Preventing House Fires

A house fire can be one of the most devastating experiences a homeowner can go through, but there are a number of things that you can do to reduce the chance of this happening. A large number of house fires result from people simply not paying attention to what they are doing, neglecting an electrical device, or using one incorrectly.

Space heaters are used in the winter in many homes that cannot afford to pay the gas bill or the extra electricity cost that it takes to heat their home, but these are the cause of house fires if they are not used properly. The first thing you need to realize about these devices is that you should never use an extension cord with them unless they are heavy duty. The cord should be a gauge 14 at least or else it will melt. The smaller cords simply cannot handle the amount of electricity needed to power these devices and so, they cause fires.

Something else you should be wary of is putting the heater on a carpeted surface. You can do this with heaters that have a good amount of space between the heating element and the floor, but space heaters with short legs should be used only on non-carpeted floors.

Another electrical item that is often misused is the electric blanket. Imagine waking up and the bed being on fire with you in it. That could be mistaken for a nightmare, but it has happened before to people who do not turn their blankets off when they go to sleep. Electric blankets need to be used to warm up the bed only and turned off afterward and they should NEVER be left on their highest setting while you are sleeping under them. You should also not allow pets or children to walk on these, since it can damage the cords inside them and cause them to have shorts.

Any other electrical device that puts out heat should be used very carefully to ensure that a house fire does not break out. It is important to follow the directions of the device to the letter and use the utmost caution if you have to leave it unattended for any amount of time. Try not to leave these items alone for more than a few minutes at a time.

Grease fires are also common in the kitchen. The best way to prevent this is to heat oil or shortening slowly and never leave it unattended.

Floor and Ceiling Water Damage Help

Finding mold or water damage in your bathroom is something that no homeowner wants to deal with, but the fact is that this happens more often than most people realize and that preventing it is much easier than dealing with the discovery later on after you have neglected this very important room of your home. If you are moving into a brand new house, then you are in luck, since there will probably be neither water damage nor mold in the bathroom when you get into it. You are ahead of the game. If you are moving into an old house or have lived in the same home for a number of years, then you might have some issues on your hands, but hopefully the room is not so far gone that you will have to renovate completely to take care of them.

The first thing that you need to look at in your bathroom is the floor. This is what holds up everything else in the room and if it gives way, it does not matter the quality of the craftsmanship in the rest of the room; everything in the room will end up on the ground under the house. So, if the flooring in your bathroom is old or damaged, then you should replace it. Before you put the new flooring down, though, you should take a look at the joists underneath to see if they are water damaged or rotting. If they feel weak in any way, you should find the money to repair it with, since building a new bathroom on top of weak joists makes no sense at all, because weak and rotted joists are what you are trying to prevent in the first place. You should also look for mold under the old flooring, as well, and remove any materials contaminated with it.

After you replace the flooring (if necessary) and put down the new flooring, you need to make sure that the entire floor is water tight to prevent rotting the joists later on. Much more water goes through the bathroom every day than you may realize, so think about this when waterproofing your floor. There should be no missing areas of grout or caulking anywhere in the room.

The next place you need to look is up. Does your ceiling sag at all or is it cracked in any places? Do you have a window in the bathroom or an exhaust vent? Or do you have neither? One of the most important things that you can install in the bathroom to protect it is an exhaust vent. Steam from your shower or bath is absorbed by the ceiling over time if it has nowhere to go, cause mold growth, and the drywall to sag. If enough water is absorbed by the ceiling over the years, it can crack and eventually collapse.

What to Know About Hiring a Contractor

Hiring a contractor to build your house might be some tricky business, especially since there are so many factors involved, but it does not have to be a nightmare if you do your research and know what to look for.

First of all, the contractor that you choose needs to be a licensed one. After you discover that they are licensed, find out if there have been any lawsuits or claims filed against that license. They should also have the appropriate levels of insurance so if anyone is injured while they are on your property, you are not liable for their medical bills.

Second of all, you need to talk to each contractor you are considering in person and make sure that you can get along with this person. You both need to be able to get along so you can concentrate on the process of building the home instead of arguing about this or that. This person will be in your life for at least a few months, so hiring someone that you can tolerate is important.

