SideQuest 18: Deck Stain vs. Paint, Removing Cabinets, & Please Don't Touch That Wire!
Welcome back to another Sidequest, besties! This is our weekly, unfiltered mystery grab bag episode where we answer your burning DIY questions.
Don't forget, you can always submit your listener questions directly through the form on our website, howtohandymaam.com, or email us at hthm@myhandymaam.com!
Let's dive into this week's listener Q&A!
Question 1: Rewiring a House
Marguerite asks: "I need to rewire my house. I'm looking for some tips."
The Verdict: Call an electrician! We are licensed builders, not electricians. In fact, our builder's license explicitly prohibits us from playing with the electricity inside the walls.
Make Friends with Your Inspector: If you are legally allowed to do this as a homeowner in your state, it is your responsibility to pull the permits. Make friends with your local electrical inspector—they will respect you if you do it by the book!
Invest in Voltage Testers: If you are touching wires, you need a reliable voltage tester to confirm the power is actually off.
The Golden Rule: Under no circumstances should you attempt to adjust, repair, or move where the main electricity line comes into your house from the outside. That is not a DIY project; that is how you get electrocuted.
Question 2: Deck Stain vs. Deck Paint
Cindy asks: "We put a new treated deck in last year. I love the look of a stained deck, but not the maintenance... What deck stain or paint would you recommend? And deck prep?"
Never Use Paint: You should never put exterior paint on a wooden deck! Wood needs to breathe. Paint forms a hard seal over the wood; when moisture inevitably gets trapped underneath, the paint will bubble and peel off in giant, ugly chips.
Solid Stain is NOT Paint: If you see a deck that looks painted but isn't chipping, it is likely a "Solid Stain." It looks and smells like paint, but it is formulated to soak into the wood and fade over time rather than chip.
Our Best Recommendation: To eliminate the hassle of peeling and chipping, use a Timber Oil (like Cabot Australian Timber Oil). It penetrates deep into the wood and simply fades away over time. You can easily reapply it every few years without having to scrape or sand!
Deck Prep is Crucial: Pressure wash your deck (do not power wash, which uses heat and will tear up the wood). Then, you must let the wood dry completely for two full, sunny days before staining. If it rains, the clock starts over! If you stain wet wood, it will fail in six months.
Question 3: How to Remove Kitchen Cabinets
Lola asks: "How do I remove kitchen cabinets?"
Get a Buddy: If you are removing upper cabinets, you absolutely need a second person (or a pair of cabinet jacks) to hold the weight while you unscrew them!
Prep First: Do not skip steps. Remove the cabinet doors and take out all the interior shelves to reduce the weight.
Find the Screws: Look at the very back panel of the cabinet. You should see a line of screws anchored vertically into the wall studs.
Check the Face Frames: Most well-installed cabinets are also screwed to each other through the front "face frames." Open the doors and look at the inner edge where the cabinets meet; remove those screws too!
Base Cabinet Tips: If you removed all the screws from a bottom cabinet and it still won't slide out, check the toe-kick (the recessed area at the bottom). Is there a continuous baseboard nailing it to the other cabinets? Also, check your flooring! If new flooring (like hardwood or thick vinyl) was installed after the cabinets, the cabinet might be physically trapped behind the lip of the new floor.
If you want more DIY advice or want to join our Handyma'am community, head over to howtohandymaam.com and sign up for our newsletter. We'll see you on Friday for the main episode!
