Articles
Basement Remodel Insights
With proper imagination and planning, you can transform your basement from a dark, underutilized storage area to nearly any type of additional living space you can imagine
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Your Home: Keeping Water Out Starts At The Top
Keeping your home and basement dry is really a team effort. Proper landscaping (lawn grade, trimmed overhanging trees, clean gutters…) and all of the other steps contribute to keeping your home dry and healthy but very often the problem starts at the top—the roof—where water isn’t being controlled.
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Your Basement: Water Is Not An Option
Water is not an option in your basement. Having water in your basement equates to losing the use of your basement at the minimum. At its worst, it ruins personal property and creates an unhealthy environment in which mold and mildew can flourish.
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Concrete: Not Just For Sidewalks Anymore
Nothing surprises people more than when they see all of the options available with stamped concrete for walkways, floors, patios and even driveways. Any look you want to create for your home can be accomplished with stamped, decorative concrete.
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Hybrid Heating: Nothing But Hot Air
A Hybrid Heating System can lower your heating and cooling expenses by as much as 24% and fits the same footprint as a conventional forced air furnace and air conditioner.
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Focus On Stained Glass: Fused Glass Tiles
If you are remodeling a room in your home or building a new home, you may want to consider accenting with fused glass tiles. The extensive palate of colors available is a designer’s delight.
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How To Update Your Home, But Not Lose Your Shirt!!!
Updating your home can be fun and profitable. If you keep the following suggestions in mind, you should have a good grounding in what is and what isn’t a good update to make.
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Wood Floors And Cabinets: Helping Them Be Greener
Cleaning and treating wood with the right materials and tools can unlock luster and beauty your woodwork has not shown in years. Green flooring is a great concept. Using renewable cork or other species makes a lot of sense when you are starting from scratch. But, what do you do if you already have wood floors or cabinetry in place?
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Nature Stone: An Option For Dealing With Damp Basement Floors
When it comes time to replace the floor in a wet basement homeowners face the dilemma: Replace the flooring with the same material or look for something more permanent.
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The Ugly Look Of Concrete Is Out
Nature Stone, the durable and beautiful solution for a broad range of flooring challenges in basements, garages, patios, pool decks, walkways, recreation rooms and laundry rooms that will last a lifetime.
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NARI Notes: Tips For Homeowners To Avoid Home Improvement Scams
During times of a softer economy paired with the approach of warmer weather as well as the horrific flooding in the area, the National Association of the Remodeling Industry (NARI) wants to remind homeowners to beware of unscrupulous people posing as remodelers.
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Plumbing Replacement Planning: Water Heaters
As homes get older, there are certain things that just wear out from use. Just like roofs age on the outside of a house, on the inside water heaters, garbage disposals, water softeners and sump pumps age and need replacement.
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Lighting Your Home
In the not too distant past, lighting was simply having a typical lamp on an end table or a fixture in the center of the room. It was plain, functional lighting. There was nothing wrong with the approach, but there is much more available to homeowners now
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Lights, Camera, Action!!! (Don’t Forget The Popcorn)
A home theatre means different things to different people. Strictly speaking, it is intended to provide you with an enhanced entertainment option for watching and listening to television and movies at home. This can range from a TV,DVD player; surround sound receiver and speakers to a specially built theatre room with high end components including a big screen television, receiver and multiple speakers built into the walls and special furniture for viewing.
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Basement Remodeling With No Water Worries
When most people build a new home they leave the basement unfinished. A lot of builders encourage their clients to do this because it saves money on the construction and its something easily be done in the future. What they don’t tell them is that they are actually afraid to do this work... Why?
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Myth: Wood Floors Are Difficult
The one thing that is consistent when it comes to wood floors is that there is a great deal of inconsistency in terms of awareness about installation and how to care for them. Chris’s top 4 Wood Floor Care Myths...
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Getting Organized With A Laminate Closet System
When upgrading to a laminate system, you are upgrading your homes value. It will set you apart from the house next door when it comes time to sell your home. It also serves as a frame so a closet can be adjusted, or reconfigured to fit the needs of the user. In a child’s room, initially, you can have an area for triple hanging clothes because of the size of the clothing. As the child grows, and their clothes get bigger, the system can be adjusted to double hang to accommodate bigger clothing.
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Home Accenting With Glass: The Glass Is Definitely MORE Than Half Full
The impact of a strategically placed glass accent in a home can make the home one of a kind. It can add color, class and a dimension that other design and decorative features can not do.
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Win — Win — Win
There definitely is a win-win win scenario for consumers when they get to the point of replacing their mechanical systems. The new generation of furnaces and air conditioners are a huge improvement over what they are replacing.
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Permanent Roofing For Permanent Homes
It’s ironic that we build homes to last 100 or more years, but we accept it’s reasonable to replace the roof many times in the life of the house.
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Granite: Making It Look The Best It Can
Granite is one of the toughest materials you will ever put in your home. Its hardness and durability is really shown when hot pans are set directly on it or if you cut directly on the surface.
