SideQuest 13: Q&A | Prying Off Paneling, Swollen Shed Doors, & Tub Caulk Talk
Welcome back to another Sidequest, besties! This is our weekly, unfiltered mystery grab bag episode where we let ourselves off the leash a little bit and answer your burning DIY questions.
By the way, you can now submit all your listener questions directly through the form on our brand new website, howtohandymaam.com! You can also read some beautiful bios written by Arly and get early access to our events.
Let's dive into this week's listener Q&A!
Question 1: The Truth About Removing Wood Paneling
Amanda C. asks: "I want to take down the paneling in my living room. How much does it suck to take down paneling, and what do I need to do afterward to have fresh, clean walls?"
We are going to be honest with you: depending on the age of your home, you should be very afraid of what is hiding behind that paneling! Here is what you need to know:
In the 1950s through the 1980s, people often threw wood paneling up specifically to hide failing plaster walls.
Taking the actual paneling down is usually the easy part, as it is typically just held up with small nails.
However, if you see that it is installed with long screws, beware! That means the paneling might be acting as a structural hold for whatever is behind it.
If you have a 1950s home, you might uncover "plaster board"—a rough, concretified plaster product.
Often, paneling was glued directly to these textured walls. Trying to sand off rock-hard, decades-old paneling glue means you also have to sand off the wall's texture, which is a massive chore.
Our Pro-Tip: Carefully pry back just one piece of paneling first to peek at what is behind it. If it's a nightmare, you can always just nail it back up and paint over the paneling instead!
Question 2: Fixing a Swollen Shed Door
Julie C. asks: "My shed door swelled so much I had to open it with a crowbar. Now it won't shut. How do I get it to shut again?"
We feel your pain! Unsealed wood acts exactly like a sponge, wicking up moisture from the rain and expanding until it gets stuck. Here is how to fix it for good:
If it is incredibly swollen and completely stuck, do not try to just sand it down while it is hanging. You will make yourself crazy!
Instead, take the door off its hinges and use a saw or a wood planer to trim the edge down.
To keep this from happening again, wait until the heat of the summer fully evaporates the trapped water and shrinks the wood back down.
Once it is dry, apply a high-quality primer and exterior paint to completely seal the door.
Make sure you paint the bottom edge (the end grain) of the door! The bottom is notoriously hard to reach, but if you leave it unpainted, it will just keep sucking up water from the ground.
Question 3: Tub Caulk Talk
Maureen S. asks: "I recently had a plumber replace my tub faucet. There's no caulk around where it meets the tile wall. Should there be caulk?"
Yes! It is actually building code to have that area sealed. Behind that faucet fixture is a large hole cut into your tile and drywall for the plumbing pipe to sit in, and you absolutely must waterproof it.
Do not use standard caulk. Because a shower is a constantly wet environment, you need to use 100% silicone.
You can buy 100% silicone in clear, white, black, or brown to best match your hardware and tile.
Run one nice, clean bead around the outside of the metal fixture plate.
Do not try to squish the silicone underneath the back of the metal fixture plate, because the thin metal doesn't provide enough surface area for the silicone to actually grab onto and create a seal.
If you have questions of your own, email us at hthm@myhandymaam.com, or go submit a form on the website! Join our cult—we are super nice, and we have pizza and Girl Scout cookies!
