It’s the Little Things – DIY Fix-It Tips | Hour 3

you can listen to anytime, anywhere on demand. This very episode that we're doing right now, this broadcast becomes a podcast about an hour after we go off the air, and every one of our broadcasts have done the same hundreds of episodes, all searchable by topic. It is a home improvement reference library. You can find it on the free iHeartRadio app or wherever your favorite podcasts are found, Apple Podcasts, Spotify. You just search for Dean Sharp or

The House Whisper or Home with Dean Sharp. Find it Boom, you'll pop up. You'll see my ugly mug right there underneath our orange logo, and you know you have come to the right place. So, if you've missed any part of today's show, and you've missed any of the tips and tricks of DIY fix it that we have talked about thus far this morning. You can just go back and listen to the podcast and listen to it as

many times as you like, whenever you want. And if you're thinking, that's all great, but what we really need is Dean and Tina in our house solving some very specific problems, well you can do that too. You can book an in home design consult with me and the tea. You just go to house whisperer dot design. You'll know when you're there. You'll see Tina's beautiful smiling face right up front where it belongs, and you'll see my ugly mug somewhere in the background where it belongs way back there.

You'll know you're in the right place when you get there. All right, I want to continue our list of DIY tips and tricks, a very specific list though. Okay, this is not the kind of stuff that you're gonna find on YouTube or in regular instruction videos, because these are not necessarily the steps that you take to get one

project done or another. These are the little tiny things, the little techniques and skills that you end up doing while you're doing that project that you realize I'm not good at this, and I don't really know what I'm doing. Case in point, let me make it about as simple and ridiculously simple as possible. I say ridiculously simple. I don't think it's ridiculous, but you might think, oh my gosh, really, you're about to tell us how to use a screwdriver, Dean, Yeah,

I am. I am about to tell you that. Okay, here is why the secret of using a screwdriver is not as obvious as what a lot of people would imagine. A screwdriver is a great device, and for the sake of making like easy, Okay, I don't even want to talk about the complexities of using a flathead screwdriver with a slotted screw. Okay. That is what I'm about to tell you is you take this and you magnify the

importance of these skills ten times. If you're gonna take a flathead screwdriver and use it to loosen or to screw in a slotted head screw. Okay, it's so much trickier than most people realize. But let's start with a very very simple, basic, and maybe the most universal situation these days, and that is a Phillips head screwdriver. Phillips head screwdriver has got that little cross shaped on the end of the screwdriver. The tip is not flat, it's

divided into four fins. And you know that a Phillips Head screw has that little cross shaped indentation in it. Okay, So what's the big deal Dean with that? What's the big deal with using a screwdriver? You stick the screw driver in the whole of the screw and you turn it. Well, go right ahead, and then you can call me later and tell me all of the hassles about doing that. Here is the thing, This is what nobody ever tells

you that when you're starting. And let's just say, for the sake of argument or for the sake of our illustration, that we're going to put a wood screw into a piece of wood. And it's a Philip's Head screwdriver and screw tip. Okay, And yes, I know there are Torques heads out there that do this easier. I'll get to that. Philip said, screwdriver has a point to it. Okay. There are angles, and those angles correspond to the angles that are down inside that indentation in the screw, the recess

in the screw. Here is the thing. You cannot simply put a screw on the end of a screwdriver, touch the tip to a piece of wood and start turning it. Otherwise, because nothing happens, the screw falls off, the screwdriver comes out. It's what we call camming out. It just comes out of the top of the screw. You have to apply

some pressure. But if you apply too much pressure, if you put put it there and you push really hard while the screw has yet to go into the wood, then the next most likely thing that's going to happen is you're gonna get it a little sideways. It's going to fall off to the side. The screw goes off to the side, and the screwdriver goes right into the wood and makes an ugly indentation, and you've just marred the surface that you're trying to fix and or a

fix and repair. Okay, yeah, now you know what I'm talking about. You've been there. This has happened to you, and if it hasn't happened to you, it will. So here is the point. A screwdriver requires pressure gradient pressure. You start with light pressure with you holding the top of the screw and the screwdriver in thumb and fore finger, and you get the fatty flesh of those two fingers around both the end of the screwdriver tip and holding on to the top of the wood screw itself so

that you're holding it in place. And then light pressure, not so much pressure that you're going to make the thing go cock eyed and ram that screw into your finger and or the wood, but just enough light pressure, and you begin to turn gently pressurized until the tip of the screw starts penetrating into the wood, and as you turn it, the first beginning part of the thread starts to take and hold How long how far do you know that you need to go until you can