Episode Transcript:
Welcome to the side quest. Normally I don't sing this by myself. Welcome to the side quest for our podcast How to Handyman. We are licensed builders and we are here to give you tips. And normally on our main episode, we're a little more rained in. That's kind of a lie, but you know. We don't even pretend to be reined in. Yeah, but these are where we answer your questions or telephone stories. But today we are answering your questions. Yeah, let's do it. Let's ready do it. Let's hear your question, OK. This one is from Marguerite and all of these questions, by the way, are from our inbox, HTHM at my how to at HTHM at my handyman.com. And so, yes, you should e-mail us because, well, I already sent these people emails, but then we'll ask. Everybody else can learn from their questions, yes. Wait, so her name is Margarit? Yes, which is beautiful. This reminds me of the the video that Allison keeps referring to. Allison is is our project manager and our construction. Yes. And she's also our BFF. And she showed me this video of this little girl saying Margarita. So what do you want for your birthday? Margarita. She's like a 2 year old. She doesn't. Probably just loves the way the word sounds, yeah. But she whispers it, so now I'm thinking Marguerite. I like it. What does Marguerite when I know? I need to rewire my house, looking for some tips. Oh wow. Call an electrician. That is my first. Tip. My second tip. Super. Elbow, I did. Send her some tips, I did. Say rewiring. Is not our specialty. We are not electricians. We are actually not allowed to play with electricity in the wall according to our builders licenses in the state of Michigan. But my 2 tips are make friends with your electrical inspector because if you are rewiring your house, even if you are not an electrician, as the homeowner it is your responsibility to pull permits. If you didn't know that, now you know that. So make friends with your electrical inspector. We had a client who rewired his entire house and he said he could tell that a homeowner was doing it because it was done so by the book. Yeah. Compared to how electricians do it. So introduce yourself, talk to them, and I think they'll work with you as you go about this process. And #2 please, for the love of God, have voltage testers. All the things you. Need. That's important. Just to be safe. So I'm sorry, those are all the tips we have. We can help you repair the drywall after you open it up. I can give you one more Don't. Do not under any circumstances, attempt to adjust, repair, fix, move where the electricity comes into your house. Yeah. Oh, that's. It because that's AI mean you can get a nasty shock from an outlet but you will die if you try and mess with the electricity where it comes in your house. And that this is a random aside, but that also goes for if you're working on ladders outside, you really need to be careful near electrical. You need to always ask yourself what's above me because you're walking around, you're not touching anything. But then as soon as you start tipping a ladder into position, you're putting something really tall, usually that conducts electricity up against it. And we, Emily and I, were forced to watch a very nasty recreation of a similar situation in our OSHA 10 training. So I would just say, and unless you want your fingers to look like the pages of a burned up book, yeah, don't do it. Not ideal, yeah. Yeah. So be careful. OK. So Marguerite, that's the answer to our question. Thanks, sort of helpful sending on the right path. OK. This is a long question from Cindy. Hello, Cindy. We put a new treated deck in last year. I love the look of a stained deck, but not the maintenance. We're older and want to eliminate future deck maintenance. What deck stain or paint would you recommend? And deck prep? No paint. That's my initial, yeah. Never painting, never paint. If you see old decks where the paint is chipping like just giant chips, that's actual paint. Yeah, no paint. Let's. Paint Real quick about the difference between paint and stain for the exterior decks and I want to preface this because a while ago I did not know the difference. I thought that the solid color on most decks was paint because it looks. Like you think of stain as transparent. Yes. But deck paint or deck stain, sorry, comes in a variety of different things. It is confusing. It looks just like paint. It applies, Yes, it smells kind of like paint, but it is a stain and there is a difference. And so if you're going somewhere and you get exterior paint, don't put it on your deck. It is different than a deck stain or a deck sealer. So a deck stain will kind of fade it kind of like soaks in and then it will fade. It doesn't form like this solid surface that can peel or chip off of your paint. It soaks in to your deck and then it'll fade over time and you can replenish it or you can let it fade more naturally if you don't want to upkeep it. But it is much different than a paint. So no to paint, no including no. Exterior paint. Don't use exterior paint. So the main difference is the breathability. So with the stain, if you have a wood deck, it needs to breathe. It needs, that is how wood has always functioned for it to not rot very quickly. It needs to not be in a moist environment. So it needs to have, obviously it's going to go wet, but it needs to be able to breathe. And yeah, so when you do paint and God forbid any water gets trapped in the paint, it's stuck there, it stops there and it'll start making the paint peel or it'll rot your wood or it'll do both, which is usually what we see at clients houses. But my best recommendation to eliminate future deck maintenance is to not go with a solid stain or even a semi solid stain. My recommendation is. My best. Recommendation is to use like a timber oil product