Ask This Old House

Kevin

Today on "Ask This Old House"...

Tom

I'll show you how to repair some old drawers on a dining-room built-in. They stick a little bit, but I think we can make those slide easier, but we can definitely fix those chips

on the front of the drawer. Chris

Yeah. It needs some help.

Heath

This room has no overhead light. I'll fix that. This little guy will put a beam on the "X" we just made.

Kaitlin

Mm-hmm.

Heath

And it'll put a dot on the ceiling to show us exactly where that light is going to go.

Kaitlin

Okay.

Kevin

And we'll have a look at some more home-inspection nightmares.

Tom

Here's one right here, Mark.

Mark

Oh,

wow. Tom

Now they clearly need to watch a little more of you on TV.

Mark

Yes, I can tell. The best part about it is, that foam has probably taken all the water into the joints.

Tom

Oh,

perfect. Mark

Yeah. So, he's creating more of a problem than a fix.

Tom

Yeah.

Kevin

Hi there. I'm Kevin O'Connor. And welcome back to "Ask This Old House" where our experts are standing by, ready to answer questions about your old house. Heath, good to see you here and good to see you here early.

Heath

Kevin, it's great to be here.

Kevin

Yeah, well, we love having you aboard. Master electrician on the team always helps. You've been working with us since the Northshore farmhouse a few years back, most recently Brookline mid-century modern.

Heath

That was a great project, lot of fun.

Kevin

That was a big one, right?

It was. Kevin

And now are you ready to dig into the mailbag and start helping "Ask" viewers?

Heath

And now we have some e-mails to answer.

Love it. Richard

Hey, fresh meat.

Laughter

Love it. Richard

Remember when you were the new guy?

Barely. Richard

Welcome aboard.

Heath

Thank you. Good to be here.

Richard

So I had a question. I got a dimmer that I touch it. It just doesn't dim.

Jenn

Uh, his dimmer can wait. I need some low-voltage landscape lighting, path light, up light.

Kevin

Guys, he has real questions he needs to answer,

from the viewers. Richard

Yeah, but I saw the schedule -- Tommy is up first. We can actually take a few minutes.

Chris

So come on in, Tommy.

Tom

Yeah, this is nice.

Chris

Thanks. This is a house. We bought it a few years ago. The original part of the house was actually built in the 1920s, 1930s.

Tom

Nice modern kitchen, big range, hood. I love the island.

Chris

Yeah, we added this kitchen in and the living room as well as the bedroom upstairs. We really just needed a little bit more space.

Tom

You always need a little more space, and I see that you've matched the casing detail to the original part of the house.

That's a nice touch. Chris

Yeah, we did our best to respect the original part of the house. You have a good eye, but I was hoping you can also take a look at this built-in.

Yeah. Chris

It's seen better days.

Tom

Seen better days. Well, these built-ins were pretty common in the houses built in the '30s and the '40s. It's a great place to store your wine glasses, dishes, and even your drinks, and I see that the... Yeah, these drawers slide a little hard, but I think we can fix those up a little bit, and you have some chips on the corners.

Chris

Yeah.

Tom

Well, I think we can fix those, too.

Chris

Yeah, that'd be great.

That'd be perfect for us. Tom

Alright. Let's get some tools, and we can get started.

Chris

Sounds good.

Tom

Alright. There's the first drawer right there.

Chris

Wow, that's it? It's pretty simple.

Tom

It's pretty simple. I mean, it's a butt joint in the back. All the boards were probably cut with hand tools, and it's just nails right through to hold the back in place, and the front right here, the only complicated cut is this rabbet, which allows them to nail through the side into the front. This is one piece. Now I could actually make a whole new front, but I think it would be nice if we try to straighten this break out, take all the undulation out of it, make it a flat surface so we can glue a piece on there and see if we can blend it in.

Chris

Sounds pretty straightforward.

Tom

Alright. So to do that, I'm going to use my plane. Alright. So that's nice and flat. Let's check it with a piece of wood here.

Joint looks pretty good. Chris

Yeah.