Episode Transcript:
Welcome to a. Side. Quiz. Hey folks, we're back for our once a week short episode where we allow ourselves to go a little bit off track more so than we do on our Friday episodes and where we can bring you like literally whatever we want doesn't have to be within the same format. So it's. A grab bag, Choose your own adventure. It's a mystery bag. Yeah, so. We choose your adventure. Yes, we're to choose our self adventure. I don't. Know what to choose our adventure, but they have to. Listen, our adventure for you. OK, yes, So we're going to do that right now and we super love answering listener questions. So that's what we're going to do today. We're going to take 3 listener questions and I'm going to. And you can now submit listener questions via a form on our new website. Handyman. Literally, if you want to know anything about any anything anywhere, it's just go to How to Handyman. Yeah, there's links to our socials, there's links to how to get in contact with us, there'll be updates about events, there's lots of fun stuff. Also you can read some beautiful Bibles about us if you want to be besties. Arlie wrote them. All right, here we go. So this is from Amanda C Amanda C, she says. I want to take down the paneling in my living room. I really don't want to just paint it. How much does it suck to take down paneling, and what do I need to do afterward to have fresh, clean walls? I got this. All right. You got this Emmy. OK. I will say sometimes, depending on the age of your home, be afraid of what's behind the paneling. I agree with that. In lovely, lovely 1970s, probably fifties, 60s and 80s. All those the mid century when plaster started failing. They just said. Oh, let's put panelling up. So depending on the age of your home, I'm just saying maybe peel back the first piece with some caution. Having gotten that out of the way, yeah, panelling is usually quite easy to remove. It's usually installed with just nails. If it's installed with long screws, that's when you should be worried, because that means the panelling is now structural and. They were trying to wall it in. Yeah, so. Relatively easy drywalling after. That's how you get. That's another story, but also I know you don't want to paint it, but painted panelling is very cute. I just have to put that on there. I have one little thing to add. So at Jana's house that we're here right now, who's like my quasi sister-in-law? Basically, you guys are basically married. Yeah. Anyway, she we are working in a house and it's from the 1950s and they it was the drywall in the on the wall. Is that weird stuff that is like not quite drywall, but it's also like kind of like cement board, but it's not. It's like plaster board. It's. Like hard plaster. It's like, yeah, it's a plaster product, but it was when they first invented it in sheets. Yes. Concretified plaster. Yeah, it's rough to work with. It's not great. It has like some sediment in it and it's wongified, so that's what it has. Her walls are structurally fine, but they do have a texture to them. And then they were glued on as well. The panels were glued on to those walls. So if we took off the paneling, then there was this glue that was stuck to the walls. And if we sanded the glue down, we sanded the texture down, which means you'd have to sand the entire wall down, which we did in one room. But then the other room, we were like, we just need to put new paneling back up. Which like leaving the old paneling wasn't really an option because Yikes, it was in rough shape, but we put new paneling up in there because it was just a modge podge of different textures and stuff. And with the Festool, which is like this giant pancake Sander on the wall, it made it a little bit easier, but it's still quite a feat. If maybe it's just your bathroom, that might be OK. Or if you find a different solution to, you know, maybe your walls were flat before, that's something to think about because that that panel glue was hard to get off and I couldn't just scrape it off, especially with it already having a texture. So maybe, yeah, take a peek back there first and see what your walls looking like and what the textures looking like, and then debate whether you're willing to take on that. Project. You remove the first panel carefully and you're scared of what's behind there. If you carefully remove the panel, it can always go back. Up, yes, Yeah. You can go oh Nope. Give it a Midwest ope, yeah. Open a? Nope. Yep. All right. So Julie C said my shed door swelled so much I had to open it with a crowbar. Now it won't shut. How do I get it to shut again? Oh sorry, I got distracted for a second because Winnie is being woken up from her nap I believe. And Winnie's the dog. Winnie is the dog and she's my BFF anyway. A shut door. I wonder if it's painted or not. I'm scared. By this question. Because I fear you, I replace the door. No. I feel like it depends on how swelled it is because Arley's point about paint if it's a little bit swelled, it might be just needs a little sanding down. But if it's a lot swelled and like maybe it was already hard to close and now it's swollen and it's like impossible to close, the answer is to just take it down and cut it and put it back up. And usually the way shed doors are built that you absolutely can trim an edge and and you can make your ask us how we know you can make yourself crazy trying to sand enough. Oh yeah, to get something to. Close, never going to be able to sand enough, just cut it. Or if you have access to a planer planet. Plus it looks better. It does. It does, yeah, because. I'm really bad at sanding and so sometimes I'll just sand weird divots sometimes. Little side note here, if it is not painted or the paint is failing, it means that more water is going to have access to the inside of your door. So say you get it to close now and then. I don't know where you're located exactly, but if you're in Michigan or in a cold weather environment like us right now, it's wet, it's cold, it grows. Wait until summer and let it dry out. Once it's drying out a little bit and it'll kind of of get smaller in the it'll evaporate