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Tips & Techniques

Tips & Techniques is a collection of methods, tools, and jigs that our readers have devised to get things done on their own construction projects.  Email photos and descriptions of your tips to us at [email protected]; post them with the #FineHomebuildingTips hashtag on Instagram; or upload them to FineHomebuilding.com/reader-tips for a chance to have them featured in an issue of Fine Homebuilding Magazine. Plus, we pay for any tips we publish.

Want to see a new Fine Homebuilding tip in your inbox every day? Then sign up for the Tip of the Day newsletter!

  • Wooden wheelbarrow

    A couple of years ago I watched a neighbor struggle through the mud with a load of firewood in his wheelbarrow. The wheel was too small. Movement was all but…

  • Save Your Siding

    I recently expanded a portion of my house and needed to remove an existing exterior wall. I wanted to match the original siding, so I searched local lumber yards for…

  • Tunneling Under Slabs

    Have you ever needed to bury a water, gas or electric line and found your path blocked by a concrete slab? Here's a hydraulic method for making a small, accurate…

  • Raising walls with jacks

    When I built my own house, I borrowed walking jacks from my lumberyard and raised the walls myself. My lumberyard doesn't lend the jacks anymore, but they sell them for…

  • Valley Flashing

    Successful valley flashing is one of the fine points of making a wood-shingle roof weathertight. I favor the old-fashioned method of nailing shingles into 1x3 horizontal stripping; fixing shingles to…

  • Removing fiberglass slivers

    In the course of various home maintenance and construction tasks, I sometimes have a brush with fiberglass when I'm not wearing gloves. Such encounters always leave microscopic slivers in my…

  • Smoking out air currents

    Air currents are thought to be too unpredictable to be individually described or engineered. For the past five years, however, I have been exploring the convection flow within houses. Though…

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Fine Homebuilding Magazine

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    • Repairing Damaged Walls and Ceilings
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  • Issue 326 - October 2024
    • Paint Behind Strike Plates
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    • Ladder Slip Solution

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