Looks straight to me. Tom

Alright. So I'll put a rough mark for the length right here, and I want to get the depth of this to match down there, so I just take it, bring it over here, mark that, and now I go from this point down to nothing. Alright. So, now I just connect some dots there and cut it with a handsaw. We're gonna make it a little oversized and then fine-tune it all later. So now what I want to do is, I want to mark the thickness for this front right here, so I'm going to put it on, going to slide it over, making this edge even with the back edge of the face. Put it on there like that, and I'm gonna take a rough measurement and draw a line the thickness that I want right there. Bring that down. There's my straight line. I'll cut this piece right here. And to cut it, I'm gonna leave my straight edge on it.

Chris

Alright. You're going to cut it with that?

Tom

Yeah, I'm going to score it a few times, break through the grain, and hopefully the piece will be what we need. Okay, and there's our piece. Let's try it out, see how it fits. Yeah. That looks pretty good.

Looks flush to me. Tom

Okay. So, now I'm just gonna glue it. And we can put the piece on and clamp it. Alright. While that's drying, we'll put the patch on the other one. Okay. So, now this piece that was left over from the other side, we're going to put it right in there like that.

Alright. Tom

Going to mark that angle, and then we'll cut it.

Chris

Okay.

Tom

So, now score it lightly because that blade will want to wander with the grain. Keep it up and down straight. Yeah. Alright. Now let's see how it fits right on there.

Chris

Alright. Set it in place.

Yeah. Chris

Not bad.

Tom

Think we're ready to glue it.

Alright. Tom

That's good. We want to get all that wood right there showing.

Alright. Tom

Yeah.

Yeah. Tom

Good. Alright. Let's get the piece, lay it in there, and we'll clamp it. Now keep it flush on the back.

Chris

Yeah,

on the back. Tom

Yep. There?

Chris

Yeah.

All lined up. Tom

Good. Okay.

Chris

Push it in a little.

Tom

Alright. So, while the glue is drying -- I want to give it as much time as possible to set up and dry -- you complained about the drawer sticking a little bit, so we'll hit the bottom of those with a plane. Keep the plane at a slight angle back this way, and I'll adjust this back a little bit so we don't take too much. Across the front. Down the side. Alright. So, that's good. Now I want to lubricate the bottom of the drawer

with some soap. Chris

A bar of soap?

Tom

Yeah, that's an old trick they used to do years ago. They used to put soap on anything that slides because it's a wood-to-wood connection.

Chris

Mm-hmm.

Tom

And it actually makes it slide easier.

Chris

Who would've thought? So, Tommy, could we have put in metal slides here?

Tom

Well, we would've had to rework the drawers themselves or actually build new boxes, and this is really a cost-effective way to save money and make the drawers work.

Chris

And allows us to keep the originals,

which were looking for. Tom

Exactly. Alright. So, the glue is almost ready, but before I remove the clamps, I want to try to match this profile right here in the edge with this new piece. I'm gonna use my plane first just to even it up on the edge. And I'll just take this little bit right here and use a rasp, take it down. Work my way down to it. Yeah, that looks pretty good. Alright. Now we'll do the top edge. Now we'll take the clamps off. see if we can fine-tune this one. So, now we want to match this profile right here and return it down across the top. To do that, I'm going to have to draw a reference line to know where I want to stop it, which is gonna be right there. So, now I want to remove this material here. Now I can't use this plane right here because the blade doesn't come all the way out to the edge, because I want to use a straight edge to guide my plane. So, I'm going to use this plane right here -- rabbeting plane or also known as a shoulder plane, and that will allow me to put a straight edge on the drawer where I want this plane to go, and I can put the plane right against it and plane off the wood, and I'll have a nice, straight cut. To smooth out the edges, I'll just hit them with some 220-grit sandpaper. Alright, Chris, and once that prime is dry, if you can get some paint and paint it,

it will blend right in. Chris

Sounds good. We have some of the paint in the basement actually.

Fantastic. Chris

So this looks incredible, and, I mean, the drawers pull so much smoother. How often do I have to reapply the soap?