and stuff. They also make tongue oil for outside that really just fades out. It's very much like oiling a butcher block where like you don't notice the color, kind of like it's less vibrant than it was, but and they make some with tints in them. They do, yeah. They make some that's tinted, so your wood will look like cedar after it's been oiled, but it's an oil. So again, it's going to dry clean up, it's going to dry out. It's not going to chip off. It is messy to clean up, like your brush or if you spill it all over the place or something, but it also so isn't as finicky as oh it's. Easy to apply, it's. Super easy to apply if it drips on somewhere you don't have like this colored drip like on your you know your driveway or something like that or on your house and it doesn't dry the same way as like a semi solid stain. Would dry. It doesn't really dry, it just soaks in. Yeah, it does. So if you get it on like your siding or something, you can just wipe it. Up 1 tip, I will say that's really important with timber oil, but it's the same with stain also is you cannot use it in full sun, no. Like. Wood gets very hot in full sun and it will like dry before it can like level out. If you put your paintbrush down with like a lot of oil and then you like go, you have you know you have less oil as you drag your brush. Well by the time you get to the end of your stroke, that like giant chunk of oil that you wanted to spread out will already be dry. It it asked me how I know this is like, you'll be like, that's not necessary. It actually is very necessary. I know for your garden fence you had to do 2 coats correct? So a good way to know if you've done enough coats of an oil is the water doesn't need to like bead up like a waterproof surface, but it should not soak in immediately if you dump a little bit of water. On it if. Your deck is acting like a sponge and it's just like with the water, you need to add more oil so that it it takes some time. That means it's more protected. It's the same with butcher blocks. So if you've maintained a butcher block, you can absolutely use this oil outside and then or you can do a light stain, which is like transparent stain will fade out a little easier than. So a transparent stain, a semi transparent stain, and a solid stain are the three main types and it's just a matter of how much pigment they have. How much grain of the wood that you can see really. Yeah, and some recommendation. Oh for deck prep, just make sure you have enough time between power washing and staining for the wood to have fully dry. Can I tell them this is what you need If you're going to you always want to pressure wash, not power wash because that will eat literally tear up your wood. You want a pressure wash, Yes. They make you really want a chemical wash, like a light chemical diluted chemical wash and just go look for deck products that parts kind of a no brainer, but you want to pressure wash your deck because you want mold to die, you want, you know, any type of mildew, those kinds of things. And then it needs to be dry. It needs to dry for two full days. It rains the sunny days, Yeah, it rains. The clock starts over again. It's like overcast and damp. The clock starts over. You need 2 full dry days and then you stain and it needs to be dry 24 hours after you finish. And we have tried to fight Mother Nature on this and it doesn't work. And what will happen is it will be a colossal amount of work. And then within like 6 months your stain will fail. Because if there's moisture in your wood and then you try to like put stain in and absorb it, or you try and put like a solid stain which has more pigment, it is going to just peel off. You're going to be really unsatisfied with the results and you will have put in a lot of work to get that. So don't cheat on the dry times. And then my last thing is that we really like Super Deck by Sherwin-Williams and we also like Cabot Stains. So we haven't had much luck with other brands. Doesn't mean there isn't another brand that works really well. What's the brand of the Australian timber that's? Cabot, Yeah. That's Cabot. So those are my recommendations, yeah. But. Deck is decks are hard to maintain, but if you get it right, you only have to do it every three to five years and just research and yeah. Depending on the type of I know one guy who he has outdoor wooden sculptures and the person that lived in the house before him had the guy like the guy chainsaw sculpted these, these trees that were on his property into these sculptures. And so once a year he puts one light coat of Australian timber oil on it. And he like the new guy, the guy that moved in after was like, I've had it for 20 years or whatever. They look fantastic still. So he every year he does one coat. But if you wanted to do like every two years you do 2 goats or you know, if you maybe not 5 coats for five years or something, but you know what I mean, You can, you can do it a little bit less, but a little bit more often. And then you'll also be able to look up like what does it look like when my wood really needs, if maybe it was a really rough winner or something like that. So I have a personal opinion, not a professional opinion. You do not want to from my opinion. You do not want to put a product like Thompsons water seal on a horizontal surface that people walk on because it's incredibly slippery. It will like turn it into like whoop. You'll be like you know in a three stooges episode. It's great for. Exterior furniture. Yes, it's great for furniture. It's great for outsides of flower boxes like other vertical surfaces that you don't. I mean that stuff like you will pour water in the water will just sit in a puddle on it. So just don't use that on your horizontal surfaces, because it does its job really well and it's incredibly slippery