Holes in Your Window Screens? That's an Easy Thing to Repair

Your standard maintenance and spring cleaning should include washing your home’s windows, inside and out. Once you’ve compared a clean window and a dirty one side-by-side, you’ll see why. At the same time, it’s a good idea to check the window screens and repair any that have developed holes since your last window-cleaning session. 

You could take a damaged screen to the local hardware store to have it repaired – at a pretty impressive cost, I might add – or you could do it yourself with some basic tools. For modern metal-framed screens, you only need one specialized tool – cleverly called a “screen tool” – and chances are good that it’ll cost less than five bucks. Replacement screen is available at the local BigBox store in both fiberglass and aluminum varieties, as well as different colors. Once you’ve removed a screen from the window, replacing the mesh should take only a few minutes for fiberglass screen, though significantly longer if you use metal mesh.

Flat Tire on Your Wheelbarrow or Dolly? No Problem

If you have a flat tire on a bicycle, it’s no big deal to change it – mainly because almost all bike tires have inner tubes. But very little else around the house has an inner tube, so if you find a flat on your wheelbarrow, a two-wheel dolly or a small garden-tractor tire, you might well have yourself a head-scratcher. Look at the picture over there: the tire (blue) must form an airtight seal against the rim (#4, gray) or any air you pump into it just comes out around the edge, or bead, of the tire. If you want to pump air into that tire, you need to force the bead up against the rim - all the way around and on both sides. 

Tubeless tire separated from rim

It’s gonna take some ingenuity, but you can do it without taking the wheel to your local tire shop. All you need is a way to compress the tire. I usually use a band clamp, but for larger wheels a big ‘ol tie-down strap might be more in order. In a pinch, you can do the same thing with some rope and a stick, though you’ll probably need a helper for that method.

Oil or Latex? How to Test an Unknown Paint

Read through almost any website or magazine aimed at the do-it-yourselfer, and you’re almost certain to find someone gushing that a fresh coat of paint can completely change the look of your room, house, cabinets, furniture… just about anything but the family minivan. Come to think of it, there’s probably a website somewhere with instructions on how to update the look of your wheels with a fresh coat of paint.

If you haven’t figured it out by now, you need to know that there are two basic kinds of paint – whether you’re going to paint your walls, your siding, or that old dresser you picked up at a yard sale. The two kinds are latex and oil-based, and sometimes they just don’t play well together.

While it’s possible to paint over oil paint with latex and vice versa, doing so could require additional prep work or even adding a coat of primer. It’s usually easier to just match the paint composition to what’s already there. If you need to buy paint for touch-ups or to repaint some trim, it’s almost essential to match oil to oil and latex to latex. If you’re not the original painter, though, how do you tell? Believe it or not, it’s actually pretty easy. 

Getting Rid of Cable: Is it Time to Cut the Cord?

News out in recent days suggest that the power in the world of television could finally be shifting to the consumer instead of the cable giants. Both HBO and CBS recently announced that they will soon initiate their own streaming services, joining companies like Hulu and Netflix as go-to sources for media in the era of cord-cutting. It's possible - just possible - that á la carte television is just over the horizon - and it's not a moment too soon!

For decades, cable giants like Comcast and AT&T and satellite services like DirecTV have controlled non-broadcast television. Instead of allowing consumers to buy only what they want to watch, they've lumped all kinds of dross in with the good stuff to create "packages." Almost everyone who buys these services knows the syndrome well. If you want to watch the History Channel, you have to buy the package that includes the Golf Channel. Want to watch Nickelodeon? You also have to pay for Bravo. You're stuck buying a whole smorgasbord just to get the few dishes you want. 

That’s so 2004! Is it time for you to cut the cord? Here's how.