Sidequest 16: Concrete Walls, Keypad Codes, & The Stud Finder Mystery
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.
We kept this one a little shorter than usual because Arly's dog Winnie is in the studio today, and let's just say she had a very questionable snack before recording, so we are on high alert!
Let's dive into this week's listener Q&A!
Question 1: Restoring Cracked Exterior Doors
Tickety Tackety (from TikTok) asks: "Our house was renovated... but they did just repaint the original exterior doors though, no removal. So now it's cracked and lifting everywhere. What do we do?"
If the paint on your beautiful, original solid wood doors is bubbling, cracking, and peeling off, you have two options.
The "Good Enough" Fix: You can scrape off the loose, flaking chunks, spot-prime the bare areas with a shellac-based primer, and repaint the door.
The "Do It Right" Fix: If you want these original doors to look stunning and last, you need to strip them. Use a heat gun and a scraper to peel off all the layers of old paint, and use dental tools to pick the paint out of the decorative grooves. Sand it smooth, and then apply a penetrating sealer.
Pro-Tip: Unlike polyurethane (which just sits on top of the wood), a penetrating sealer soaks almost an inch deep into the door, completely hardening and sealing the actual wood fibers. It is a miracle product for old exterior doors that have taken a beating from the weather!
Question 2: Finding "Ghost" Wall Studs
A Listener asks: "I'm trying to find a stud to put my handrail in on the stairwell... But my stud finder isn't finding anything for long stretches of wall. Could there actually be long stretches of wall with no studs? And if the stud finder isn't finding anything, how can I check manually?"
First of all, yes! Your stair handrail absolutely must be anchored into a wall stud. However, sometimes houses are built weird, and sometimes stud finders just straight-up lie to you. Here is how to manually find a stud when your scanner fails:
The Magnet Trick: Buy a "rare earth magnet" (an incredibly strong magnet) and run it along the wall. It will stick to the hidden drywall screws or nails, which are driven directly into the wooden studs.
The Measuring Trick: Find the nearest electrical outlet or light switch. These boxes are almost always nailed directly to the side of a stud. From that point, measure out either 16 inches or 24 inches (the standard spacing for wall framing) to locate the next stud.
The Drill Trick: If you still can't find it, take your drill with a tiny drill bit and drill a horizontal line of pilot holes every half inch until you hit wood. You will know you hit a stud because the drill will face resistance, and it will pull out brown wood dust instead of white drywall dust! (Don't worry, you can easily patch the tiny holes with spackle later!)
Question 3: Hanging Things on Concrete Walls
Steph asks: (How do I hang things on my concrete walls?)
Standard drywall anchors will not work on concrete or cinderblock walls. If you need to hang something heavy (like a TV) on concrete, you need Wall Plugs.
Wall plugs are solid, hard plastic cylinders with a tiny hole in the center. You use a masonry bit to drill a hole into the concrete, use a hammer to pound the plastic wall plug perfectly flush into the hole, and then drive your screw directly into the center of the plug. The plastic expands slightly, gripping the concrete and creating an incredibly strong, secure anchor for heavy items!
If you have questions of your own, email us at hthm@myhandymaam.com, or go submit a form on our website! Don't forget to follow us on Instagram (@howtohandymaam) to help us hit our goal of 1,000 followers! We'll see you on Friday!
Episode Transcript:
Hello friends, welcome to the side quest where we go a little off the rails. Arlie, would you like to sing your song in the last sad manner? Welcome to the side. I mean I'd like it to be known that if you hear dog barking. I made the really not right idea to bring my dog today and she also ate Rd. kill so I'm really scared she's vomiting and sweet. We better make this fast then. OK, we're going to do I. Just had to let the listeners know that's the point. No, from downstairs you're. She's actually a silent, silent puker, but sometimes she whines as she's puking. Ohh I understand. I cry while I'm puking. Like seriously, seriously, I'm like. I just disassociate. Oh, can we start this over? Because that seems crazy. No, I think that's. Fine. All right, here we go. So this question came from tickety tackety. Oh. We're answering listener questions, yeah. We're listening to answer your questions. All right. From Tiktok our house was renovated. Not like DIY like the pig stripped. The house down to the studs has been abandoned for years. They but they did just repaint the original exterior doors though, no removal. So now it's cracked and lifting everywhere. What do we do? What is cracked and lifted everywhere? The exterior door. The paint on the exterior doors. I would hit it with a heat gun and scrape it to the bare wood and then repaint. It so you have a couple options depending on what kind of finish you want. So you can just scrape off the loose chunks, prime the door, and paint it again if you're like it. With shellac because it's probably a mix of oil. Yes, yes, OK, that's option number one. Option #2 would be like Emily said to put a heat gun on it and like really strip off as much paint as you can then prime it with shellac based primer and then paint it. It's satisfying. It like bubbles and then you can scrape you scrape it. If you have the. Patience. And you want, if the rest of your house is beautiful, which it sounds like is what you're saying, they probably ran out of like juju for doing it. If I can tell you from experience, by the end they were like, just paint them doors. So what you could do, especially if they're beautiful doors, Emily and I did this at a really old house that we renovated it. If it they're like solid oak, then it's worth putting the effort in. And what you'll do is we use the heat gun, scrape as much paint as you can scrape off, and then you'll sand it until it's back down deep. Grooves then you can use like dental tools to get the paint out. So if you're if you want to go to that trouble and then what I recommend, the product that we use is unbelievable. It's a penetrating sealer. So most finished products like polys or shellacs, they form a hard coating on the surface of your wood, which