remove your finger from the screwdriver tip and the the screw. When the screw has started and it's now standing up on its own, it's far enough in that it is now sticking up like a tree standing on its own

out of the wood. Now we reapproach. You still use your fingers lightly there, and we're going to re engage the screwdriver and understand that from here on out the screw is going to encounter more and more resistance from the wood, but it will become more stable the further it goes in, and so you as a result will need to apply greater and greater forward pressure as you rotate it, so pressure starts light, just light enough to

get it started. And then as you turn the forward pressure of the screw driver into the screw head so that it doesn't cam out, meaning spin and strip and come out of the screw head, you continue to apply greater and greater pressure until you've got that thing all the way in. This is something that I as far as I know, no YouTube video that I've ever seen has ever covered. But this is how a screwdriver works well without screwing up the project that you have prepped

so so very carefully. That's how you use a screwdriver. Now, of course, there are screw heads out there these days, torquees head screws that cam out far less. They're superior to a Phillips head screwdriver, and that's why they're by and large replacing Phillips heads in most places. They're kind of star tipped, they have more surface area, they create more tension, they go down straight or and further into

the screw. But the same principle still has to apply because the further a screw gets into a piece of wood, the more pressure you have to apply behind it to take it the rest of the way. And they don't tell you that. You just think, oh, you just turn the thing and it goes in on its own. No it doesn't. But too much pressure up front will screw the whole thing up way too early. It is a gradient, kind of a bell curve of pressure as you put

a screw into the wood. All Right, you're either saying, Wow, you just wasted five minutes of my life, or you're thanking me forever. Hopefully it's the latter and not the former. All Right, we got more of these for you right after.

tackle the you've taken everything into account. But I'll tell you what doesn't end up on those instruction lists or those YouTube videos or the kind of little things that I'm talking about today. And sometimes it's the little things that you have to do again and again and again and again in a project that ends up giving you the greatest frustration or the greatest victory. And so that's why I want to make sure that these little things are handled and that you know what to do. We've

talked about how to glue wood. How many times do you turn a pipe thread? You know how much of a pipe thread has to be covered to know that it's on right. The kinds of things that you only start to think about once you're actually doing it and you realize, I don't know this, I don't know how far I'm supposed to screw this pipe in here. That's the kind of stuff that I'm trying to help you

with this morning. Literally, if if you just joined us, then you just missed me explaining how you use a screwdriver. And I mean that in all seriousness, because there is a physical technique to using one adepthly, and so we talked about that. So you have to listen to podcast. If any of these great tips and tricks that you've missed along the way. In the spirit of what I just described with the screwdriving very quickly, what's the secret to setting a nail and nailing nails in without hitting

your thumb with a hammer? Okay, it's very very simple. This one does not take as much time as the screwdriver tip. It's it's very simply this. The biggest problem that people have with hammer and nails and their fingers is the fact that they start off too aggressive with it. That you hold up the nail and you try and give it a good whack while you're still holding the nail and the nail hasn't started to enter the material yet. Okay,

So it's very simple. You hold the nail and you hold the hammer, and you tap, just tap, tap, tap, very light tapping on that nail until the nail is standing on its own, and then you remove your hand from the crime scene and continue to hammer it in. Now, I can't guarantee that you're gonna hit that nail on the head and that you're not gonna mar up the

material around you. That takes a little coordination and experience, but at least at least if that hammer is gonna miss it's not going to land on one of your phalangies and give you a black and blue nail and so on. So the point is this, you just tap the nail until it gets started and is stuck in there standing up on its own, and then you know that little tapping is never gonna Number one, it's not

a swing. It's never going to miss, and even if it did miss, it's just a little tap against your finger. So you just lightly tap it until the nail is on its own and then remove your hand from the area before you start swinging that hammer. For real, very very simple. Something that a lot of people don't know the answer to is if you're doing any electrical work,

and I don't mean rewiring your house. I just mean, let's say you're changing out a switch or an outlet and you run into a situation where there's a wire nut that you have to undo something, and then you've got to redo it. Wire nuts. You all know what a wire nut is, right. They're a little cone shaped plastic. They're either well, they come in different colors, and they come into different colors for a reason. There's different gages of wire nuts. There's orange, there's blue, there's red. There

is when I just cover yellow. These are different gauges, meaning that wire nuts are raided to have a certain number of wires shoved up inside them before they twist and hold on to them, and so on. The package of wire nuts on the box itself, it'll tell you that a red wire nut is rated for four you know, twelve gauge wires or six fourteen gauge wires or you know whatever, that kind of thing. But the question is assuming you've got all that right, because that's just instructional.

