This site is a subscription based resource for all homeowners who have questions about any area of their home. On the left side panel are four (4) fully functional pages as an example of the 200 resource pages. The site is structured so that topics are easy to find. If you find that one area is not covered or that you require more detailed explanations please feel free to fill out our contact form to assist us in making this site more user friendly and to fill in any gaps you wish to see.
The concept for creating this website is to help people (Homeowners and Realtors) become familiar with the major systems of their house so they will hopefully be able to identify concerns when buying, remodeling or even when maintaining a house. By showing examples of what failure or damage looks like in photographs in the beginning stages and in accelerated or later conditions it may provide a greater understanding of what to look for or watch out for.
This simple method will be to show correct versions of the systems and conditions, what the warning signs look like when something needs attention, service or maintenance and some of the really bad conditions from deferred maintenance (A very polite term to use when a tenant states, “The owner never fixes anything!”). Also provided on this web site will be many of the Building Codes to refer too.
The areas reciting Building Codes are to help make good use of your time. If you are on a subject, there will be some Code notes on that exact topic you are already reading. This assists you right now instead of trying to search through the web, wondering what key words to use. Have you ever got 100,000 hits on a subject and were not certain what to think when you read two conflicting blogs. Then you read old wives tales on somebody’s blog about how they fixed their sink and it lasted through the day. They were so excited they wrote about it on the web that night to share with their friends before the bubble gum leaked again.
The Code pop-up icons will be on many of the pages. These will review what the code actually means and/or implies pertaining to that subject. These sections are not to make you think any City or Municipality is evil and only wants some money out of you. Before you build or want to upgrade your floor heater to central heating and cooling, etc., these sections are to back up the statements of how to correctly install or build something in your home so you do not have a disastrous situation occur in the future. Basically, there will be very little grey areas in the Code Sections. If the seller of the house you are buying is using Uncle Wilbur who is walking around with duct tape to repair things before you purchase the house, the code section can be your backup to have things done the right way.
Code Intro
A house can appear complicated. Not as complicated as brain surgery but areas you are not familiar with can be daunting. But lucky for you, the large “Do-It-Yourself” stores specialize in selling you anything for your house. An area that leaves something to be desired about a hardware store is that buying materials do not always translate to magically having the “know-how” to do it correctly. Inspecting many thousands of houses as well as leveling and building from the ground up, it is amazing to me how many incorrect ways someone can attempt to fix something. On the farm you can make a lot of things work in the barn that aren’t to code. They just may not be safe or last very long. If you were stuck on Gilligan’s Island, anything that works even once may be a welcome pleasure. Not the same in civilization, uh, where we live. So by reviewing an individual system with photographs documenting correct and incorrect installations or repairs, this will hopefully assist you to realize when there is a specific concern in an area of the structure or property. This can be helpful when buying a house, remodeling a house and watching the workers piece it all together as well as regular maintenance or repairs on a house. Leave the duct tape in the kitchen junk drawer. There are only a couple of places in a few hundred pages here where that is the actual “fix”.