I have existing natural gas line in the home. I’m looking for a plumber to extend the gas line to the kitchen for a gas range. Do you have someone that you can recommend? How much does it cost to take down a kitchen backsplash? If i don’t replace it with more tile – will it look horrible? Will I have to replace the sheet rock? Any names you can recommend to do this job?
Heidi
Tom’s Answer:
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Charlie: First off, I don’t know how much it’s going to cost, and I don’t set prices here on the show. I never have…
Tom: Fair enough.
Charlie: …Because I don’t know anything about it. It won’t be that bad, and if you take it off, if you want just sheet rock textured and painted, that’s fine. A lot of homes have that. You will want at least a four-inch or so backsplash like you would have even in a bathroom counter, around the base of it just to keep the water from getting on the sheet rock and make a nice detail there. You don’t have to have all kinds of tile and stuff.
Tom: If she put backer there, or something down toward it, would that not…?
Charlie: No, you still need to have some kind of waterproof material…
Tom: Okay, some waterproof ceramic thing that’s going to stop the…
Charlie: Then the countertops never meet the wall perfect, so you have to have something on top just to hide that little…
Tom: What? It’s not a perfect fit?
Charlie: Only God makes perfect things.
Tom: Then there you are.
Charlie: You need to make a decent detail there.
Tom: All right. She says that…here’s something else she found out. Heidi is probably going to be this whole segment because she has so many great questions in here. She says that her inspector went up into the attic and he found out that their bad insulation was put in upside down. Is that a problem?
Charlie: I’d rather have it the other way, but is it a major problem? No. Basically, when you say upside down, I assume that she means that the paper backing on it, or whatever backing it has, is up as opposed to down, against the sheet rock ceiling. If that’s the case, if you really want to do anything at all, all you have to do is take a razor blade and cut the paper open, the backing open, so it’ll breathe. That’s all you want it to do is breathe, and it doesn’t get wet. If it’s been there that long and it’s dry, it should be fine.
Tom: Do you still get it faced to put in like that, or do you get unfaced now?
Charlie: The stuff I use is all unfaced now. For a long time they didn’t make much unfaced because there’s not a big market for it in the United States. Everybody else wants some kind of moisture barrier. Eventually, they realized since there are…this part of the country, Zone 3 – Houston, Florida, the Gulf Coasts…we have special products and there’s some money to be made down here because we are booming.
Tom: She should go to the tropics, because that’s her next problem. She said she moved into the house in April and that everybody wound up with upper respiratory issues within two weeks. They moved five blocks away, and now they’ve got a problem. They had a company come in and clean the ducts, and had a company come in and fix holes in the intake and added a filter on the blower and the intake of the attic, and built her own attic box…one of those tents upstairs out of insulation board and the silver tape and all, sprayed sticky insulation foam around the entrance to the attic ladder, and still noticed that air is being pulled into the hallway where the attic entrance is located, so it’s pulling it up there. Could that be part of her problem?
Charlie: I don’t…every house has infiltration. We talk about this, and you get the guys from Absolute Comfort, they want to handle it one way. I say a simple fresh air return handles it a different way. Besides that, I don’t think it’s going to be a problem where it would make everybody in the house sick.
Tom: Okay.
Charlie: If you suspect you’re getting sick in a home, there is a company out there that can do an air quality test for you, Nova Testing up in Conroe. Then at least you’ll know what you’re dealing with. I don’t think the attic door is going to be the health issue.
Tom: She goes on and says, I have hard wood floors. I mop, I wet mop the floors, keep the dust at bay. The dust problems in the house are better, but her allergies are still an issue. It’s been a month since she put the filter in. Is there anything else she should be looking at? She goes on that someone said to replace the plenum in the attic because the ducting is metal pipe, original to the home, and the last time my sinuses were this bad we had a mold problem under our house in California. All the vertical water pipes were replaced when she moved in. We had pinhole leaks but I didn’t see any mold in the attic. All the bathrooms were updated, not sure if the pipes in the walls were. The dirt around the foundation was in weep holes. I removed the dirt, redid the drainage just in case. She said, I’m going nuts trying to figure out what’s making my eyes and sinuses miserable. I even checked the sheet rock to make sure that it wasn’t the Chinese drywall.
Charlie: I understand.
Tom: The beds and the box springs are wrapped in plastic. She washes the sheets and bedspreads weekly in hot water. She’s starting to feel like she’s never going to get better.
Charlie: That’s why I go back to my original statement. You can’t…if you don’t know what you’re fighting, you’re just wasting your time. You’ve got to have good information. I would have an air quality test done in the house and find out if there’s something in that house that you’re allergic to and making you sick. Once you know that, fixing the problem is always the easiest part. Don’t blame your air conditioner. It cannot filter all the air in your home.
Tom: Yeah, that’s voodoo.
Charlie: The only way you can do that is by strapping that filter to your nose, and that would be really…