Tom

Well, depends on how often you use the drawers. Usually two, three, four years later, you might need a little bit of soap, so here's some soap if you need it.

Chris

Thanks, Tommy. I'm sure I'm going to need that.

Tom

Alright. Alright. Well,

I'm glad I could help. Chris

Alright. Thank you so much. Looks amazing.

Kevin

For over a year, we have asked inspectors to send us pictures of their worst home-improvement nightmares, but we also asked you, the viewer, to send us pictures, as well, and, boy, did you respond. What'd we get for us?

Richard

You know, we see it all. You know, many of them are plumbing-related. People trying to do their own plumbing. Danny from Florida sends us this one.

Oh. Richard

So, you know, the corrugated plastic, you know, you can take exception to that, and this is all corroded, but, you know, you heard the term any port in a storm. This is any glove in a storm.

He's got a latex glove. Kevin

Is that what that is?

Richard

You know what? It worked.

Tom

It stopped the water, right?

Mark

That's all, but look at this -- Nancy from Indiana.

Kevin

What? Oh, Nancy.

Wow. Wow. Mark

Oh, Nancy.

Tom

Now look it. Now that's an old house. Alright?

Mark

Yeah, definitely.

Tom

Look at the skip sheathing on the roof. One time, that had a wood-shingled roof, and you can see how bad it was leaking right there.

Mark

Oh, a lot of water damage. Right.

Tom

And notice the chimney is diagonal.

Mark

So, the chimney's probably diagonal. There's probably a coal stove right below it

and maybe a parlor or -- Tom

Oh, stuck in the corner of a room,

yeah. Mark

Exactly. So, we came up at an angle, didn't know really what to do to get out of the house safely and, again, watertight, so that's probably why you have all that damage. They brought it down to something solid, you can see, and then I don't think they really knew what they were doing

when they had to go back up. Tom

No, I mean, this is not an uncommon situation.

Right. Tom

But he didn't have a clue on how to rotate the brick and bring it out.

Kevin

Think you guys are missing the most important part right here and the explanation.

Richard

Oh, a case of beer.

That explains it. Tom

Alright.

That explains it. Tom

I didn't see that.

I didn't see that. Mark

Put a little twist.

Case of beer. Tom

Alright. Alright. Well, here is one right here, Mark.

Mark

Oh,

wow. Tom

Now they clearly need to watch a little more of you on TV...

Mark

Yes,

I can tell. Tom

...because, you know, they probably had a draft or something.

Mark

Can you find the insulation? That's the foam insulation?

Tom

A drafty window -- Why not insulate the brick?

Mark

The best part about it is, that foam has probably taken all the water into the joints.

Tom

Oh,

perfect. Mark

Yeah. So, he's creating more of a problem than a fix.

Tom

Yeah, but if he scrapes it off, makes it flush with a wire brush, he can paint that great.

Mark

Oh, yeah,

absolutely. Richard

I don't think we're gonna find any shortage of these pictures.

Tom

Wow,

that's bad. Kevin

Alright. Well, apparently people will do anything, and when they do, we'd love to see it, so keep those pictures coming to us, and maybe you'll end up on "Home Inspection Nightmares."

Tom

It's bowing out.

Kaitlin

Hi, Heath. Thanks for coming.

Heath

Hi, Kaitlin. Nice to meet you.

Kaitlin

Nice to meet you,

too. Heath

This is a great house.

Kaitlin

Thank you. We lived here for three years. We have a 10-month-old, but we're also expecting another baby.

Congratulations. Kaitlin

Thank you. We have four bedrooms total, but we don't need all four, so we want to turn this bedroom into a dining room. I have my great-grandmother's table that my husband refinished, and we needed a place to showcase it, but the problem is that we have only this one light switch

for this light. Heath

Okay.

Kaitlin

And then to turn this other one on, you have to go all the way around the table just to come over here, so it's not great.

Heath

Got it, so you're looking at a couple of floor lamps trying to light this room up, and it's just not adequate for what you're looking for.