That's like, okay, that's the technical thing. I've got three of these wires, and so according to the box, I should use the yellow wire nut. Okay, got it. Now I have the yellow wire nut and I have these wires. How do I know what I'm about to do is done right? Okay? Because it's not just put the wire nut on the wires. There's a process there, right, So it's very simple. Here we go. Choose the right wire nut, have the wires stripped appropriately to the right depth, very

very important, not too far and not too short. Again, the box will tell you how far quarter inch, half inch of exposed wire, whatever the case may be. Use a gauge and strip the wires to the right depth the nut on until it begins to grip. All three wires hold them together, and you feel that it begins to grip, and then keep twisting the wire nut until

it's what we call bottoms out. When it bottoms out, it means that those wires have been drawn all the way up inside that wire nut and they're not going in any further. And then keep twisting that wire nut until the wires themselves, the wires that you can see down outside the wire nut, begin to twist around each other at least once. Yeah, that they actually spin on. That's how you know that wire nut is as tight as it's going to go, and it couldn't go any tighter.

And believe me, you ask any electrician, they will tell you the biggest problem with DIY electrical work is that people don't put wire nuts on tight. In fact, the biggest problem that they have with their own apprentices is that you guys didn't put the nuts on tight enough. Down the road or somewhere, something slipped, something wiggled, and

now we're losing contact. So wire nuts go on as tight as possible, how tight all the way in and we keep twisting until the wires themselves start twisting around each other. You don't have to do it ten twenty fifty times. Just get those exposed wires where the part of the rubberized insulation that you can still see cross over each other at least one time, at least once twice, just to be super safe. You don't need to go any further than that. And there you go. All right, I got more for you.

things that end up in YouTube videos or instructions. They are these tiny, mechanical and sometimes coordinated tricks and tips and techniques that most people just don't talk about. And because I care for you, and because I know the kind of frustration that you experience when you get out your set of tools and you get right in the middle of a job and you realize, well, nobody told me. Of all the things they said, they didn't tell me how much to do, and how where did I get it?

I get it? So let me get back to the list. I'm going to try and make this a bit of a lightning round. I want to get a few more of these in. How many wraps of electrical tape is enough when you are using electrical tape, Now, electrical tape, you know, we use it for a number of different reasons. Sometimes we use it to repair a nick or a cut in the or break in the insulation on a

electrical line. Sometimes, after we have put a wire nut on, will give a few wraps of electrical tape just to kind of seal up the gap underneath the wire nut to the wires themselves. A lot of electricians like to do that as a as a just as a habit of extra moisture protection and so on. There are a number of different reasons to use electrical tape, but electrical tape primarily is an insulating and a repair tool, and it's very rubbery and it has an insulating quality to itself.

So how many wraps is enough? Wraps? You see? That's the thing? How many is enough? This kind of gets down to the remember that old Tutsi pop commercial from do you remember? Are you old enough like me to remember that? From like the seventies and eighties, where the kid wanted to know how many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tutsi pop? And he asked the rabbit, and he asked the bear. I don't remember, he asked several woodland creature. I don't know

why he's asking woodland creatures, but it's cute. Finally, they all referred him to the owl, and the owl said, well, let's find out, and he took like three licks and then he crunched it with his beak and he's like three So I don't think that was good advice, but this is good advice. How many wraps of electrical take? The general rule is this to exceed to meet or

exceed the thickness of the wire insulation. So, in other words, if you take a look at that little rubbery coating that the wire has on it, and you're repairing a piece of missing insulation or cracked or damage, then how many wraps rapid enough so that the electrical tape wraps are roughly the same thickness as the wire insulation. And

there you go. That makes sense and you'll be able to remember that from now on because it's not a number, it's just matched the thickness of the insulation of the wire. All right, A pilot hole. You know what a pilot hole is when you're putting a wood screw into a piece of wood or some other sensitive material. Putting a screw into sensitive material. You got to understand this that

screws are basically wedges. They're wedge shaped. And so if we just take us and a lot of people ignore this because the wood that they're going into is soft, it's like pine or it's redwood or something like that, and you screw a screw down into a piece of soft wood like that, and you're not going to see anything happen at first, But then you come back later, whether it's hours, days, or weeks later, and all of a sudden, where the screw is there's a crack. It

has split the wood. Now, hardwood will split immediately, it'll show you the error of your ways right away. Soft wood might hide it for a while, but eventually the wood will split along the line of the screw because it's a wedge and you can't just put that much pressure into the wood and not expect the wood grain to split. So how do we avoid that. We use