is awesome for like weatherproofing. What the penetrating sealer does is you, you literally will lay the door on saw horses and then you pour it on and you kind of like squeegee or we use a paintbrush to move it all around. Then you go away for like 20 minutes and it literally penetrates almost an inch into the wood. So what it does is that whole top inch of the door is hardened and sealed and then it still gives you a nice sealed finish also. So it's pretty phenomenal those doors turned out. Especially if they're like chipping at the bottom like sometimes older doors. Do yeah. So it's kind of like the wood hardener you talked about in the last side quest that can provide you with some like structural help for a door that's really seen a lot of rain and sunshine. But yeah, that's pretty fantastic. OK. The next question from the field, we didn't have a specific person for this. I think it came it was a in person question someone asked. I'm trying to find a stud to put my handrail in on the stairwell. Quick side note, yes your handrail should always go in a stud. But my stud Finder isn't finding anything for long stretches of wall. Could there actually be long stretches of wall with no studs? And if the stud Finder isn't finding anything, how can I check manually? Girl or boy, whoever asked us, I have been through something similarly recently. Do you remember when I called you? You're. Like it's not here. It's not. Here I know. Oh my God, I don't. Some people do like random things in houses. Sometimes there's like random piece of wood and also sometimes you just can't find them for some reason. I have a deep wall scanner that I use and we've talked about it before on the podcast as my stud Finder and I have only had once where I could not find the stud. And I was at this house and I don't know what was wrong with it, but like 10 inches up from where I was finding a stud, there was a stud. So I'm like, OK, then it must be down here. 2 Nope, there wasn't a stud in like like for 30 something inches or whatever. But one of the ways to check manually is I think you can get like some kind of raw earth magnet or something. Rare earth magnet. Rare earth magnet to find like it's the. Cooked version of the raw one, yeah. But it's very slightly cooked. Yeah, but it will find either the nails or the screws that are holding your plaster or whatever into your studs, like the nails through the screws. Did I say that? It's a super powerful magnet. Yes. But the other way if you don't want to go by that is you just take a drill bit and you a. Tiny 1. A tiny drill bit and. You just. Yep. Yeah. And you just keep drilling holes into your wall until you find it and you'll be able to tell because you'll go through what the drywall is and then it'll go like it'll kind of stop and in where the stud is, you'll keep drilling, it'll keep going and and you'll still feel resistance at the end of your drill. Bit and if you're just drilling into plaster or drywall, you're going to get only white dust coming out of the hole. And when you get brown dust coming out of the hole, that's another confirmation that you're have hit wood. Yeah. If you have like plaster and lath, you're going to have to drill a little bit farther in because obviously the lath is going to be brown. Yes. And then my other tip is find your nearest light switch or outlet and if you can figure out which side the stud is from that wall and then try to measure. If it's an older house, it might be that you have studs every 24 inches. Like if you have old oak studs it they're probably at 24 inches, but they also might be 16 inches on center. So you'd want to take your tape measure from the nearest and then pull it. And then you'll get narrow down the idea of where their stud probably is. And then you'll be able to do your drill thing and and you're probably going to want to go like every half inch probably until you find it. But yeah, good luck. Some people do the knocking method, but I, I don't know if that actually how much that actually works because I feel like sometimes I'm like, Oh yeah, I hear it. But then I'm like, no, I don't, what am I talking about? So I don't know, Yeah. OK, last question, this one's from Steph. She asked the question on TikTok. She mentioned that she's trying to figure out how to hang things on her concrete walls. I just discovered that the solution for that when we were working at the VFW, so we did a month long project at the VFW National Home for Eaton Rapids. If you don't know what that is, just stop right now, pause this and go Google it because it's pretty amazing. Yeah, probably not if you're driving. So go look at what that is. It's pretty amazing. But anyway, we spent several months there and we renovated a building that has all concrete walls. So interior walls are concrete, exterior walls are concrete. And part of the project was hanging things, including TV's. So you have to do it properly. And I hadn't used these before. I had seen them, but I didn't know what they were for. They're called wall plugs. Pretty simple, but it's basically a think about most plastic anchors are pretty hollow in the middle and then they're round and you make a hole and you pound them in and then they kind of spread out as you put the screw in. Well, these are very hard plastic. They have just a the tiniest hole in the middle. And basically what you do is you drill a hole that is the same size as the wall plug and then you pound it in with a hammer. And then what you have is basically the entire hole that you drilled in the concrete is now filled with this plastic. And then the nail just goes into that. You start it in the tiny little hole in the middle of it and then it just goes in. And it's honestly, it's better than pretty much every other anchor situation like as you have to use the right size, like if the holes too big for it, that doesn't work, but that's the same with any anchor. But it's pretty fantastic. And that's a great way to hang things in concrete walls. OK, that's three questions, ladies. Do you have anything to add? Nope. No. All right. You should follow us at How to handy them, specifically on Instagram. We're trying to hit 1000. Yes, please go to Instagram and follow us. And also everything you do like subscribe, follow, comment, rate, review all of those things. Tell whatever platform you're on, hey, we should show this to other people. And that's how people we don't know find this. So if you want to help us, please do that.