Absolutely. Heath

Got it.

Kaitlin

So, we want to put an overhead light. We'd like to put a chandelier over our table.

Heath

Okay. I think we can do that. Let me grab some tools, take a look at what we have,

and we'll go from there. Kaitlin

Awesome. Great.

Thank you. Heath

Nice. So, let me show you what we have. The first thing we did is, we turned power off to the circuit. Then we pulled the receptacle out of the wall to see what we have for a wire. We have two wires in this configuration. One is providing you with constant power that's feeding this lower portion of the receptacle. The second one is being used as what's called a switch leg. So, what they do is, they'd send power up one wire, up our wall, over to our switch, and when you turn the switch on, it lets power come back over and make the top half of this receptacle live.

Okay. Heath

That's how we're able to turn the lamp on when you walk in and flip the switch. What we're going to do is, we're going to use that wire and reuse the switch leg, and we're gonna make it a constant feed. That way, we have constant power in that box for the switch.

Mm-hmm. Heath

By doing that, we're going to replace this receptacle, make this receptacle constant power, as well.

Okay. Heath

And then, I'm going to take a new wire out of the switch, up the wall, over to where our new ceiling light is going to go.

Okay. Heath

What we want to do next is figure out where the ceiling light is going to go. In this case, the table

is going to dictate that. Kaitlin

Mm-hmm.

Heath

So we put a little tape in the middle so we can mark the center of the table. So, now what we're gonna do is, we're gonna mark the ceiling, and to do that, we're gonna use a plumb laser. So, this little guy will put a beam on the X we just made.

Kaitlin

Mm-hmm.

Heath

And it'll put a dot on the ceiling to show us exactly where that light is going to go.

Kaitlin

Okay.

Heath

Alright. And now that we made our mark on the ceiling, we're going to go ahead and use this rod to see what's up in that ceiling before we go ahead

and drill a hole. Kaitlin

Okay.

Heath

Since most boxes that we're going to use are going to be a 4-inch diameter and we're not sure which one we're going to use yet until we see what's up there, we're gonna bend this to a little over 2 inches, maybe 2 1/2 just to give us some clearance.

Kaitlin

Mm-hmm.

Heath

Then we're going to bend the other end in the same direction so we know which way it's pointing. Next, we're going to poke a small pilot hole where our mark is. And now we'll insert our tester that'll tell us what's up in the ceiling. So, by spinning this, I can feel the resistance, and if you watch, we can see that we're stopping on a piece up there. That means we're up against the joist in this case.

Mm-hmm. Heath

That's okay. That just tell us what's up there and to be careful when we drill.

Kaitlin

Okay.

Heath

So, it looks like what we have here is just a piece of strapping. We'll just finish cutting out of the way, and then we'll work on installing our box. I'll remove the old switch and cut a second hole to allow us to fish the new wire from the fixture back to the switch. I put this piece of marker tape here to tell me I'm close to the hole, so you should be feeling something right about now.

Kaitlin

Yep,

I think I got it. Heath

Alright. Just pull that right out.

Perfect. Kaitlin

Alright.

Heath

Next, we're going to tie the wire on, and I'll pull it back towards me.

Kaitlin

Okay.

Heath

Now that it's taped up, you're gonna feed this end, and I'm going to pull from this side. And there we go. We have our wire. I want to anchor our box to the structure, and since the hole in the center of the room falls between two joists, the best way to do that is using an old work fan brace. It feeds up through the hole, and as I twist it to expand its length, each end of the bracket has teeth that bite into the joist, securing it into the structure. The feet help keep the bar at the correct height off of the drywall. Once the bar is tightened, I can position the bracket mount over our hole and attach the box to it. We'll just align the box and bracket and secure with a couple of screws. By pulling our fixture wire down to the switch box, we can begin to rewire the switch. There we go. Perfect. For a metal box, we need to bond the ground wire directly to the box and to the switch. And next, we're gonna replace the receptacle, so as you can see, we have a ground screw, this green one, for the ground wire. We have a couple of silver screws that would be the neutral, and then we have two brass screws that are for the hot wire, and in this case, this is a complete receptacle that still has the tab and tack, so you can actually just put one black wire to this one feed, and it would feed both sides of this because it has that tab. And on yours, they broke the tab, which was good because they wanted constant power on one side and controlled by the switch on the other, so in this case, we're just going to put it back so both sides are constant power. Alright. So this is the light fixture you chose?

