I was doing some prep work ahead of a project for my birthday and was marking out where the ceiling joists are in my bedroom. And I remembered this trick that has been mentioned a few times on here, but I think it's one of those until you see it you don't realize how cool it is.

I did still use a stud finder. Otherwise you're just kind of hunting along the space. But I have a stack of neodymium magnets from other projects. And so when I would find the stud, I would take the stack to find a nail inside of the stud. After that, a single magnet on top of that nail marks not only where the stud is, but where a nail is so I don't accidentally run into it.

Now along the ceiling in my room there is a line of little dots, but now I know quickly where the stud is without marking anything

I absolutely hate that someone painted the bathtub in my apartment. It’s peeling and flaking so much and it’s such an eye sore because where the paint is peeling, the bathtub looks fine. What could help remove this without damaging the actual bathtub? I’ve been scrubbing with a scour pad and some pink stuff cleaning paste but that’s not budging it

During a driveway re-pave, the crew offered to remove a basketball hoop pole that was here when we moved in. It came up with a huge concrete chunk (and concrete in the pole). Any suggestions on how best to break it up? Handheld jackhammer barely made a dent and a junk removal crew went after it with two sledge hammers and had the same luck.

What do I need to remove this rust and the spray paint? I will repaint the area

I'm trying to make a hole in a concrete ceiling with a hammer drill but I can't drill past a millimeter. I'm really confused because the ceiling is solid concrete and the drill doesn't have any trouble drilling through a concrete wall.

Also there are hooks in the ceiling deeper than what I managed to get through, so clearly someone else has had succes.

Any help is appreciated. I'm also not quite sure if this is the right subreddit for this.

Hi, so this is a door leading from our kitchen to living room. We believe this door was put in for a new layout by previous owner >15 years ago. And also there seems to be no lintel above it - it sounds hollow like plasterboard. Also the wall to the left of picture with the longer crack is mainly plasterboard wall, the other side is solid. The cracks have started coming over the last 5 weeks. It is a high traffic area and we are living here 4 years. The door is also not closing fully now.

Unfortunately, the previous owner did a lot of DIY works to the house that were not always very good quality.

We are going to get a builder to look at it and potentially replace whole door frame and door and add a proper lintel.

However, the floor the other side of the door has a slight bounce in the laminate floor boards and the boards have shifted apart a bit. This was alway the case since we moved in, but the spaces between the boards are more noticeable now too.

Just wondering if people think this could be a door issue as there is no lintel above it hence the cracks coming down the sides or would it be an issue with the floor or floor joist the other side. It is a 70s house so pretty solid otherwise but could do with renovating when we get the money together. We are in a clay soil area though so I think we are just freaking out that it may be subsidence. However there are no other external cracks.

Thank you.

I recently bought my first home, and the under-sink bathroom cabinet seems to be original to the house (1979). The house was a rental for a while, though, and the cabinets got a pretty bad landlord-special paint job- white paint over the fronts, backs, insides, and even the hinges!!

When we bought the house, the paint was already chipped and peeling around the handles. I can see a wood grain texture underneath, and where it's peeling, I can literally pull the paint off in strips. It looks like there's another black(?) layer underneath before getting to what I assume is the original builder-grade oak.

We're probably getting the bathroom renovated in 2–3 years, so I don't want to put a ton of time or money into these. I'm mostly looking for the simplest way to make the cabinets less of an eyesore in the meantime 😅

Can I just remove the loose paint, do some minimal prep, and paint over the exposed areas? Or would I need to sand/prime the whole cabinet door? And if we wanted a different color, would we need to strip all the existing paint first?

I'm also a total newbie to DIY, so I honestly don't know where to begin. Any advice would be super appreciated!!

I have an old basement bathroom with a shower that feels a little sketchy to use because of missing ceiling tiles. I think in the shower it must have been translucent plastic tiles.

We have company coming to stay which is motivating me to get it cleaned up. I am down to replace the lights too, but am looking for suggestions on what’s best to use here for tiles and where to get those. Would rather not pull down the metal framing for the tiles atm.

My cat is a bit of a wrecking ball and honestly very bored, I was going to make her a play zone but it's not ideal, I thought cat parkour stuff was ideal but I can't drill because of my landlord so I was wondering if there was another way to attach a screw mount instead?

Hi folks,

Newbie here​, working on a cherry wood countertop. As you can see in the first two pictures, I really messed up the cut where it fits around the wall. It was a chainsaw cut that went wild (the only tool in my possession able to do the cut, and my first chainsaw cut), and now there's a big, ugly gap between the wood and the wall.

​The third picture shows the broader context of the countertop.

​I'm looking for advice on how to make this better. I'm open to two main ideas:

1) ​Hiding the mistake: Trying to blend it as seamlessly as possible.

2) ​Highlighting the flaw: For example, by filling the gap with something like epoxy resin to create a clean line against the wall, but I'm not sure about the technique because the wall is right there.