when it's wet. OK. Our last question are we ready? We're ready. How to remove kitchen cabinets? Lola asked us this. Oh, OK, Lola girl, you're going to need another person. Or something to hold the cabinet up. This is upper cabinets, right? Or just cabinets? Cabinets? If it's upper cabinets, you definitely need another person. The first thing I would do is take off your doors and take out your. Shelves don't short circuit the process. Yes. Taking off the doors, especially if they're like old cabinets, they're probably like solid wood doors, which means they got a little bit of weight to them. And then you want to take out your shelves that are in your cabinets. And then you're going to look at the very back panel of your cabinet. And what you're looking for is usually a big panel head screw. Is that what they're called? Pan head? Pan head. I knew it was wrong. You added a couple extra letters or. Cabinet screws, and those will be screwed in, usually in like lines, vertical lines, which tells you that it's in a stud. If you're wiggling in and it is about to come out, you probably don't need to look for that. You'll want to take those out and make sure that when you're taking your last one out that somebody is holding it as you're doing that if it's an upper cabinet. Now, if it still doesn't budget, you need to look at the edges, the face frame of your cabinets. Not everybody screws in their face frames to each other, but basically they're running parallel or perpendicular to your face frame into the face frame next. To it, it screws your cabinets to each other, not just the wall, and most well installed cabinets will be attached at the face frames because that's a way over time that you don't have your cabinets not flushed together in the front. So you'll want to check for the face frames on both sides and then in the back and then it should really just pop down. Sometimes if it's been painted a couple times around, you need to like kind of shimmy it up and down or kind of side to side to get it to pop right off, but that should really do it. I think most people who have put cabinets on or taking them off who haven't done it before are kind of astonished at how little support there actually is for like, you put it through this thin back panel and then you put all of your grandmother's China. I know it's so heavy and it's so, yeah, physics I guess. But it's amazing how you'd think there were some like French cleat system behind it or something, but it's normally just put it up and screw it into a stud. It's kind of amazing. This is my best tip for projects like this is the best way to learn how to do it is to learn how it goes up. Yeah, cuz then it's easy to reverse engineer how to. Take it out. This might seem self-explanatory, but start at the end run, Yeah, the end cabinet out. Cuz then it's like all the others are still like solidly fixed. So you don't run the risk of like, ripping an entire panel of cabinets out of the wall at the same time? Yeah. Yeah, I definitely recommend doing this with a friend. Yes. Or you can get cabinet jacks which will hold the cabinet up in place where it's supposed to be. Then you can undo the screws and then you can lift it off the cabinet jacks. But I still recommend having a friend help. But me too, it's like, especially if you're putting cabinets up, which is not what you asked, but still, because after a little while you get kind of tired, so it's nice to be able to switch. And when you're taking them down, you can be like whatever you're taking the screws out, you don't need like precision. But when you're putting cabinets up, you do need precision. They need, there is one very specific place where you want that cabinet. So you don't want to be like, oh, I got a little tired and put the screw in and now it's half an inch down from the ceiling, so. And then I have one more tip about base cabinets. So base cabinets are pretty easy to remove. You don't need anybody to hold them. So make sure that what? I just heard. Winnie, Winnie, Winnie the Golden is shaking outside the studio. She smells us. You want to remove the screws and if it doesn't pull right out, then check the toe kick. So the toe kick, first of all, sometimes there's a baseboard that runs across all of your base cabinets and that might be holding it to the other cabinets. But then there's also the possibility that new flooring was installed after the cabinets were installed. So if you're trying to pull it directly and slide it out, you're not going to be able to if there was like say an inch and a half of hardwood flooring installed. I mean, even top of even half an inch can make it hard. Yeah, to get it. Out that even like thick linoleum can make it hard. Yeah, yeah. So if you're having trouble and you're like, Oh my gosh, I got all these screws out, check those couple of places. Check your baseboard. Where it's binding if you're pulling on it and the right side's coming away from the wall but the left side isn't, your trouble is on the left side. That's where you can go. Investigate. Yep, you can kind of pick them up and you have to put. On your trench coat and get your magnifying glass out and like Inspector Gadget yourself. Also, look in your old sink cabinet for mold. Yeah, or your new sink cabinet. Look in your sink cabinet for mold, because we always find mold and like water damage in a sink cabinet. So if you're in your kitchen, just take a little peek under there just to make sure everything's going good. And as always, you got this. You got this. Probably got this. It's your own house, if it messes up or something it can always be fixed. You got more questions? E-mail us at HGHM at my handyman.com. And all of our other links are in the bio. Remember to like, review and subscribe. And thanks for joining us. We'll see you Friday. Bye.
