0:04
Before you start your next do it yourself project. Listen to this. You got this is on the air you got this is hosted by abt plumbing, electric heat and air owner, Andrew Twidwell and Rosalie Brown, with a helpful hand. Here are Andrew and Rosalie.
0:19
Hi this is Andrew Twidwell, owner of abt plumbing, electric heat and air once again, with the show, you got this. It’s a show of DIY do’s and don’ts. Don’t rather, and I’m here with Rosalie Brown, and I just finished a snicker. So I’ve got some peanuts in my mouth. So anyway, how you doing?
0:34
I’m doing well, Andrew. I see you got your Valentine’s chocolate, good for you. Good for you, sir.
0:42
Unfortunately, we have people that bring us stuff every once awhile, people want to sell us something. So they bring us like candy and goodies and things. And it’s like, this is great. I love this getting the company getting bigger, and we get more and more swag. That’s kind of that’s kind of nice.
0:55
That is kind of the upside of people trying to sell you stuff. I usually just get like annoying phone calls or actually, you know, see a lot of door to door anymore. But I actually I had door to door the other day. And that’s kind of you know, me, like, if I don’t, you need to the reason I live in a building where you have to have permission and get buzzed in is because your permission to get buzzed in, you’re just not rolling up on my door. Okay, like, that’s not gonna happen. So I like I like to if I could have like gargoyles and stuff outside my door, I would like get out. So somebody knocks on the door, and I’m like, what is that? What’s that going to be? And so I look through the keyhole. And I see this, you know, kid standing there with a mask on. And I’m like, Oh my god. So I opened the door, not because he was wearing a mask, but I knew there was gonna be some kind of sales presentation. So good. Yeah. So literally, he went to hand me some piece of, you know, literature that looked like I had religious overtones. And I just looked at my clock on the wall, and I went, it is far too late for this stuff. And I was like, nope. And I posted or unlocked it. And I just thought, you know, if you want to hand me some candy taken from a stranger, I probably would have possibly. If it would have been a wrapped cookie or something, would I have grabbed it, my impulse would have been to go towards the sweets. You start to hand me a sales brochure that has anything to do with anything, whether it’s political or religious, or anything, or anything. You know what? I’m kind of annoyed that you have now intrigued if you’re gonna do that bring me cake. Give me something. So anyway, it’s interesting. You get kicking door to
2:34
door one on one. Yeah, I get we actually I just hired somebody to do that. And he’s going into people’s businesses, as you know. And I tell bring chocolates, bring cookies, bring you something that opens the door, and have fun.
2:48
And while he is practicing that, and I’ve met him and I think you know, he’s gonna be a lot of fun. I would just like to do what I do. Every time I get the opportunity with you go on air. And I would just like to drop a little suggestion. You do know that donuts, cookies and sweets can be delivered to Southern California and I just have not done that. Like I know. So just Okay, so we’re at it’s we’re currently recording on February 15. So whoever’s listening, I just want to say that Andrew now has technically three months to get something sent to me, because that’ll be our five year you got this anniversary. And I don’t know how that’s possible. This crazy, this is one of my longest relationships, Andrew, congratulations. mean, besides my dog and my kids, I guess that’s that’s.
3:43
Yeah, your kids got, what, 20 years on me or whatever.
3:46
Yeah, they Yeah, they’re and, you know, I mean, that’s got its own challenges now that they’re adults, the stuff that they talked to me about, I’m like, I just want to get back to like, when you were little, and you just don’t want to talk about this stuff. It’s weird. It’s weird when your kids are adults, and they want to talk to you about like, they have all these really well developed theories. They’re well developed to them. Right. And, and you listen, I got a phone call this morning. And I just was on the phone going. Now. Now see that? And I just What are you gonna do? I mean, they’re adults. And it’s, it’s, it’s weird. It’s weird. I’m not ready for all this. But anyway, I digress.
4:25
I digress. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So what’s going on? What do we got? What do we got for the show today?
