Ask This Old House

Kevin

Today on "Ask This Old House"...

Ross

If you told me on, you know, March 10th of 2020 that we were going to be jumping into a pandemic that was literally going to shut the world down and change the way, you know, life is normal, I would, you know -- I would bet against that, you know? Good thing I'm not a betting man.

Nathan

When the quarantine first started, I found myself at home, like most homeowners, kind of wanting to tackle a project. And my wife and I decided, "Let's work on our office space."

Tom

Because of this pandemic you couldn't go anywhere, you know, everything was shut down, and so did a few social things. So I thought we would have a little bit of fun with my locks. Some of them I got like four or five million likes on. I was like, "Whoa."

Kevin

Hi there. I'm Kevin O'Connor, and welcome back to "Ask This Old House" and to the final episode of our 19th season. Now, you may have noticed that this season has looked a little different from previous ones. Well, like so many businesses, our business, too, has been affected by COVID-19, so we've chosen to operate a little differently this year. Some of the segments you've seen might have looked familiar. Well, that's because we're not traveling this year. So we've decided to show you some of our favorite segments from across the country. And in some cases, our experts have been working alone without homeowners. That has reduced individual exposure to one another. And then there are things that you're not seeing, things that are going on behind the camera. We want to make sure that we operate safely, so we have reduced the size of our crews. There are regular health screenings. Temperatures are taken every day before we get on the job site. And most importantly, cast and crew are being tested regularly. If you work behind the camera, you have a mask on at all times. And because of that testing, folks in front of the camera, like me, can operate without a mask. Now, you're probably doing more projects yourself from your own house this year. Well, so are we. And we thought it would be fun to show you the projects that our experts are working on from their own homes. Enjoy.

Nathan

When the quarantine first started, I found myself at home, like most homeowners, kind of wanting to tackle a project. And I was looking around the house. My wife and I decided, "Let's work on our office space." She works from home a lot. I've been working on a lot of estimates. So I thought, "Why not knock this out?" We started by stripping and refinishing the floors. Then we did some paint. We did the trim over. And also we did a built-in desk area -- custom top, some floating shelves. It came out really nice. And when we were decorating it, finishing it up, you know, I wanted to display my grandfather's flag that I had received a few years back. And he was a World War II veteran. And when he was buried, it was a flag that's draped across the casket, and when it's folded up it's given to a member of the family. And with my military service, my family decided that I would receive that flag. I've always wanted to make a display case for it. So I thought no better way to finish up the office space than to make a case today. So for my flag display case, I'm actually going to keep it really simple. I want the flag to stand out because that's the most important part to me. I'm going to use some red oak, which is going to blend in with my office, some half-inch plywood on the back side, glass on the front, and a few simple miters, some glue, a few pin nails. And to finish off my case, I'll use some lacquer. So a typical coffin flag folded is 11 inches high and 22 inches wide. So first I'm going to establish a center line and then pull all my dimensions off of there. I want to undersize it just a little bit, so I'm going to go 10 3/4 inches off the bottom and 10 3/4 in either direction, make for a snug fit for the flag. We're going to use 3/4-inch material for the case. So I can actually do a lot of my layout with just a scrap piece of 3/4. So I've established my base. I'm going to come up 10 3/4 off of that. 10 3/4, 10 3/4. I can actually start connecting my lines. Now I can offset those. All right, now I have the rough idea of the pieces that I need. I need two pieces up top. These are going to be similar. One long piece down below. I'm gonna cut each piece, just a little bit longer than I need. I'll fine-tune them later. And I set the table saw up for 4 inches. I'm going to run all this 1x6 through and make it a little bit thinner because I don't need all that depth for the flag case. But the base I'm going to leave full thickness. All right, so my glass groove is going to be 3 1/2 inches, and I'm going to set the blade to 1/4 inch high. Now I'm going to set up for the rabbit that the plywood is going to sit inside. Off my rip fence, I'm going to set it 1/2 inch at the back side of the blade, and I'm going to set the height of my blade at 1/4 inch off the top. Now I'm going to go 1/2 inch to the good side, 1/2 inch tall. So one detail that I'd like to add to my flag case is just to ease the edges a little bit with a chamfer bit. I love the subtle look of it. So for the display case, we have to make a few mitered cuts. One of them's really easy. For this triangle, we just have a 90-degree angle. We can cut a 45-degree miter, make up that joint. But down below, we have these really steep cuts that we have to make. I could do this on my miter box. It's not as safe. I actually have a modified tenon jig. I can do it on my table saw to achieve that really steep cut. It's a 22 1/2-degree angle, but I'm going to add 45 degrees to it. It'll be 67 1/2 degrees to get that nice long miter. Using the dimensions that I pulled off my template, I'm going to cut two legs to 17 7/8, and I'm going to cut the bottom to 25 5/16. Next, I'm gonna sand it with some 220. This red oak actually comes really smooth, so just hit it with some 220 just to knock it down a little bit more. We'll tack it, and I'm actually going to use some lacquer and finish the insides. That way I don't have to come back and do that later. Now I'm ready to cut my glass for the front and my plywood for the back. It's actually really easy to get these measurements. I just measured from the 90-degree point down to the sides 16 inches. Do a diagonal cut, have my piece for the back. Now we're going to cut the glass. I'm gonna undersize it just a little bit more than the plywood because it's going to be hidden on all three sides. Nice. Good cut. My grandpa Wally served in the Army during World War II, and after that he had a lot of different great jobs over the years. One of his favorites was down at the Fore River Shipyard, and enjoyed a long retirement, and then he passed away in 2018. Right before the ceremony, they had told me that I was going to be receiving his coffin flag, which was a huge honor to me.

