Posts by : Suzanne Stephens

This Ken’s Korner article appeared in out July, 2007 newsletter.

Here's a quick tip.  It's about those handy little plastic wall anchors.  You know the little tubular plastic pieces that fit into a hole in your interior wall.  Once in the wall, you insert a screw which expands the tube and you have a holder for heavy pictures, etc.

If you follow the instructions that come with them, you will be using a drill to create the hole and then tap the anchor into the hole with a hammer.  Very messy and time consuming.  Sheet rock dust all over the place.

Do this instead.  Don't use a drill.  Use an awl.  An awl looks kind of like a screw driver except it has a shorter, rounder wooden handle...

This Ken’s Korner article appeared in the May, 2006 newsletter.

One problem that all homeowners will face one time or another is a leaky faucet or valve.  That dripping of drops whether fast or slow can be annoying beyond belief.  Not to mention a real water waster.  Don’t assume you’ve got to replace that valve.  There might be a simple fix.  Here’s the deal on Ken’s “crush trick.”               

Below I have an drawing of a water faucet, also known as a “hose bib” in the trade, and a stop.  This type can also be referred to as an ‘angle stop.”  These are two different types of valves.  The faucet is for attaching a hose for outside watering or to supply a clothes washer. ...

This quick little article first appeared in Ken’s Korner in August of 2002.

Our homes are hosts to busy lives.  Over time varied activities take their toll on our once bright, clean walls and ceilings.  Stains happen.  Mud, dirt, pencil, crayon and water stains.  Usually we reach a point where we cannot stand it anymore and slap on a fresh coat of paint.  Ah!  Just like new!  But then something strange and frustrating happens.  After a while some of those old stains re-appear!  Aggravated now, you slap more paint over the stains.  A little later they come back again!  What gives?

Some stains have components in their make up that chemically attack the paint topcoat.  This is unfondly kno...

This is our January, 2001 Ken’s Korner article.  The electrical outlets with the little test buttons.  I still get questions about them all the time.

Some time ago I received a call from someone who had purchased a relatively new house several months previously.  Everything had been going just fine until all of a sudden the electrical outlets in the bathrooms went dead.  All of them!  Some of the outlets still had little stickers on them saying “GFCI Protected Outlet.”  They had seen GFCI outlets with little test buttons on them before, but none of these outlets had the buttons.  Somewhat puzzled, they thought maybe there was a tripped circuit breaker.  When they checked though, all the ...

This article was originally in Ken’s Korner in August of 2000.  This issue is another one that we still see all the time.

 Do you have light carpets?  Are you noticing darkening strips under bedroom doors, along the baseboards or the edges of stairs?  This article is for you.

Actually, if you have darker carpets, you may have these strips too only they are harder to see.

As real estate agents, we get to see the inside of a lot of houses.  As the years have gone by we have seen interior decorating fashions come and go.  What seems to be an enduring trend is the movement to lighter colors.  Whites, off-whites, and beiges have all been popular for some time now.  As increasingly stain re...

This is a warning about the lure and dangers of borrowing against home equity.  We wrote this in May of 2005.  In re-reading this today, I could not help but wonder at how prophetic we were.  I am including this as kind of a statement about the fact that we have been around in the real estate business long enough to have seen most things happen and have given solid advice to our clients and friends.  This was written at the height of the real estate bubble.  The advice still holds today.  We took our own advice and are still in our home.  A number of our readers took that advice and are riding it out.  Sadly, way too many ignored it and are in great difficulty or have lost their homes....

This article appeared in our September, 2009 newsletter.  This brings us to the present.  Articles will be posted from now on as they are published in the newsletters.

This is going to be news to a number of people but that little chrome tower to the side of the kitchen faucet is not supposed to leak water into the sink.  Well, that's not totally right.  If everything is O.K. it is not supposed to do that.  If there is a problem it is supposed to do that.  Here is the story.

That little chrome tower mentioned above on your kitchen sink is the dishwasher "air gap."  If you have a dishwasher that drains into your sink drain system, an air gap is required to be there by code.  It is a s...

This article is from the January, 2008 Ken's Korner.

I have been wanting to do this subject for some time but did not have the space.  This is my chance.

A common home maintenance problem is keeping those beautiful stained wood cabinets looking good, especially in the bathroom.  Time and wear through use will damage the finish.  However the worst enemy of the finish is water.  Bathrooms are very humid environments, kitchens to a lesser degree.  Water and wood and wood finishes are just not compatible.  What do you do when the wood color is gone and bare wood is showing through?

It depends.  If the bare spots are relatively small areas and the greater parts of the cabinets are still O.K...

This is the follow-up article on termites from Kens’ Korner posted last week.  This article appeared in the September, 2008 newsletter.

As promised in our last newsletter, this is where we talk about closing termite routes to your house.  As you may remember, in the last newsletter, we discussed how subterranean termites can gain entry to the wooden structure of your home through soil that has been built up at the outside wall of the home until it touches either the wood or stucco siding.

We also discussed how subterranean termites cannot long be exposed to fresh air and how their access to your house's wood must be via a protected environment like soil.  Now we are going to disc...

This article first appeared in Ken’s Korner in April, 2008.  I will publish the follow-up article next week.

So what do termites have to do with dirty stucco you ask?  Actually a lot.  We are talking about subterranean termites here.  They nest and move about in the soil.  Actually, they cannot survive long in fresh air.  They eat, (well that is not the right word but we are not going into that right now) cellulose.  That can be wood, tree roots, etc.  They can actually survive out of the soil if they can get inside wood that is not in the soil.  The wood itself prevents their being exposed to fresh air.  Termites love wood components of house construction, like wall studs, beams, sub fl...

