Question: My wife and I own a nice condominium in Santa Barbara that we used to live in and now rent out to supplement our retirement income.
The unit is in good shape overall and is easy to rent, but the original natural oak kitchen cabinets are starting to show their age and we would like to spruce them up without doing a major kitchen remodel.
Our renter is moving out next month and we would like to get this taken care of quickly so we can show the unit as soon as possible.
What are our options?
Your Handyman: If the cabinets are not damaged and are of relatively good quality, you have two options for an affordable facelift rather than going through the often major expense and effort of installing new cabinets, countertops and plumbing.
Your first option is to give the cabinets a very thorough scrubbing down inside and out using a cleaning solution like Murphy Oil Soap, which can be purchased at most grocery stores.
Fill a bucket with hot water and Murphy Oil Soap, wear gloves to protect your hands, use a nonabrasive but stiff sponge to aggressively scrub the cabinet surfaces, and you may be surprised how many buckets of dirty water you go through before the cabinets are clean.
Even the cleanest appearing cabinets can be coated with large amounts of grease and oil generated by years of cooking and the resulting coating of dust sticking to the oil.
As a final step in the cleaning process, wash down the cabinets with a rinse of hot clean water to remove any residual of the cleaning solution.
Once the cabinets are completely clean inside and out, they need to be left to dry, which may take a day or two in foggy weather or just an afternoon if the weather is hot and windy.
After the cabinets are thoroughly dry, select a wood stain from a product line like Minwax, choosing a color that matches the original stain color of your cabinets as closely as possible.
Along with the new stain you will want to purchase some plastic drop cloths, a small plastic bucket to hold the stain while you are working, a package of nitrile gloves to wear while staining, a roll of blue painters tape, and a couple of cloth staining pads — all of which can be purchased at any paint store or the paint department of a hardware store.
Use the plastic sheeting to protect your floors and countertops from the inevitable drips and splashes of stain, and then wipe down the exposed surfaces of the cabinets, doors and drawers with a generous application of stain.
After the stain application is complete, go back over all the stained surfaces with a clean white rag to wipe off any stain that has not been absorbed into the wood.
The cabinets will immediately look much improved as the clean dry wood soaks up the stain. After airing out for a couple of days, they will be ready for showing to potential renters.
Note that it is very important that the new stain color closely matches the original stain color.
If your intention is to change the stain color of your cabinets, they need to be stripped and sanded down to new wood, which will require considerably more time and elbow grease, and it may be best to hire a professional painter for the job.
Your second option is to do what is commonly referred to as re-facing the cabinets, which involves the removal and replacement of all the cabinet doors and the matching wood fronts on all the cabinet drawers.
Fabricating cabinet doors and drawer faces require very specialized and expensive wood-working machinery so it often is made by very large cabinetry mills.
Even if you have a local carpenter build custom cabinets for your home, more often than not the doors and drawer fronts are being ordered from a large regional cabinet mill. Typically these mills will only sell to contractors, kitchen designers or lumberyards, but there probably are some that sell online to consumers.
However, great care must be taken to ensure that the correct sizes are ordered. This may be a project best undertaken by a professional, and Santa Barbara has many skilled finish carpenters and kitchen shops that can handle this job for you.
Once the old doors and drawers are out of the cabinets, the cabinet frames and faces will need to be cleaned and stained as previously described in the first option prior to the installation of the new doors and drawer faces.
Re-facing gives you the opportunity to update your cabinets with an entirely new look, or you can order the new doors and faces to match the original style.
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Question: The rain gutters on our house are sagging, even though I have repeatedly hammered the gutter spikes back in.
I’m afraid the gutters are going to finally just completely fall off in a heavy rainstorm, get damaged and then need to be replaced. I’m a senior and can’t afford to pay for new gutters.
How can I get the old gutters to stay in place?
Your Handyman: Sagging rain gutters are a common problem that can be easily solved by using an improved fastener.
Most rain gutters are installed using an aluminum or steel spike that threads through the gutter, has a metal bushing or ferrule that fits inside the gutter to prevent the gutter from being crushed in by the spike, and the spike is simply hammered into the rafter tail.
Over time the rafter tail wood dries out or splits, the spike is no longer secured in the wood, and it is pulled away from the rafter tail by the added weight of a gutter full of rain or leaves.
The solution is to remove the loose spikes and replace them with long threaded screws that fasten into the rafter tail, permanently securing the gutter.
Most hardware stores carry this product under the name of GutterScrew, which is sold is several different colors, comes with new ferrules, and can easily be installed using a power drill or ideally an impact driver.
It will not be possible to screw in the new gutter screws by hand without the assistance of a battery-powered drill or better yet, an impact driver.
This work all has to be done on a ladder and it usually is not a good idea for anyone old enough to be receiving Social Security to be climbing ladders, especially not to access gutters on the second floor.
If you can not safely work on a ladder, it would be best to hire a contractor for this project. Just remember that the falling is not all that bad, but the landing part can cause some serious problems.