pilot holes. We drill a hole through the wood so that we're removing material and as the screw goes in, it's not wedging and forcing all this material around it to move out of place. So the question is how big should a pilot hole be? And it's a very very simple answer. You take the screw in question and you hold it up to the light. You want to ignore the threads. The threads are the part of the

screw that bites into the wood. But inside the threads you'll see the shaft of the screw going the length of the screw, the thickness of that shaft. That's what you match your drill bit up to. Okay, your drill bit should not be any larger or smaller than the shaft inside, hiding inside the threads of that woodscrew. You drill that hole, and as the shaft goes in, it will not be splitting the woods. And yet the threads will dig into all the sides in three hundred and

sixty degrees and the screw will hold beautifully. By the way, it also makes putting that screw in a lot easier in reference back to screwing screws in with a screwdriver. So there you go. The pilot hole is the thickness of the shaft of the screw itself. When fixing my sprinkler lines, Dean, which a lot of you're going to be doing. How much glue do I put on a PVC pipe and how many times do I turn the fitting? I've heard I'm supposed to turn the fitting, spin the

fitting after putting the glue on. Very very simple, very very simple. Right, you apply to your PVC pipe after you have put some primer on. Primer very important first, Okay, first, a little bit of watery purple primer that opens up the porosity of the PVC. Put primer on the pipe and on the fitting. Both then one unbroken band of glue all around the fitting and the pipe, push them together and then make a one quarter turn. You turn

it too much and you're wiping the glue away. Don't turn it at all, and you don't have the assurance that you've got even spread. So you put those PVC fittings together with the glue after the primer. One quarter turn and you're done, and you wipe off the excess and move on, and don't get the purple primer or the glue on your hand. You'll be fine. But it's a mess, and so wear gloves, have a rag nearby that you can throw away, wipe it all up, and you're good to go. All right, I got a couple

more for you. We'll do it right after.

a Southwest flight. We know you have options when you fly. We thank you for flying Southwest. Well, I'm just saying I appreciate your attention and your confidence and your trust in me coming together to do everything we can to take your ordinary house and make it an extraordinary home. Because you know, at home is ground zero for all of our lives. It's where we live literally, and to improve upon that place, you know, is to improve everything

about our lives in every meaningful way. And so that's why we do what we do around here, and I appreciate it. Just a quick reminder, follow us on social media. We're on all of the usual suspects, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, x, at Home with Dean same a handle for them all.

This very program, this broadcast will very shortly after we go off the air today, become yet another episode of the House Whisper podcast, which is everywhere your favorite podcasts are found, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, the free iHeartRadio app, wherever you listen to your favorite podcast and if your home is in need of some personal house Whisper attention. You of course can book an in home design consult with

me and the tea. All you have to do is go to house Whisper dot Design and you'll know you're in the right place because you'll see Tina's beautiful smiling face right up front where it should be, and my ugly mug way in the background where it should be, and you'll know you're there and you can find more details on that as we go. All right, very quickly as we're wrapping up, can you believe another three hours

has gone by? The time flies when you're having fun, But very quickly, as we're wrapping up the list of stuff, fix it tips and tricks that we do along the way, I want to I want to explain one thing to you before we're done here. And this is something again that happens in a lot of dy projects. You've got something that needs turning, tightening, grabbing, spinning, and you need

a tool for this. It doesn't come as a surprise to me that most people couldn't give me a cogent, immediate answer as to what is the difference between a wrench and a pair of pliers. I know you can picture it in your mind, But if you really get technical about a thing, that's where things get start to

get a little fuzzy. And I know they get fuzzy because I've been on many a project where I have asked, please hand me grabbing that bag over their pliers, and I have been handed by some assistant let's just say, a wrench, or I've asked for a wrench and I've been handed a pair of pliers. And so the question is what is the difference? And I want to explain it to you, very very simply. Wrenches can come in

all sorts of shapes and sizes. Okay truly, but as a general rule, a wrench is part of a uniform system of mechanical parts that addresses the shape and the size of another part. In other words, a just imagine a wrench, your classic wrench like a mechanic's wrench, and one end it's kind of open ended. The other end has a circle around it or a circle enclosed end. That wrench is designed to go on a nut, and that nut has smooth sides on it that are parallel

with each other. And therefore that wrench is designed with smooth sides that are parallel with each other. There are no teeth on that wrench, okay, because it doesn't have to grab into the metal. It simply slides along the edge of the nut, lines itself up, and then it gives you some leverage as you start to spin it and put the nut, you know, tighten and or loosen the nut. It's a classic definition of a wrench. You do not have to do anything other than slide it

on or insert it into the pre shaped mechanical system. Okay, A half inch nut takes a half inch sized wrench. A three eight s nut takes a three inch sized wrench, and you put it on there. Some wrenches are adjustable end with that little spinner at the end, so you can move the jaws back and forth to fit the nut. So you can have one wrench that fits a lot of different sized nuts, but the principle is still the same.