out of the water will evaporate out of it. Then take a good primer and a good paint and paint it even on the ends like the end grains and it'll help a lot with reducing the amount of water that gets introduced into the wood because you'll have like a nice thick protective barrier and it'll help your door stay like less warpity and less it won't expand and contract as much and it will last a little bit longer too. I mean, we've talked about before how drywall is like a sponge. It will soak up water. So when you install drywall, you don't you install it like an inch off the floor, you have that. The same thing should you should keep the same thing in mind with your shed doors is that if sometimes sheds are in the location where water actually runs toward the shed, like our shed is like that. And a lot of times when people paint things, they don't paint the underneath. Yeah. So that's, that could be something if your shed door is beautifully painted, but the bottom, and this happens a lot when the door gets installed and then painted because the bottom is very difficult to reach. And this also, if you have rotting Hardy board trim on your house, it's usually because the Hardy board's been cut and they forgot to paint the bottom. So like a lot of times when people say the trim on my house is rotting at the bottom, I will lay down and look at the underside and can see that it's not painted. So I don't want to go too far down that road. But if you're taking it off to paint it, make sure you paint all the sides. And if you're wondering why does it keep swelling, it could be because the bottom is not painted. And so I mean, wood isn't going to soak up as much water is drywall, but wood is going to soak up water. So OK, last question. This is from Maureen S Hello, Maureen. Hello. Maureen. I recently had a plumber replace my tub faucet. There's no caulk around where it meets the tile wall. Should there be caulk? Yep. I think that's code, isn't it? It is. Good code because that's where a hole in your wall is to have the pipe come out. And so it's not super waterproof unless you waterproof it with caulk and so then it can get in there. Especially with how modern plumbing is. I'm gonna sound like an old person. These days. These modern plumbers, they drive all over the backside. You don't usually have an access panel and so you really want to make sure it's watertight. My house has an access panel. My husband and I did a little bit of DIY plumbing so I was able to. Check in after. A few days, but if you don't have an access panel, it's really important you maintain all those water seals. And I I want to tell you that you should not use caulk. We use the term caulking like in general meaning squeezing something out of a tube. But for that application you want silicone. Yeah, you want because that area is wet all the time. So 100% silicone. You can get it in white, you can get it in, get it clear so. Black. Brown. Yeah, you can get different colors. So depending on like what will be the least noticeable when you put it on, Most of the time people use clear because you're just, it will look. If you do the clear correctly, it won't even look cocked when you're done or silicone because it's, you know, you don't need giant beads of silicone. And actually sometimes that's worse because then you don't even know that there's like places for the water to get in. You want one nice clean bead all the way around. And you can get little squeeze tubes so you don't even need a caught gun. I have. To explain an inside joke that whenever we say clear, one of us goes clear. Like from like a medical show or something? That's from Bruce Almighty. Yeah, but I was gonna say it and then I realized I needed. To tell that because nobody knows. Because otherwise I'd just be weirdo being like clear. All right, well. Clear can I? Can I ask a question? Yes. What you guys might think so I don't you guys didn't take my shoulder class obviously I took a a Schluter tile class. Shoulder we. Love you. Yes. And we walked through how to use all these different products to make your shower completely waterproof. So they have these little collars that go around your different things, and they're specifically engineered so that if any water touches the collar, they drip directly away from getting close to your drywall. If you have one of those, do you also need to cock it? Yes. And what if? So, you know how you can like screw on the faucet of a bathtub? Bathtub. Yep. What if you cocked the pipe and then you put that thing on? Do you still need to cock the outside? You do believe the the. Hole. For the pipe is much bigger, at least in my case. My pipe is half inch. My hole is like. One inch, yeah, yeah. So it could be like 1/2 inch pipe and a bigger hole. So it's too big. Yeah. And also, I think it's because the faucet itself, if you think about the edge of the faucet that touches the tile, if you were to pull that off and turn it and look at it, it's very thin metal. It's not. There's no solid surface. So if you were to like, put caulk on and try to like squeeze that on to a bead of caulk, for example, there's not enough surface area to like squish the caulk and make a seam. So like a solid seam. So you want to put it on and then caulk the outside so that water just hits the outside and drains away. Yeah. I'm just asking questions. I like it. Waterproof, waterproof, waterproof cause the damage that can come from poorly done plumbing is not. The best? No, it's not. All right. Well, we kept it short this time, so. Go us. You're welcome. Or we're sorry, we're not sure. Goodbye from our side question. Should follow us at How to handyman on everything. Yeah. Two quick things. If you want to ask us a question to answer in a future episode, then e-mail us at HTHM at my handyman.com. Or go to the new website. Go to how to handyman.com and submit it and then join the community if you want to be the first one to find out about cool stuff. Join our cult. That's it. And so we'll. See you in five we'll. See you. This is a nice cult. We have pizza and Skittles and Girl Scouts. So, yeah, Love mom. All right. Bye
