DIY Don’ts: Top 5 Projects

Inexperienced DIYers can often run up against trouble, especially in these five common projects.

Starting to pick your DIY home improvement projects for the year? Before you start buying lumber or picking out paint, consider the five projects recently profiled by The Wall Street Journal Online. These projects are rife with pitfalls for inexperienced home renovators. We’ll walk you through the common mistakes and pros’ advice for avoiding them.

Project: Removing “Popcorn” Ceilings

Tired of that tacky throwback to the ‘70s and ‘80s? Before you start scraping, you should know that this can be a messy, dirty, difficult job that often results in ceiling gouges. Or worse – some of the nasty stuff won’t come off.

Professional renovators recommend never scraping a dry ceiling. Brad Little, president of Case Handyman and Remodeling Services in Charlotte, N.C., advises wetting the ceiling first with a garden sprayer and then scraping at it with a putty knife. You should get the texture off in neater clumps and have less risk of digging a hole in your ceiling.

Project: Laying Brick Paths

Picture how frustrating it would be to spend time and money laying a beautiful brick path only to have it become crooked, cracked and old within six months. This is what can happen if the foundation under the pavers isn’t hard and level and if it rains enough.

Unless you’re going for the old, cobble-stone street look, use spaced out, individual stones for your path. They are less formal, “so you can get away with not having the foundation as straight and solid,” explains Little.

Project: Removing Wallpaper

This is probably one of the more difficult home improvement jobs, as removing wallpaper can cause chunks of drywall to come off along with the little duckies on your wall.

Lou Alvarado, owner of Handy Husband in Atlanta, Ga., says that this may be unavoidable if the wallpaper was put on incorrectly in the first place. As a first step, try to soften the glue behind the wallpaper first with a steamer or a removal product, such as Diff. If the paper doesn’t come off easily, you’re just asking for pitted walls. The pros recommend just leaving the wallpaper on and painting over it instead.

Project: Building a Deck

Inexperienced home renovators often bolt the deck right onto the roof or house without putting a layer of metal flashing in between. This can lead to leaks and water damage, says John Schmitt, owner of Kingston Custom Builders in Fairfax Station, Va. Decks that homeowners build themselves also often have frames and railings that are not up to code or are crooked and soggy due to too shallow or improper foundations.

Instead of doing this tough project on your own, leave it to the experts if you are inexperienced. Hire an experienced contractor.

Project: Patching Drywall

If you don’t know what you’re doing when you try to fill a hole in sheet rock, you can often end up with bumpy walls with a rough texture. This is typically a result of using too much joint compound and the wrong-width knives.

To patch drywall, use a six-inch knife to smooth the first coat of joint compound and eight-inch and ten-inch knives for the following two coats. To create an extra-smooth surface, try using less compound for each application and apply four or five very thin coats instead of just three.

<< Back to Home