet long, even — the more likely they are to be metal and manly.

Here’s a better look. Mine comes with inch markings on one side, centimeters on the other.

Happy building.

Don’t forget to listen every Saturday on WBNR, AM1420 or WLNA 1260 at 10 a.m.

Love, your Cool Tool Girl,

Elizabeth B

Hammer how-to

(Left: A close-up of a pair of serger tweezers, one of the “hammer helpers” featured on our radio show, The ABCs of Home Improvement, Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 11 a.m. on WBNR.)
A photographer from Hudson Valley Magazine came to my house last week and we got to talking. She is one of the many of us who have trouble getting the nail straight into the wall.

“Courage,” I laughed. “That’s what it takes.”

You simply have to be unafraid to swing that hammer hard — because that’s all there is to it.

Of course, that’s all there is to smashing your thumb, too.

So last Saturday, on the show, I brought in some hammer helpers — tools you can use to get your poor, sensitive fingers just a little farther away from that dangerous bulls-eye — and help you to work up your nerve a bit.

Check them out here:

http://www.theabcsofhomeimprovement.com/cooltools/

She was a great, fun photographer. I gave her one more tip, besides. We both live in old houses with plaster walls.

Ever try to hammer a nail into plaster walls and watch them split and crumble? Next time, before you even pick up the hammer, pick up some cellophane tape and make a small X with the tape on the spot you want to nail.

No more crumbling plaster.

“You’ve changed my life!” she said. “I’m not kidding.”

Look for the feature on The ABCs of Home Improvement in the July issue of Hudson Valley Magazine.

And listen every Saturday. It’s a fun show.

Let’s try this at home. And try again, if we have to.

While of course we hope to empower females out there, especially anyone out there on their own, you boys know you’re out there.

You know who you are. Those of you who hear the word “torque”* — and, well, first off, you think it’s spelled like “dork,” for all you know about it. But it’s worse for you guys who think you’re SUPPOSED to know the right end of a wrench and DON’T. (Don’t feel bad. Once upon a time, not too long ago, I didn’t know either.)

Relax. You’re just as rugged and manly as anyone else.

Just the same way I’m still as girly-girl as anyone else, even though I sometimes wear a tool belt instead of an apron. (And yes, I do sometimes wear an apron. Who wouldn’t when baking cookies?)

We can all learn together: the nuts and bolts of home improvement. And of course, when to call on the rugged, handsome co-hosts of mine, and other experts. We need to know our limits.

Don’t be scared. Anyone can do anything. If we fail, well, we learn. We try again. Until we succeed.

We just won’t call it failure. Why should we? Never give up.

We’ll do what the doctors do. We’ll call it “ruling out what doesn’t work.”

With me so far? Let’s go.

* torque: the ability of a rotating instrument — like, say, a screwdriver — to overcome resistance — like, say, the resistance of a screw. Knowing a little bit about torque is handy when, for instance, you know that the longer your screwdriver is, the more torque you can generate with each turn, given the same effort of your hand.