Tom

I've never wanted to do anything else in life than what I do. I love working with my hands. I've been doing a lot of projects around the house and with my kids. We are in our little bubble. I mean, Kate lives five minutes from me, T.J. about 15 minutes. So because of this pandemic, you couldn't go anywhere, you know, everything was shut down, and so did a few social things. We're getting a lot of comments on my hair has been blowing in the wind. I'm really enjoying my COVID cut. So I thought we would have a little bit of fun with my locks. "What's TikTok or TikTak or whatever it is?" You know, and then it's, "What's Instagram?" Kate goes, "We'll be fine, Dad. Let's just do it." It's been fun. I like to do some funny stuff, some relaxing stuff, but also some quick tips and educational stuff too. Right underneath the belt clip, if you look, there's a number right there -- 2 1/2 inches. That number represents the face from here to here, the width of that tape measure. So we did a few tape-measure tricks, and we got a lot of hits on those. Some of them I got like four, five million likes on. I was like, "Whoa. What's that?" Kate was down with us, and she came up with this this one that we did. It's called "Bored Around the House." Just making fun of myself and making fun of the whole thing, but really passing the time. And the response that we've been getting is just amazing because, you know, a lot of people are stuck in their house with nothing to do and bored. And you start to read the comments and it's like, "Oh, my God! So glad you're doing this! Brings brings me laughter during the day when I sit and watch it. And it's so gloom and doom, and we turn on this and we're having fun and we get a good laugh." It's so nice to see that, you know? When you get that kind of thing directly from from a viewer, it makes you feel good. It really does. It makes you feel good. I think social is fun because you're having fun, you're making people laugh, but also now and then you're giving them a tip about how to do something. But I have to give credit to Kate. She stepped it up. From all the bad things that have come out of this pandemic. I mean, we're just closer than ever. It's been a terrible thing that we've gone through, and I just hope everybody stays safe, stays healthy, and we'll get through it.