This article appeared in the January, 2008 Ken’s Korner.            

Do you have a sliding glass door that is hard to slide open or shut?  Ours was that way until recently.  Do you have a dog or cat?  Here's a little story about that.

Two glass workmen had just finished replacing a broken window at our house when it occurred to me to ask them about our frustrating hard to move sliding glass door.  I asked them if they could replace the rollers.  You see, I assumed the door's rollers were worn out and needed replacing.  The older of the two workmen said to me that they could of course replace rollers if needed but the door was not that old and he noticed we had a dog.  He suspected...

This article appeared in the July, 2004 issue of the newsletter.

Looking at our tired vinyl floor in the kitchen the other day I couldn’t help but think back to my childhood, (we’re talking early 50’s here), when we had linoleum kitchen floors that seemed to last forever and stand up to just about any abuse.  Why I wondered, did these floors get less durable instead of more so?  Well, I decided to find out.

Though many people call modern vinyl flooring “linoleum” it is really not the same thing.  Linoleum was invented in the early 1860’s by Sir Frederick Walton in England.  It was made from natural ingredients: Linseed oil, natural resins, powdered wood or cork, ground limestone,&nb...

This Ken’s Korner article appeared in the March, 2006 newsletter. 

One of our home sellers had a little dilemma recently.  There was a buyer who wanted to purchase the house but was turned off by little holes in the walls around some of the electrical outlets.  Now to many of us this seems like a minor concern but to this particular buyer, who was a fastidious person, this was a big thing.  Our seller wanted to fix the problem and make the buyer happy but was at a loss as to how to do it.  He was not that handy at doing drywall repair and dreaded the idea of filling, sanding and paint touch up.  I told him about “goof plates.”

Quite often, during construction or remodeling, the h...

This article appeared in the May, 2005 Ken’s Korner.  I still get questions about this all the time.

In pursuing that great American pastime of finding room for storing our stuff, it is common for people to create spaces in their attics and stick stuff up there.  It used to be pretty simple.  Cut a hole in the ceiling, sometimes including a ceiling joist, frame in the hole and start hauling stuff up into the attic.  That was usually no big deal.  In most of our newer homes though, doing this sort of thing can lead to real problems.

We get to see inside of a lot of homes and see all kinds of things people do to them.  One thing that is happening occasionally is a homeowner cutting a ...

This article appeared in the August, 2003 newsletter.  The info is still current.

We love our garage door openers!  Rain, shine, dark of night, that door will open right up for us without our having to get out of the car or pulling a back muscle.  For decades, the basic design of the garage door opener has been pretty much the same.  The boxy motor unit hangs suspended from the garage ceiling and the door is pulled up via a chain or screw riding along a long rail from the motor to the top of the door.  As wonderful as this gadget is, it can be sensitive as all get out to the slightest change.  Things like buckling of the rail or twisting and jamming of the door or simply a refusal o...

This article appeared in Ken’s Korner of our newsletter in May of 2003.  This is one of my favorites.

Though I am no longer working as a remodeling contractor, I still do work on my own house.  The list is endless!  Because of this, and because I am still very much interested in construction work, I continue to subscribe to some construction trade journals.  I recently read an article that answered a question I have had for years regarding fence posts. 

Now just about every homeowner has to deal with fences at one time or another.  Building them, painting them, repairing them, changing them, moving them.  It seems that something is always going on with fences.  I have built and repair...

This article appeared in Ken’s Korner on our February, 2002 newsletter.  The info is still very useful! 

Do you need help with pesky mosquitoes, rats, mice, skunks, ticks, yellow jackets?  How about Africanized “killer” bees?  Free help is just a phone call or mouse click away.  Here is the story:

Early in the 1900’s epidemics of malaria and encephalitis were common in Northern California.  It was so bad, certain areas of Contra Costa county were considered uninhabitable!  In 1926 citizens and businesses formed what was to become the Contra Costa Mosquito Abatement District.  In 1927 mosquito control went into operation.  Over the years control of other disease carrying and otherwise da...

This article was first run in Ken’s Korner in the November, 2002 newsletter.  I updated a few details.  The info is still current and useful.

Have you ever had the joy of installing a brand new up to date appliance ruined by the hassle of getting rid of the old one?  Getting that new washer and dryer hooked up is great.  But the dirty, grunting task of moving them to the curb only to be ignored by the trash collector is the pits.  Then loading them up and taking them to the dump is even worse.  And really, really worse is if the dump won’t take them or charges a fortune to let you drop them off!

During this process, did the thought ever come to you that “gee, it sure is a shame someon...

This article was originally in Ken’s Korner in July of 2000.  However it is still very relevant as I get questions about this issue almost daily.

I have written about water heaters in previous issues and thought I had pretty much covered that subject but not so.  It seems there is a lot of confusion about the California State requirement that water heaters be protected by seismic straps at the time a home is transferred to a new owner.

Well, here’s the scoop:  First some history.  This is some more “old news.”  Those who study these things found that after the Northridge earthquake of 1989 a lot of damage done to houses was attributed to water heaters tipping over and breaking ...

This little quickie was in the November, 2002 Ken’s Korner of our newsletter.  It is hot and dry right now but will change by November.  Reading this now might be helpful for those projects on coold foggy days.

The recent change in weather reminded me of something I knew but disremembered at the wrong time.  (My Grand Daddy used to say “disremembered.”  I always liked it).  I am trying to get another coat of paint on our patio cover before the rains get serious. It is being done a little at a time when an hour or two of opportunity presents itself.  Recently the hour presented itself just before dark on a nice day.  So paint was applied until too dark to see. It felt good to know that...