Next, you need to get references from each contractor that you talk to and talk to those references at length and make sure that the contractor does good work. Ask if they have had any mold or water damage issues since their home was constructed or since their remodeling work was finished. Mold may be the most important issue to look for, since this gets built into new homes more often than most people think due to materials being stored directly on the ground or because they have been rained on.

You should also consider what your contract with this person is going to have in it. You should schedule a date for when the project will start and an approximate date that you want it to have been completed by. If you are expecting a baby or any other major event that will require you to have the home completed, take this into account when hiring your contractor. Find out when they can start on the project and if you do not have any room to be flexible (this is rare), consider hiring someone else.

The contract also needs to contain exactly what materials you want your home to be built from, from the kitchen counter material to the type of finish you want on all the hardware. Be very specific and do not give room for any substitutions, since some contractors will substitute lower grade materials without you noticing if they can get away with it.

Remodeling the Kitchen and Bathroom

The favorite and most frequented rooms of the house tend to be the bathroom and the kitchen and while these are the rooms that can add or subtract the most value from your home, most people do not realize just how important it is to take care of them. A great deal of time in everyone’s life will be spent in one of these two places in the home and making them the most comfortable and pleasant rooms in the house to be in can be quite a task, especially if you have just moved into a home where they need a bit of TLC.

Some of the giveaway signs that a kitchen needs a little remodeling are the cabinets and the flooring. If these are out of date, water damaged, or otherwise unpleasant to your eyes, you will want to replace these as soon as you can. Sometimes all they need is a simple coat of paint or a drawer or two replaced, but any cabinet that shows signs of severe water damage such as rotting need to be thrown out. It is hard to make a kitchen look new and modern with old, partially rotten cabinets still in it.

The same goes for the bathroom. A water damaged or molded vanity needs to be thrown out and replaced with a new one if you want your bathroom to look brand new.

Something else that you need to think of when you are remodeling your kitchen and bathroom is the existence of a steam vent so the moist air in the room can escape. Bathrooms and kitchens that do not have ways for steam to escape will be the victim of mold growth and a sagging ceiling if the problem is not dealt with. These are not too difficult to install, but will cost you maybe a couple hundred dollars and half a day’s time. If you are unsure how to do this yourself, you can hire someone to do it for you.

The floor of both these rooms should be waterproofed, but the bathroom floor is more important than the kitchen since a much larger amount of water flows through the bathroom every day. Rotting floors in the bathroom is a big problem, since there are a number of cases every year where the bathroom floor completely gives out due to the amount of water the floor joists have soaked up over the years.

Home Contractors, Mold, and Water Damage

The worst thing that you can find in your newly built home is mold, but it is something that is built into homes these days by careless contractors bent on getting the job done with as little effort as possible on their part. As the employer of the contractor, it is your responsibility and in your best interests to be at the job site on a regular basis to ensure that the building materials that your contractor purchased to build your home with are both up to your standards and that they are handled correctly.

Your contractor should have purchased only the materials that you outlined in your contract with him or her to purchase. They should have purchased nothing more and nothing less. None of these materials, especially drywall, should be stored directly upon the ground where it comes into contact with the soil. They should be stored on tarps or raised up off the ground in some way. This will help ensure that mold does not start to grow on them before they are used in the construction of the house.

The building site should also be covered with tarps before it rains until the roof and walls are put up to protect the interior of the structure.

Before you hired your contractor, you should have obtained references from him or her to determine the quality of their craftsmanship. This is something that you should do when hiring anyone to do almost anything for you concerning an investment such as this. You should ask the references whether they have had any problems with mold or water damage since their home was built and if it was due to bad construction or not. As long as your contractor is known for good building practices, you should have no problem with the way that he treats the building materials for your house.

It is unfortunate that you cannot be at the site of your home’s new construction all the time, but the more you are able to check on the progress of your home’s construction, the better. You should have a mold inspector come and inspect the property at least twice, once during the middle of the construction and again once it is completed to determine that there is no mold growing in the home.

Getting the Right Contractor

There are a number of factors that you need to consider when hiring a contractor to build your new home and the process of finding the right one can be somewhat tricky. While you may think that hiring a contractor is a few simple steps, but a lot of it can be attributed to your own intuition.

Talk to your relatives and friends and find out if they can recommend a good contractor to you. This is the most reliable way to do find a contractor to build your house, but if you do not have anyone that you can talk to or they cannot recommend anyone, then you should try the phone book. The general consensus is to never use the phone book to hire people to work on your home, but not all of us have the friends or relatives that can give us advice on who to choose.