Heath

They deemed us essential employees because we have to keep businesses operating. Certain places have to run. Hospitals have to run, you know, food services have to run. So we've got to make sure we can maintain them and keep them up and running. There's no such thing as an eight-hour day, 40-hour week. Long days for all of our guys, and fortunately everyone's been great. But it's, you know, an early morning, you know, go, go, go. You're bouncing around quite a bit. A lot of different jobs, trying to keep everyone comfortable and operating as best as we can. It's been a little more difficult to get some materials, to be honest, because a lot of places shut down production. So trying to keep up with the demand has been really, really tough. We've been so busy and so crazy that you lose focus on some things. So all I see right now is just work, work, work, and just trying to stick with the schedules and make sure we're getting things done and try and keep customers happy as we can. But at the same time, you got to look back and realize personally, all right, maybe you need to take a little stock and take a little breather and realize the things that are truly important as well. And you have to force yourself to take a little time off and enjoy yourself and appreciate what you really have at home. At the start of COVID, I did start one project at home that I didn't quite get a chance to finish. So I installed a new USB receptacle in the kitchen, which we've been meaning to put in forever. But when it's your own house, you just tend not to get to those things. I do need to finish the job, and in my case, I'm going to install an AFCI circuit breaker to protect that circuit as well. All right, and I'm at one of the panels in my basement. And as you can see, neatness does really matter to me. It shows good workmanship. It shows things are installed correctly. And when we label things like this as well, it makes it very easy to identify where everything is and where we can turn something off when we need to. In this case, we're going to turn this breaker off here that goes to the kitchen receptacle that I replaced a little bit earlier. So what I need to do now is I need to install AFCI protection -- arc-fault circuit interrupter protection. The way I'm going to do this in this case is I'm going to replace this breaker with an AFCI breaker. This breaker looks for an issue in the system if there's any kind of an arc or a problem caused. An example of a problem that would be caused is, let's say you had a wire too close to a wall where you were hanging a picture, and you drove that nail through that wire. A conventional breaker may not trip, but if that nail pierced a conductor or scraped and it was rubbing up against two of the conductors, that could create an arc. That's when this would shut that circuit down and keep you from causing a fire. It's a little different than GFCI protection. GFCI more measures the current going in and the current coming back out. It wants to make sure the system's balanced. A GFCI operates by seeing a difference in the current. So if it sees something as small as five milliamps, that breaker will trip. This more looks for the arc. Now, the one thing I'd like to point out before we get started is working on a panel can be very dangerous, so this is something I'd like you to leave to a licensed professional. What we're going to do is we're going to actually go outside, turn the power off, lock that breaker out to ensure that everything is deenergized. Then I'm going to open this up. Now we have the cover off. Just gonna double-check it with my meter. And that is off. Next thing I want to do is identify the breaker we want to replace, which is this 20 we turned off. I'm gonna take the black wire off. Just pull that out of the way for now. Now I can take the breaker out. Set that to the side. So now what I want to do is I want to find the neutral that goes with this black wire. They'll be in the same cable together. And what's going to happen is both of these wires are going to land on the new arc-fault breaker. So that's the black wire there, and that's the white wire right below it. So now that we have the wires identified and the old breaker removed, we're going to go ahead and install the new AFCI breaker. And for starters, we're going to install this pigtail onto the neutral bar. And then we're gonna take the two conductors we identified, the black and the white, and we're going to install them directly into the breaker. Now that we have everything in place, we're going to go ahead and just torque those screws. And now it's time for the panel cover to go back on. It's always a good idea to turn off the smaller breakers before you turn on the main breaker again. This way, you're not having a bunch of equipment trying start up at the same time, and you can bring them back on one by one.

Mauro

Before all this happenings, I have four crews with between five to eight guys and girls in each crew. That was plenty of work for everybody. We're always busy. We're always getting the work done. And then all of a sudden everything went down.

Jenn

Well, in the beginning it was everything was unknown.

Right. Jenn

This is all new to us. This is nothing normal.

Richard

You know what? The whole thing about this,

it's just been weird. Ross

Yeah.

Richard

It's just been weird, you know?

Ross

If you told me on, you know, March 10th of 2020 that we were going to be jumping into a pandemic that was literally going to shut the world down and change the way, you know, life is normal, I would, you know -- I would bet against that, you know? Good thing I'm not a betting man.

Mauro

It was like just -- just crazy. It was just like, you know, one of those things that you said, "Am I seeing this really? Is this happening?" It was like -- it was kind of tough.

Jenn

As it started going, just having guys on site, and like for landscape, the trucks, everyone had color-coded tools. "You're the blue tool, you're the red tool, I'm the yellow." You weren't supposed to share tools. You had to wear masks. But we were lucky. We got to work outside.

Richard

I think the industry did good with embracing the masks. And, you know, they just realized that the only way they could keep on doing it was to just -- just deal with it and put the mask on and get serious.

