Author Archives: Bill Hutchison

Help! How Do I Childproof my Concrete Retaining Wall?

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Welcome Elijah Bruce HutchisonWe had a rather eventful weekend, some joyous news and an unfortunate accident. I’ll be writing the exciting news soon, the photo on the left is a bit of a teaser…

The accident involved my son head butting the concrete retaining wall in our backyard. This is the second time he’s done it, but this time was far worse than the last and involved a trip in an ambulance to the Alberta Children’s Hospital.

The first time he did it he was playing tug-of-war with his sister and hit the back of his head, this time he fell off the play equipment and hit the front of his head on the concrete retaining wall.

We had thought of moving the play equipment, but given that the first accident had nothing to do with the swing set moving the structure would only be a partial fix. To be honest I’m still not sure how he fell all the way off the equipment to the concrete retaining wall since when we put in the equipment we put it what we thought would be a safe distance away.

Removing the concrete retaining wall isn’t an option as our yard is over 1 metre higher than our neighbours backyard.

So I’m requesting some advice from anyone reading this post. How would you recommend we child proof our concrete retaining wall?

Final Basement Renovation Design

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After much deliberation we did eventually decide on a design for our basement renovation. It’s the easiest design option in as much as we don’t have to change any of the existing walls and all we have to do is add three walls and box in the ceiling. It should also meet all of what we feel we want out of the basement renovation.

Basement-Renovation-Design

The three walls are the short stubby wall just inside the door, the wall with the door leading into the storage / furnace room and then the short 45 degree wall at the end. The 45 degree wall leaves us with a near perfect nook to put a wardrobe or cabinet for storage.

Where we plan to put shelves, photos and bookcases we’ll be putting blocking behind the dry wall. That’ll save having to use those annoying drywall plugs that never seem to be as secure as I would like.

We will also be adding as much soundproofing as possible to the walls and ceiling of the room as the sound environment in the room is very important for the recording of the YWAM Podcast, and other future recording projects. I’ll write more about that later, but we think we’ve come up with a pretty good solution.

Create a Fold Up Workbench for your Garage

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I was browsing around Ikea Hackers looking for ideas for a narrow desk for our kids and came across this great idea for a fold up workbench for the garage…

Photo1The design is built off of the Ikea BEKVÄM Kitchen Cart, which sells for $59.99 from Ikea in Canada. I figure that if I can find off-cuts like I did when I built my Garage Workbench then the rest of the needed parts would probably only cost around $20.

Although I’m not needing a fold up workbench at the moment, it’s something that I might make use out of in the future, if time ever allows me to work on all those projects that are still only ideas…

You can see the full article, including more photos, over at the Ikea Hacker article.

Combat High Humidity with a Dehumidifier

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Over on my previously article about “What temperature do you set your air conditioner to” someone asked me the following question:

Can someone in the know please tell me how to combat high humidity in the home. It is Jan 2011 with all this rain and humidity here in Melbourne the tiled floor in the home and the painted garage floors have taken on a film of dampness and I’m worried about it being a slipping hazard let alone any other damage that all this dampness can cause. Obviously running my evaporative AC system would increase the problem, any solutions would be appreciated.

I reckon that the best bet for removing humidity from a house that doesn’t have a dehumidifier built into the air conditioner would be a separate dehumidifier. They recommend dehumidifiers for basements here in Canada, but they also work well in other humid environments.

Dehumidifiers are available in various sizes:

  • single room units
  • apartment size units
  • small home units
  • large home units

I found a few places in Australia that sell dehumidifiers with prices ranging from $120 for a unit for a closet to $1200 for a unit for a large house (140 square metres):

The dehumidifiers are available as portable units and as whole-house dehumidifiers depending on your needs. The portable units are easy to use since they don’t need to be installed by a contractor, but you need to be aware of the size of it as some are not as portable as the name would suggest. The whole house units generally need to be installed by a specialist contractor.