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Renewable Flooring: Cork - Harvested and Recycled
Cork may seem like an unusual choice for flooring, but cork is one of the best sources of truly renewable flooring. Harvesting the bark from the cork tree and converting it to flooring does not kill the tree, when done properly.
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Flooring Choices: The Customer Satisfaction Process
The best way for a homeowner to get the most from their flooring selection process is to prepare before shopping and be sure to work with a reputable retailer. The flooring in a room accounts for as much as 50% of the room’s impact.
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Improving Your Water: Better For You And Your Home
Water quality can be a big issue because as a natural solvent, it breaks down a small amount of everything it comes in contact with. That can cause problems. The source of the water you have provides insight into what issues you may have to deal with.
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Granite: As Green As It Gets
The original “Green” countertop, granite, gives homeowners a sturdy, long-lasting product that has no off-gassing, can be re-purposed with no environmental downside and granite is now more affordable than ever.
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Built In Pride - A Classic Beauty
Planning for options to use the “odd” spaces that remodeling frequently creates and anticipating future projects can save on redundant expenses. Electrical, Plumbing, HVAC and even the impact of a doorway you move may have consequences on future growth or reorganization of the home.
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Making Your Home Feel New: Affordable Interior Upgrades
Small upgrades or updates within your home are a great way of making your home feel new without breaking the bank. And, it doesn’t take much to make a significant impact. Following are activities the Handyman Connection routinely does for their customers to make homes more livable, fresher looking and just plain better.
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Indoor Air Quality: Can Your Home Pass The Test?
Studies show most Americans spend about 90% of their time indoors. That’s significant in that according to the United States’ E.P.A., levels for many pollutants often are five to ten times higher indoors as compared to outdoors.
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Changing The Way Madison Buys Granite
There was a time when granite countertops were not for every homeowner because of the cost. Traditionally speaking, local dealers or installers of granite will purchase from a local distributor, who purchased from a regional wholesaler, who purchased from an importer, who then in turn purchased from an exporter, who purchased from a reseller who had purchased from a mine or quarry. Of course, along the way, each step in the distribution chain made a profit on the handling and sale of the product. The result was an expensive, and therefore, an exclusive product.
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Tough Question: Great Answer! Star Dek
“In the past, the options were limited to patching the concrete, which can be unsightly, or removing degraded concrete
and re-pouring, which is very expensive,” says Jeff Seegmiller of The Handyman Connection.
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Lifestyle By Design
The Process: At Once Complex And Simple - For the design process to be successful, trust is the primary ingredient needed in every project. It allows for true collaboration, which in turn, creates the best plans and outcomes. In fact, trust should be part of a homeowner’s relationship with any designer or remodeler. “In our business, the trust creates life long relationships, which gives us the opportunity to use personal experience on multiple projects for our customers. In the majority of cases, we are not starting from scratch; we know the home and can expand our involvement in a very positive manner. Our experienced designers skillfully assist new customers in the process so a comprehensive plan is created,” says Groenier.
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Granicrete: Small Step With A Big Impact
Granicrete can be used as an interior flooring replacement for both residential and commercial applications, as well as externally for a variety of purposes including pools, patios and walkways. The value of Granicrete is that it has a wide range of stone types and the coloring is
unlimited.
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Homeowner Skills: Using a Showroom Visit Effectively
Armed with a general budget and particular preferences, a showroom visit represents the first concrete step toward completing your project.
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Natural Daylight: The Best Way To Light A Room
‘Daylighting’ is a growing trend for making interior and north facing rooms brighter. Improved technology allows homeowners to reflect, and project, light nearly anywhere in their homes.
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The Plumbing Professor - Plumbing Is More Than Meets The Eye…
To attain the title of Plumbing Professor (as Benjamin Plumbing’s staff has), one must have extensive training in plumbing and the equipment and fixtures related to plumbing and must possess time tested experience, or practical know-how for solving problems quickly and efficiently. These qualities are crucial with plumbing services because there is usually “more than meets the eye.”
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A New Dimension For Your Home: Finishing Your Basement
Finishing a basement can be great way to increase the enjoyment and uses of your home. To get the most from the project you need to put a little thought into the planning stage.
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Your Basement Has Never Had Water? Never Say Never…
Even the best prepared homes can experience water and the damage it can cause. Time and natural processes eventually catch up with homes built before sump pumps were required. Over time, waterproofing does get old or saturated and water can seep through your foundation.
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Indoor Air Quality - Cleaning Your Homes Air
The air inside your home can be 100 times more polluted than the air outside. According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), our homes are loaded with pollutants like pollen, lung-damaging dust, pet hair, dander, dust mites, mold spores, bacteria and viruses. It’s no wonder they list indoor air quality as one of the top five environmental risks to public health today.
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The Magic Of Lighting
Natural light is a gift we have come to take for granted. Yet what is more beautiful than the sun rising in the morning and setting in the evening? Natural light is responsible for brush like strokes of color across the sky, shade beneath a tree and sprinkles of light dancing across water. Designers use these visions as an inspiration to create lighting artistry.
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