Mauro

Wearing a mask is not new for us, for painters, because we, you know, we wear a mask all the time. Wear a mask during the preparation, sometimes during the painting we'll wear a mask. And the N95, you know, it was like -- it's been popular between painters for a long time.

Jenn

I feel like everyone's kind of been resilient and rolled with it.

Ross

You know, I would work mornings, my wife would work afternoons and we'd have the kids kind of alternate between mornings and afternoons. You know, those are the kind of things that we were just kind of figuring out on the fly because you don't have any other choice, you know?

Jenn

The materials became more scarce.

Mark

Yes.

Jenn

I have never had to wait for bluestone for a patio. Right?

Mark

Right.

Mauro

We did have a little trouble buying paint, especially at the end of March, beginning of April, May. Many of the paint stores were closed.

Mark

Of course it's an availability problem. But it's not a material problem.

It's a transportation problem. Jenn

Right.

Mark

If a guy or a girl gets tested with a bad temperature, now everything on down the line

is shut down for two weeks. Jenn

Right.

Mauro

And that slows down everything. You know, it slows down, you know, for me to get the paint, for me to get the job done, the ones that we could do work. It was like -- was not a good thing. But I kept all my guys and girls working. And they understood this is, you know, this is what we got to do. This is what we're going to do.

Richard

There is some blessings for all of us. It's caused the world to slow down, center, you know?

Mark

Camaraderie has been much, much better.

Jenn

Yeah.

Mark

And consideration for other people. My people lay brick, again, six feet apart.

Everybody has a mask. Jenn

Yeah.

Mark

They eat alone. Whatever the protocol is. Luckily we've had no cases of COVID in my company from, you know, from the start to now. So we'll knock on wood for that.

Thank you. Jenn

I just knocked for you.

Richard

For all of us, we've got to think about, "What are we doing with this time we now have unexpectedly?" He doesn't have time. He's got young kids. And he's got -- and a business. But for senior people...

Both laugh

Ross

Are you senior?

Richard

I'm getting there. No, I'm getting there. I play young.

Mauro

My daughter's bedroom needed some updates, and she worked with me on that. My son did some work with me at the garage. We paint, you know, some walls in my garage. It's kind of fun and frustration at the same time because they think they know everything. "Oh, I know how to do it. Don't worry about it. I think -- Yeah, I know. I know." But they don't know.

I've been reading more. Jenn

Yeah.

Mark

I've been cooking a little bit.

Jenn

Awesome. Although I'm not going to brag about that. I bought a smoker,

so... Mark

Ohh!

Jenn

I've just been like -- yeah.

Mauro

At the end we all, you know, walk back and we look at it, and we say, "Wow. And they were very proud with, you know, what they'd done.

Ross

Because I'm not traveling as much, you know, because I'm home all the time, I'm spending a lot more time than I ever have before with my two kids, which is, you know, great, because they're in the development years. And hopefully I'll look back on this and be like, you know, I'm glad, you know -- I'm glad I was there.

Mark

What about everybody getting back outside?

Everybody I know is hiking. Jenn

Yes!

Mark

Is that the best part?

Jenn

That is -- I'm so happy you mentioned that.

Mark

We've rediscovered Earth, if you will.

Jenn

It's just, go outside, hit your feet on the ground, go for a walk. The amount of kids that learned how to ride bikes. Everyone's hiking. Everyone is just getting reconnected. And that was really the only way I think a lot of people were able to feel a little "normal."

Mauro

A lot more people are doing paint right now. You know, it's like -- I always say, in between all trades, paint is really easy to do, you know, and people enjoy it because they can see the results faster than anything else.

Mark

If I had to say something to anyone adamantly, it's just follow the guidelines, follow the protocol, follow the rules. Let's get through this thing. It's going to be better for everybody when this is in the past.

Richard

Hug your kids. Hug your parents.

Ohh. Ross

Ohh!

Richard

Wait a minute! Wait, wait. That's too close.

Jenn

I would like to thank everyone who's been watching. And we've been trying to put together these little segments for everybody the best way we can, because we had to do a lot of it remotely. Hopefully, we got to share with everybody little pieces to give them that little piece of inspiration. And we love all of our "This Old House" people.

Mark

Double that.