We thought this article would be fitting for this very wintery Day here in Edmonton Alberta. The following article is from the Jon Eakes on the Net Website : http://joneakes.com/
In the home improvement field, winter means
learning how to work with colder temperatures. It is also a time to
identify problems that you may not want to work on until spring.
Whether you are doing the work yourself, or hiring someone, remember that cold
fingers are not as skillful as warm ones. Outdoor winter work does take
more time and you have to be more careful not to break flexible
materials, like roof shingles. Although many contractors will continue
to work well into or even right through winter, you simply can’t get
the same quality job that you can get in warmer weather. For asphalt
shingles, for example, the self adhesive tabs won’t even warm up enough
to stick until a warm afternoon. So if you get a violent wind storm
before the adhesive manages to do its thing, the shingles could suffer
wind damage, something that wouldn’t be likely to happen in a warmer
season.
For caulkings, most of the thermoplastics and
polyurethanes can be applied a bit below freezing, and silicone way
below freezing, but there are tricks to making it work better. Keep the
caulking itself warm right up until just before you apply it. If the
weather is much below the temperature stated on the tube, use a hair
dryer or hot air gun to warm up the surface an inch ahead of the bead.
That will give the caulking a chance to grab the surface before it gets
cold. Although caulkings will stick to clean, dry but cold surfaces,
they will take much longer to cure. Latex caulkings are out of the
question outdoors when it gets cold. If you are using glue for
woodworking, remember that if you only warm up your shop the day you
work, the wood may be far too cold to glue properly with the regular
water based glues we usually use in a workshop. You not only have to
keep your glue warm, but your wood as well, which means overnight or
longer depending on the size and density of the wood as well as whether
it is stacked tightly or wickered for air flow between pieces.
Winter is less a time for working outdoors than a time for inspecting
outdoors. You can spot problems of heat loss by looking at the melting
pattern on the roof, or inspecting inside the attic for frost
accumulation. There is a lot of detailed information on attic “Frost” in the Nuts&Bolts database.
Winter is not always frozen solid. In fact, weather that hovers just around
the freezing point can be the most troublesome, because it creates
flowing water that turns to ice. Walkways can be particularly dangerous
when you have either rain gutters or sump pumps that send water right
across your traffic path. You should try to redirect this winter water
flow away from both the foundation and walking paths. If you can’t
avoid making ice, then you need to be prepared to render it safe with “deicers”.
Ice hanging off the roof is another problem, both in terms of the danger of
icicles falling down, and in terms of water backing up under the
shingles. Check the database for detailed information on both “Ice Dams” and “Icicles”.
When you look around the yard you may see fence posts shifting, patio blocks
rolling out of kilter or even the basement developing cracks. This
generally happens in clay soils and is caused by the particular way
that clay freezes. In some soils, things will just rise year after
year. In others, they will rise and fall back into place every year. It
all has to do with “Ice Lenses”.
Good drainage around foundations and under walkways, as well as good
surface run-off will help to control these problems. But that all has
to wait for spring. For now, just record or photograph the problems so
you remember what needs to be dealt with when the nicer weather
arrives. We can’t control the temperature outdoors, but we can control
the accumulation of water.
Since we don’t do much work outdoorsin the snow filled winters, we do tend to hole up in that nice warm basement shop. Just remember that the windows are not open and you need to exhaust out dust and fumes even more than the rest of the year.
Spreading a large quantity of contact cement can create explosive
conditions in a closed shop, and if the gas water heater is near-by, an
electronic pilot light can do more than just light up the tank burner.
There has been more than one serious accident from fumes igniting in an
enclosed space. Even the simple application of solvent based finishes
on a newly sanded floor can be dangerous without adequate ventilation.
As a matter of fact, fine sawdust floating in the air means as much
danger of an explosion as solvent fumes. Good ventilation is your most
important tool for indoor winter projects.
Common DIY home-improvement projects include:
- putting up shelves
- painting and decorating
- plumbing work:
- replacing washers
- replacing sink, bath or basin taps or fitting an outside tap
- fitting a shower
- extending or installing central heating
- decking
- building an extension
- extending or replacing electrical wiring
- automotive repair:
- changing engine oil
- changing spark plugs
- fitting or replacing a car radio or audio system
- Modifying or upgrading computer equipment, known as modding or tweaking.
- Building a white box PC from scratch.
- DIY audio/video equipment.
- building/restoring cars, boats or aircraft
Do it yourself, often referred to by the initialism DIY,
is a term used by various communities that focus on people creating
things for themselves without the aid of paid professionals. The notion
is largely made possible by living in a modern industrial society, and is related in philosophy to the Arts and Crafts movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Many modern DIY subcultures take the traditional Arts and Crafts movement’s rebellion against the perceived lack of soul of industrial aesthetics
a step further. DIY subculture explicitly critiques modern consumer
culture, which emphasizes that the solution to our needs is to purchase
things, and instead encourage people to take technologies into their
own hands to solve needs.
The actual activity of DIY goes back through the ages: since the
beginning of time, people have used their own abilities and available
tools and technologies to take care of their own needs, make their own
clothing, and so on.