A pair of pliers inevitably has some kind of teethy grooves on it, because pliers are really all about non uniform systems. This thing is weirdly shaped, or you have to grab two of them at the same time and twist them, or it's round, or it's oblong, or whatever. Pliers are all about grabbing onto things that aren't necessarily uniform and structured. Pliers almost always have teeth on them because they need to get as good a grip as possible.

And most importantly, pliers are almost always dependent on the strength of your squeezing them for their effectiveness. Now you think about that wrench. That wrench slides onto a nut, you don't have to squeeze it, all you have to do is turn it. Okay, so your hand grip is not dependent upon its effectiveness or the other way around,

I should say. But with a pair of pliers, the degree that you can squeeze it and the strength that you apply in the grip of your hand to hold it onto that uneven, non uniform surface is directly related to how well those pliers grab and how well they do their job. So yeah, there's a difference between wrenches and pliers. And there you go. And that's the last thing I have time to tell you today on the broadcast. And I hope that these things have been useful to

you and beneficial to you as we've been going along here. Okay, wrapping it up, I'm gonna leave you with this thought today. Some of you have noticed that in the past few weeks there have not been too many closing thoughts at the end of the show, and that has sparked a bit of concern among some of you, and perhaps a question or two as to whether everything is okay over here or we're changing the format of the show. No, no, no, and yeah, there have been some things, but TEENA is okay.

I'm okay. Let's just say we've had some unexpected seasons of loss and pain that have kind of crossed paths with us here. Some of our close friends have suffered some loss and some pain recently, some of our family has suffered some loss and some pain recently, and some loss and pain have hit us too. And that's all I'll say about that, because I don't need to say more.

Apt At a couple of weeks ago, a dear friend of mine sent me some beautiful prose by a woman named Rose Marie Tramer that probably expresses where I'm at with all of this better than I could, so I'm going to read it to you. She writes this, She said, I want a word that means okay and not okay, and more than that, a word that means devastated and stunned with joy. I want the word that says I feel it all at once. The heart is not like

a songbird singing only one note at a time. It's more like a tufin throat singer, able to sing both a drone and simultaneously two or three harmonics high above it a sound the Tuvans say that gives the impression

of wind swirling around rocks. The heart understands swirl. How the churning of opposite feelings weaves through us like an insistent breeze, leaves us wordlessly deeper into ourselves, blesses us with paradox, so that we might walk more openly into this world that is so rife with devastation, and this world so ripe with joy. Yeah, I think that's a good way of saying it. The heart understands swirl. Yes,

I have a swirl on my forearm. I resisted for a long time, but now and forever I have a tattoo of my own design on each of my forearms. They are simple images stick figures. In fact, they are modeled after ancient Native American petroglyphs. The one on my right arm is simply the image of a man with uplifted arms and swirling above him and in him. Is the great mystery of life, depicted as a spiral, a swirl.

It is the ancient Hopey image of the whirlwind, and something powerfully felt but unseen, present but out of reach, constant and constantly changing, dizzying, difficult, and beautiful all at once. Part of what it represents to me is the familiar and the unknowable. Part is how life sometimes throws everything at you all at once. So yes, I agree with

Mss Traumer when I tell you how I'm doing. I too want a word that means okay and not okay at the same time, a word that means devastated and joyful. But also maybe I don't need one, because I suspect you know exactly what I mean. The heart understands swirl. So not sure there's a message here, except perhaps to update you, to remind us all that seasons come and seasons go. Pleasure and pain, joy and grief. They come

and they go. But our hearts are big enough, and with a little help from our friends, they're big enough to hold it all. The heart understands swirl. Wounds are real, but a heart can heal and a heart can find its way back to building itself a beautiful life. And so I'll leave you with that today. Get out there, enjoy this beautiful spring day or whatever the weather is offering you today. Make this the most important day, because it's the day that's in your hand. And we'll see

you right back here next weekend. This has been Home with Dean Sharp, the House Whisper. Tune into the live broadcast on KFI AM six forty every Saturday morning from six to eight Pacific time and every Sunday morning from nine to noon Pacific time, or anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio app