hausdok

If a complete understanding of how plumbing vents has always eluded you, PMEngineer Newsletter recently re-featured a 2003 article from their archives about the basics of plumbing vents written by Julius Ballanco. This is a good article to recharge your brain cells on that topic. To access the article, you'll need to be a BNP Media subscriber. The subscription is free. You are able to opt out of receiving any future email content from them, and they won't share your information with anyone else without your permission. To access the article, click here.

Apparently Nashville readers like to hear from home inspectors, because two Nashville papers have home inspectors writing competing columns. Walter Jowers has been writing his Helter Shelter column for years in The Nashville Scene and now Don McGonagil has a Q & A column in the real estate section of The City Paper Online Edition. In this June 19th article, McGonagil espouses his view of the dichotomy posed by an inspector's obligation to the client and the need for a referral source. In this June 23rd article, McGonagil discusses the new licensing law in Tennessee and how he sees it impacting home inspectors in that state.

Do you struggle under the mounting pressure of debt, personal and/or in your business? You are not alone. The statistics on debt are troubling. This article in Plumbing & Mechanical Magazine by Ellen Rohr shows how to create a business balance sheet and increase your business options. Warning: You'll have to register (free) on the PM Mag site to access this article, and the first 30% of this article has nothing to do with debt, so you'll have to fight the urge to click away. Hang in there, it's worth it. Click here to read the complete article.

The Radiant Panel Association's 2006 Radiant Flooring Guide is the only annual publication that provides detailed articles on how to match various floor covering and subflooring materials with radiant heating systems. Click here to download a copy of its user-friendly digital version. WARNING: Though very informative, this publication is chock full of ads for every conceivable manufacturer and will take a while to load it's 100+ pages.

According to this Washington Post article by lawyer/columnist Benny L. Kass, a recent decision handed down in a D.C. Court of Appeals is going to give homeowners more leverage when dealing with home inspectors who attempt to shield themselves from liability using a pre-inspection contract. Click here to read the entire article.

For years, some in the business have advocated that one day sellers inspections will become commonplace. Perhaps, if more articles like this one continue to be printed across the country.

No, The barn I was in was wood-framed and painted gray. I'm beginning to think that PA is unique in the number of old book places it's got. Les, you thinking about moving to PA yet? OT - OF!!! M.

Hi Bill, Nope, that's not it, but thanks for putting one more place on my list of places to check out. Very kewl! OT - OF!!! M.

Hi Les, You know, you should check out a place I discovered in PA somewhere around 1993. It's a big old barn in a guy's back yard and it's filled to the rafters with old books and magazines of every ilk. I can't remember the exact name of the town or the guy who was running the business, but it was within about an hour's drive of the National Association of Watch & Clock Collectors' Museum in Columbia, PA. I had a real bad addiction to woodworking magazines back then and was compulsively collecting every back issue of every woodworking magazine that I could lay my hands on. I was on leave from the military and was travelling up and down the east coast of the US looking for old woodworking magazines (My wife thought I'd gone to visit the Smithsonian in DC. If she'd known I was feeding my addiction at the time I would have woke up missing some plumbing.). Anyway, I first heard of the guy while digging through some old magazines in a used magazine store on a little side street outside of the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York. They didn't know his name either, but they told me about a place in Philadelphia that sells old books and mags and said that place would know, so off I went. I found the place in Philly and, man, what a collection they had, but not the specific issues I needed. They in turn told me where to find the old dude's house and I drove down there and spent an afternoon perusing what he had before driving over to the NAWWC Museum. In five days of travelling, I found ten mags and felt pretty smug. Though the most expensive one was $8, those have to be the most expensive magazines on the planet. Maybe Bill Kibbell knows about the guy or an antique shop in that area knows him. Come to think of it, maybe a google search will find him. OT - OF!!! M.

I guess I've got a different mindset. I grew up around a gas stove in a house without an exhaust fan in the kitchen. It had a constant pilot, not an electronic one, and assured that the windows were dripping with condensation in the winter. Nobody in my family suffered from migraines, unexplained cold or flue symptoms, pink pallor, confusion (not alcohol induced) or any other symptoms of CO poisoning....ever. Gas stoves burn cleaner than cigarettes. I'm a non-smoker. I bet that growing up my father's then 2-3 pack a day habit, my mother's nearly 2-pack a day habit and my older sister's constant chain smoking produced a whole lot more CO than that stove every did. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Hi, Go to http://www.jlconline.com , choose bookstore from their menu, scroll down on the right side and choose 'structure & framing" and take your pick OT - OF!!! M.

I got up in the attic and looked at the cutouts for the jack vents in the OSB. OT - OF!!! M.

Hi, Maybe the CO was produced by the burning crud on the burners! Generally speaking, if a stove is adjusted properly and working OK it won't produce any CO. If it wasn't the smoke from the crud producing the CO, I'd have to believe that it was caused by crud that's blocking the burner orifice and causing the thing to burn crappy. OT - OF!!! M>

Hi, About a year ago, I did an ICF's house up on a lake the other side of Stanwood, which is about 40 miles north of here. It was a nice home, built by the owner/builder. Unfortunately, he installed a standing seam copper roof on top of OSB decking without battens and 6 mil layer of polythylene sheeting between. I talked to the manufacturer. They said, "Ain't no way Jose!" and the proud owner wasn't happy when I recommended tearing off the roof and redoing it. He thought he'd make an end run around me and called the manufacturer to prove me wrong. Uh, uh, manufacturer told him outright that it should have been felt and that the plastic was going to turn that OSB into a big mushy biscuit on top of the house. Well to do clients demanded tear off or and redo. It got done. Some days you win. OT - OF!!! M.

Perhaps that's what happened here. - Jim Katen, Oregon Download Attachment: Yes I Have Windows.jpg 59.44 KB Hmmm, Speaking of a fort. Those are nice looking sally ports up there in the front of that bunker, Jim. Bet with the right weaponry, they can hold off a whole hord of Watchtower totin' LDS missionaries, magazine contest kids, cookie-sellin' brownies and FBI agents. [:-eyebrow OT - OF!!! M.

Hmmm, Yeah, well see, to do that I gotta figure out how to use the scanner. Since I've only used it about a dozen times in the last half dozen years, I'm not willing to expend that many brain cells trying to refigure it out. Yep, I'm no account lazy. No question about it. [:-dunce] OT - OF!!! M.

Hey, Cleaner air will always get my vote, it's just that the experts say that dirty ducts aren't the bogeyman that we all thought they were. I still recommend they clean them when I shine my light down into them and see mounds of matted up dog hair, dogfood, and sticky substances that look like they're growing whiskers. OT - OF!!! M.

Hi Kurt, I agree with everything you were saying but I bet that she painted herself into a corner with the size of that house because energy codes limit the amount of glazing that you're allowed to have. I'm guessing that the original "vision" had larger, grander windows and then the municipalit snapped them back to reality. She could have gone back to redesign, but she was married to her original design, thus the dinky windows. That's my uninformed theory and I'm stickin' to it dammit! Next: My theory on why McDonalds lost the bid to build the other half of the St. Louis arches. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Hey Les! This old girl was built in 1914 for the daughter of one of the Kellog Company founders and has fallen on hard times. Know anyone in Michigan around Battle Creek who has an appreciation for old homes and the stick-to-it-iveness to see a project like this through? http://www.historicproperties.com/detai ... y=ncbat005 ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Hi Jim, Now I'm kicking myself in the keester. Last week I threw away 10-1/2 years worth of Metal Roofing Magazine issues and remember seeing an article about the use of various vapor retarders under metal roofs. Do this, shoot Dan Perkins an email. He's the guy who writes the technical articles for the Metal Roofing Magazine website and he can be reached at DanPerkinsroof@aol.com. He's in Michigan. Alternatively, you can review the forums at the Metal Roofing Alliance site. They're just like here and are broken up into various categories for questions about metal roofs with various metal roofing guys giving input. The primary forum URL is http://www.metalroofing.com/v2/forums/i ... Categories and the Underlayment category URL is http://www.metalroofing.com/v2/forums/i ... egoryID=38. If you'd like to call the Metal Roofing Alliance and talk to someone directly, they will be open in a couple of hours and their number is: (360) 275-6164 Here's the URL for MRA's site: http://www.metalroofing.com/v2/index.cfm Here's the URL for Metal Roofing Magazine: http://www.metalroofingmag.com/ While you are there, sign up for a free subscription to Metal Roofing Mag, as well as Rural Builder and Frame Building News. I always seem to learn some good stuff from these, even though they are aimed more at the rural/agricultural market. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Hi Kurt, It might be colloquial. Girts are what one calls the horizontal members that connect adjacent bents in a timber-frame structure just below where the principal rafter and principal post meet. Then there are bent girts, which are at the same level but span the same bent. Purlins do exactly the same thing between bents but below the girt on the walls and above the girt on the roof. Today, most folks that aren't acquainted with traditional timber frame construction but are in construction would probably refer to the girt in a timber frame as either a top plate or a purlin, thus "girtlin." My best guess. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Yep, right through the wall between the two. OT - OF!!! M.

Don't print it. Save it to your hard drive and then you can read it without printing it. OT - OF!!! M.

Hi, Is it possible to take a bore hammer and cut yourself a hatch into the newer crawlspace from the old one? If so, it's 30 minutes work and it will eliminate the question mark that the buyer will have about what conditions are under the floor of that addition. Glenn, Don't know about Houston, but around here a sealed crawlspace is usually a dank moldy mess filled with insect issues, unless the floor has been covered in concrete or the vapor barrier has been applied tight as a drum head. Any home inspector around here who doesn't attempt to get into any crawlspace any way he can usually finds himself with attorneys breathing down his neck in a few years. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Go to the menu bar above, pass your cursor over 'resources' then choose 'downloads'. Scroll down to FM5-426 and download/save the Army carpentry manual and then look up those types of trusses. OT - OF!!! M.