Get in touch with a few different contractors and ask for at least three references from each one and contact them all. Ask if they have had any issues with water damage or mold in their newly constructed home and ask about other structural problems that might exist. Write down what you discover about each contractor and use this to make a decision on who to offer the job. Get a fixed price bid from the ones you think are good enough for the job and make sure they get the same building plan.

Your contract with them should have a number of specifics in it so that there is no room for confusion as to what is expected of your contractor. Dates showing where the project should begin and approximately when it should end are to be included along with a list of materials the home will be built out of. Consider offering incentives to your contractor if the job is completed early and offer penalties if the job is not completed by a certain date if moving in as soon as possible is important to you.

Any contractor that you hire should have the proper insurance for himself and his workers so workers are covered by his insurance while they are working on your property. You need to obtain copies of all these insurance policies and keep them in a job folder along with other necessary documents like your building contract and a payment schedule.

You should make payments to your contractor as work progresses and do not let your payments get ahead of the work that has been done.

Carelessness Concerning Electricity and Water

All homeowners have been careless at one time or another concerning water or electricity in their homes, but unfortunately negligence is one of the leading causes of damage to homes in the country. You should not fail to take care of your property and do maintenance whenever needed, but you should also make it a point not to take unnecessary risks when concerning water and electricity. While water does not do much immediate damage to a property, fire certainly does and carelessness with electronic items can cause fires much more quickly than anything in the natural world.

Most house fires are caused by either failing to make sure that an appliance used on a daily basis is not in danger of having electrical shorts or due to an electrical device being left unattended when it should not be. Space heaters are particularly dangerous in this regard and should not be left on overnight or used with an extension cord that is not a heavy duty gauge of at least 14. They should also not be left on overnight unless absolutely necessary, since most house fires tend to happen when people are sleeping.

This is also the case when you are cooking with grease or oil of any kind in the kitchen. Houses have caught on fire and burned completely to the ground due to leaving oil or shortening to heat in the kitchen unattended. You should never leave anything you are cooking unattended on the stove, especially if it is grease or solid shortening. It catches on fire much quicker than you would think, so no matter what reason you may find to leave the room, you should either stay in the kitchen or turn the stove off.

Water damage occurs mostly when there are leaks from the outside of the home or the plumbing, but sometimes damage occurs due to carelessness, too. This can happen when you are running a tub of bath water or filling up the kitchen sink to wash dishes, but the fact is that people often become preoccupied with other chores or phone calls and allow them to overflow onto the floor. Whenever you run a large quantity of water into a container, you should always watch it to make sure that it does not overflow, since allowing it to do so on a regular basis can cause damage to the floor, especially if it is not waterproof.

Buying a Home: What To Look For

Most people would love to design and have their own custom home built and anyone that gets the chance to do this would do well to do their research on the entire home building process before even dialing the first number to a contractor. Know what issues can crop up with buying a home that already exists and educate yourself on this before considering having a home built for you. There are a number of things that a person wanting to build or even just purchase a home should do research on before they begin the process.

One of the most important things that you can look for when you are purchasing a home is mold. While you may not be able to see mold if it is growing inside the walls, floors, or ceiling, you can often smell that something is wrong with the house or look for other signs that mold may be growing in the house. Look around in the more moist areas of the home for mold, like the kitchen, bathroom, laundry room, and the basement. These are generally the areas where mold likes to grow the best simply due to the amount of moisture in these rooms. If you find no mold growing here, then odds are good that it is probably not growing anywhere else.

Water damage is also something that you want to look for. If you notice any buckling in the floors and the home is fairly new, ask if the home has been flooded in the past, either due to a natural disaster or due to a waterbed rupturing or a similar accident. Human errors like bathtubs, toilets, or kitchen sinks overflowing on a regular basis can also cause significant damage to the floor and carpet. You can avoid these most of the time just by paying attention to what you are doing when filling up a sink or a bathtub. Try not to leave the room.

You should also look on the outside of the house for signs of smoke damage under the eaves. This could be a sign that the inside of the house has been on fire at some point or another. If you see this, ask the seller about it to make sure that he or she is telling you the entire history of the property. There could be problems with it that you are unaware of and the last thing that a new homeowner wants to find is a bunch of surprises that they never factored into their budget.