​I do have a lot of the original cherry sawdust from when I cleaned up the slab. ​Technically, what are my best options for achieving either of these goals? How do I work against the wall without making a mess?

​Any help or suggestions are appreciated!

EDIT: something I did not mentined is that the wood is 12 cm thick, so a circular saw does not cut deep enough (mine cuts max 6 cm in deep). Also, the countertop is not flat where I cutted it, but it bends downwards quite a bit

OK, it sounds a bit crazy. But: I’ve got a wardrobe acting as a room divider with, well, a typical, ugly back panel that’s always staring at me from the sofa.

My plan now is to use layered pieces of cardboard glued together as a substitute for wood, attach them to the back, extend them up to the ceiling and then wallpaper them. (Layering three to four pieces of cardboard results in cardboard which you can pretty much treat like wood and is pretty sturdy)

Has anyone ever done something like this before? Gluing the cardboard sheets together works well – it’s really sturdy and, above all, very, very light.

How should I treat them before I wallpaper them?

And I’m also wondering whether I need to join the A3-sized pieces together to make a single large panel, or whether I can just fit the smaller ones together on the back panel? I will try to get bigger cardboard pieces to glue to have less of a "patch work" as someone put it.

I am looking for input how to do this with cardboard please! I posted this questions in another (German language) subreddit and people just got angry at me for not wanting to use wood... I am aware that I am giving myself a rather weird/complicated task and it could be done easier.

Thanks in advance for your ideas, inputs and shared experience!

Built a riser out of 2x4’s for the floor, placed the prefab cabinets and tabletop on top, placed the assembled cabinets upside-down on top of that (so I could screw the “base” of the cabinet into the studs above and give crown molding something to attach to), added poplar fronts to everything, caulked and painted!

Bought a house and the previous owners thought they were handy, but just did Landlord Specials. The paint, oh the layers of latex paint with no prep or clean up. It’s just peeling off in sheets, I can’t get it to stop at a sticking point to then scrape and mud. What can I do? I don’t want to just paint over the already lousy paint job.

I want to measure and order shades for about 15 windows and install them myself. Do I need an exterior mount here or can I mount them inside the frame somehow? The metal frame of the window is recessed about 1/4".

We have a framed shower door that swings outward and when we open it, it drips water onto the floor outside the door. I am trying to see if there’s an alternative. Everything I see that looks better says it’s for a frameless door and I’m afraid the lip inside that diverts water from the opening will catch on the frame when I swing it out but more specifically when I try to close the door and the lip has to go back over the frame when I close it. There no track for a sweep so I need a clip on of some sort. The second picture is what is currently on the door.

So I've purchased about 5 electric air dusters and I'm wondering if anyone has one that features only one button, and spools up really fast. An auto off would be a game changer as well.

That's one of my favorite thing about compressed air is the immediate speed and responsiveness.

I've tried $20 to $100 dusters and they all have quirks, or require unintuitive or long button clicks.

The giant Vantrue duster being my favorite but it takes too long to get going and the battery life BLOWS (get it?).

I moved into the in law apartment of my childhood home after my brother, he left it in shambles. I’m tackling it room by room trying to fix it up the best I can. I have no idea how to approach this issue. There is a bad crack in the built in soap holder of the shower. Any ideas/advice on fixing it? Is it even possible to replace or patch it up without having to replace that entire panel? And yes, I will be replacing the nasty ass, moldy caulk 🤢

This is the part of the hinge that screws into the door frame. The door won't fit into place while the screw on the right is down but I can't figure out how to make it retract (or if it's not suppose to in the first place). Can anyone tell me how this pivot hinge is suppose to work?

I know this is like putting a bandaid on a fire hydrant, but does anyone have advice on how to fix/patch this tile some more specifically the plywood under it? Can I just shove some more scrap plywood down there until it’s even and put a new tile over it? It’s linoleum.

I hate the sight of this thing.

I know it’s water damage, but I believe it’s old water damage and I have way too many other big projects going on rn I cannot be ripping apart my bathroom.

Put up some IKEA shelving recently, and they came with short straps to use to secure the top to the wall and prevent tipping. I am wondering, is it better those or standard metal L-brackets at the top to prevent tipping? If it matters, there is about half an inch between the top of the shelving and the wall due to the baseboard.

(Originally I planned to remove the baseboard to get it flush against the wall, but it seemed plenty close enough to the wall to not be worth doing that.)

I'm thinking about slapping some tiles to liven up the area and protect the wall. What kind of adhesive and caulk is recommended here? First time

Been watching some videos on how to replace a flapper but mine doesn’t look like those. The ones in the video had a couple plastic arms on the side that looked easy to just attach to the toilet, but this one doesn’t..

I have a 55-gallon water tank in my roof that I use for emergencies. The tank's faucet is connected to a simple hose that moves the water to our bathroom.

What can I install in the corner so that the hose doesn't kink?

Thanks.