The phrase “do it yourself” came into common usage in the 1950s in
reference to various jobs that people could do in and around their
houses without the help of professionals. A very active community of
people continues to use the term DIY to refer to fabricating
or repairing things for home needs, on one’s own rather than purchasing
them or paying for professional repair. In other words, home improvement done by the householder without the aid of paid professionals.
In recent years, the term DIY has taken on a broader meaning that
covers a wide range of skillsets. Today, for example, DIY is associated
with the international alternative and hardcore
music scenes. Members of these subcultures strive to blur the lines
between creator and consumer by constructing a social network that ties
users and makers close together.
There are various communities of media-makers that consider themselves DIY, for example the indymedia network, pirate radio stations, and the zine community.
The home improvement DIY scene we know today is actually a
re-introduction (often to city and suburb dwellers) of the old pattern
of personal involvement in home or apartment upkeep, or the making of
clothing, or maintaining of cars, computers, websites, or any material
aspect of living.
A comment by philosopher Alan Watts (from the “Houseboat Summit” panel discussion in a 1967 edition of the San Francisco Oracle)
reflected a growing sentiment of the times: “Our educational system, in
its entirety, does nothing to give us any kind of material competence.
In other words, we don’t learn how to cook, how to make clothes, how to
build houses, how to make love, or to do any of the absolutely
fundamental things of life. The whole education that we get for our
children in school is entirely in terms of abstractions. It trains you
to be an insurance salesman or a bureaucrat, or some kind of cerebral
character.”
In response to this sort of insight, in the 1970s, DIY spread
through the North American population of college- and
recent-college-graduate age groups. In part, this movement involved
simply the renovation of affordable, rundown older homes. But it also
related to some extent to various projects expressing the social and
environmental vision of the ’60s and early ’70s.
A young American visionary named Stewart Brand,
working with friends and family, and initially using the most basic of
typesetting and page-layout tools, published the first edition of The Whole Earth Catalog (subtitled Access to Tools) in late 1968.
The first Catalog and its successors used a broad definition
of the term “tools”. There were informational tools, such as books
(often technical in nature), professional journals, courses, classes,
and the like. And there were specialized, designed items, such as
carpenter’s and mason’s tools, garden tools, welding equipment,
chainsaws, fiberglass materials, etc. — even early personal computers.
(The designer J. Baldwin acted as editor for the inclusion of these items, writing many of the reviews himself.)
The Catalog’s publication both emerged from and spurred the
great wave of experimentalism, convention-breaking, and do-it-yourself
attitude of the late 1960s. Often copied, the Catalog appealed to a wide cross-section of people in North America and had a broad influence.
For decades, magazines such as Popular Mechanics and Mechanix Illustrated
offered a way to keep current on useful information. DIY home
improvement books began to flourish in the 1970s, first created as
compendiums of magazine articles. One of the earliest extensive lines
of DIY how-to books was created by Sunset Books, based upon articles
derived from the pages of Sunset Magazine in California.
Time-Life, Better Homes & Gardens, and other publishers soon
followed suit. In the mid-1990s, DIY home-improvement content began to
find its way onto the World Wide Web. HouseNet was the earliest
bulletin-board style site where users could share information.
HomeTips.com, established in early 1995, was among the first Web-based
sites to deliver free extensive DIY home-improvement content created by
expert authors to Internet users. Since the late 1990s, DIY has
exploded on the Web through virtually thousands of sites.
In the 1970s, when home video (VCRs)
came along, the potentials in demonstrating processes audio-visually
were immediately grasped by DIY instructors. As with television
programs, presentation could be dynamic and was not limited in the ways
that still photos and written text might be.
The DIY industry has grown markedly since the 1980s as DIY has
become a popular weekend pastime for people wanting to improve their
living conditions (and the value of their house) without the expense of
paying someone to do it. There are many DIY stores to supply materials
and tools.
In 1994, the HGTV Network cable television channel was launched in the United States and Canada, followed in 1999 by the DIY Network
cable television channel. Both were launched to appeal to the growing
percentage of North Americans interested in DIY topics, from Home Improvement to Knitting.
Such channels have multiple shows showing how to stretch one’s budget
to achieve professional-looking results (”Design Cents”, “Design on a
Dime”, etc.) while doing the work yourself.
Article from:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_it_yourself
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Edmonton, like the rest of Alberta, is experiencing an economic boom
due to high energy prices. Oil and other natural resources are
Alberta’s primary industries, and Edmonton companies are benefiting by
supplying these projects with workers, supplies, and services. This
also increases jobs in the construction and retail industries to build
homes and supply furnishings for workers moving to Edmonton to fill
those jobs.
On top of that, further growth in non-resource based industries,
such as software development, technology, and biomedical research,
continues to diversify our economy.
The benefit of all of this is a low unemployment rate (at less than
5%, it is among the lowest in Canada) and a tremendous opportunity for
workers to find jobs and to receive training for new jobs, and a
healthy environment to start and grow a business.
Read more about living and working at this local website:
http://www.movetoedmonton.com/working/economicfacts/