Mm-hmm. Heath

Great. So it looks like we have a little assembly to do. We'll just the chain on a couple of mounting points. We'll hang it on the ceiling, and we'll take a look. Alright. The power is on. Want to give it a shot?

Kaitlin

Okay.

That looks great. Heath

Does look good.

I love it. Heath

We even put a dimmer in.

Okay. Heath

So we can set the level.

Nice. Heath

Wonderful. The other thing we did is, when we had to cut the hole in the ceiling in order to get the wire down to the switch, we used a hole saw. The advantage to this is, for us, we can put the patch back in the hole, and it's easier to fill and sand afterwards. Hopefully you can guys can take care of that?

Kaitlin

We can definitely handle that.

Alright. Kaitlin

Thank you so much. Heath, It looks great. We love it.

Thank you. Kevin

Nice job, Heath, and you get your first "Ask" segment

underneath your belt. Heath

We did. Thanks.

Kevin

So, I got a question for you. When you took that feeler bit, you went up into the ceiling, and it ended up being a piece of strapping,

which you could cut away. Heath

Right.

Kevin

Had it not been strapping, had been the joist, for example, and you didn't want to cut it away, then what? New location?

Heath

No, it's perfectly fine. They make a box for application. If that were the case, if we landed on the joist, we probably would've used something like this -- a pancake box.

Kevin

Oh, okay, and we can use this because?

Heath

Because it's shallow, so we can actually mount that directly to the joist had we landed right on it.

Kevin

Oh,

I see. Heath

Still would've held the fixture perfectly fine.

Kevin

Thickness of the drywall right there?

Exactly. Kevin

Perfect. Love that. Solution for every problem.

Heath

And couple of other things we ran into with this particular room is, this is still treated as a bedroom. Even though we're using it as a dining room, it's legally a bedroom.

Kevin

And so why does that matter?

Heath

Difference is the wiring that's typically in that room. So, in a bedroom, we're gonna have 14-gauge wire

more times than not. Kevin

Yeah.

Heath

This is allowed to run the receptacles and the lights, and it's pretty common to do it that way.

Tied in together. Heath

Exactly.

Yeah. Heath

In a new dining room, you have to use 12-gauge wire, 20-amp circuit for the receptacles.

Kevin

So a heavier load wire?

Correct. Kevin

Why is that? Because I usually think of this as something for the kitchen.

Heath

Treat the dining room like an extension of the kitchen. If you're entertaining, you got to bring Crock-Pots, heating elements, that kind of thing in there.

Kevin

Oh, interesting. So did we have to switch to this wire in this case?

Heath

We didn't, so because it's still

legally a bedroom... Kevin

Yeah.

Heath

...we're able to take that 14-gauge wire, come out of the receptacle, go up to the switch and feed that light with the existing circuit.

Kevin

Perfect. Good to know. Alright. Thank you, Heath. And that's it from us until next time.

I'm Kevin O'Connor. Heath

And I'm Heath Eastman.

Kevin

For "Ask This Old House."

Richard

So, I also have a breaker that keeps going on the...

Um... Richard

What are you doing?

Jenn

I have a schedule to keep, too.

You two are shameless. Jenn

Landscape lighting. It's easy. It'll be quick. It'll be easy.

Kevin

Next time on "Ask This Old House"...

Jenn

I'll show you how to design and plant a terrace garden.

Tom

And in Chattanooga, a team of women show other women how to repair and build things around their house like this footstool. They'll show me and you how to build it.

Woman

The way I teach the people to use it is, basically, to use your body weight. Get a good stance. Plant yourself and take control of the wood, and then you don't feel intimidated.

You own it. Tom

That's right.