4:32
Well, you know, I thought I’d do something that I and this is gonna sound so self serving, but anyone who knows me knows I’m a straight shooter. So Andrew, I, you and I talk offline all the time. And I find your humor to be actually kind of funny, and I find your storytelling to be honest with you kind of funny and I kind of enjoy it. So I thought you know what the world needs to hear or the other 12 listeners need to hear. I’m always interested because you have all this experience. And you know your background comes from you, your dad was in the trades and you grew up in like so people that know you know that. I’m always fascinating. A guy who owns a company that has a trades company. What was? What was that that? Do it yourself project that you started, right? Because you’ve owned homes and you’ve got a lovely family and you’ve got a wife and you said, You know what, I’m going to do that myself. What’s the project that you you did you started to tackle and you got into it? And you thought, What was I thinking? Do you have one of those?
5:30
You know, it’s funny, because it’s like, I was trying to think of some of the things that I’ve done in the past and where I was able to pass it off. And, you know, I was born and raised pretty poor. And there was and we come from, you know, farm stock, essentially. And just peasants, right? So we always just did all of our own stuff, right? I mean, we worked on our cars, we worked on our own houses and stuff. And I remember putting laying some brick when I was like 16, or 17 at my mom’s house, and not wearing gloves and my skin falling off because of the lie in the mortar. And that was like, okay, that’s why you have to wear gloves. Right? Yeah. And most of them, I started thinking about most of these things that I’ve done, I’ve never really had the option until my old till recently, you know, until I’m like in my, my late 40s, early 50s, where I was actually felt like I was able to pass something off. So you just did it. And now it’s you know, I can guys it as a training moment, right for my my staff. So it makes it really easy to like I was training, training my electricians how to fix my sewer yesterday, right. And I actually got in the hole with them. So they were kind of impressed. So, but we’re cross training, right? You guys got to know how to do this stuff. Hey, chagrin, because they don’t like doing anything that has to do with. I mean, we cut the pipe open and a little bit of sewage came out and all three of them jumped back. And I’m like, what, that’s just liquid, and there’s nothing else in there. There’s no solids in there.
7:04
Okay, so honestly, I hope that someone got that on camera video picture, because that’s the kind of thing we need to share with the community. The cross training that happens at Abt, here’s our electricians in the sewer. Yeah. Who does that? I want to jump back, I would jump back.
7:22
They definitely jumped back in. There was one that was one of the technicians kind of had a couple you know, gaggy moments but like, Dude, it this is just natural, but never get over it. But anyway, so what what are some of the things I’ve done a lot of different things. I mean, I’ve done everything from sheet rock, which to be honest, at this point in my life, I don’t like doing sheetrock and taping anymore. It’s it’s hard. Although I had to fix a wall, we we moved a piece of furniture. And there was a big crack that went up the wall, so I had to tape it, but it and texture it right. I could have passed that off. But if I had to go in and shoot rock tape and mud and texture, a whole room, I would definitely not do that anymore. It’s just physically, way more than I want to deal with roofing. I’ve done roofs before. I was actually up on my roof after this last storm, I had to repair the roof. But if I have to replace the roof, I’m not gonna replace the roof.
8:19
I mean, there’s a lot I know. And we’ve talked about this in the past,
8:21
like, you know, chimney cleaning, I don’t have a wood stove anymore. But if we did have a wood stove, I wouldn’t I stopped clearing cleaning the chimneys. I just leave that to professional leave that to somebody that does it on a daily basis, not on a semi annual basis every six months, because they really know what to look for. car repairs, I’ve gotten myself into some pretty bad situation with car repairs, because I know just enough to be dangerous. And those have had to pass off a couple of times. But those weren’t like home do DIYs because, you know, I just I was born and raised working in cars went to the auto shop and my uncle was a civil engineer but also a really good car mechanic. He taught me a lot how to a lot of things about cars. But yeah, especially today with all the computerization and stuff. I don’t even deal with it anymore. So
9:14
Isn’t he the uncle who also didn’t get his oil changed ever? So maybe, you know? Yeah.
9:21
Oh my god. Yeah. He had some interesting ideas on Yeah, he would just change the he would just pull the filter and replace the filter. I mean, he did it religiously. And you know, if the oil started getting a little sloppy, he would change it. But he’s like, Yeah, you don’t need to change it. It’ll be three or 4000 miles and we had an old Mercedes diesel that he has ran to the ground, and then he ended up getting it. When the first Jeep Wrangler came out, he got that because he really liked the fact that the windshield could go down so he could get some property Epico out in the Russian River, and he loved the fact that the windshield would go down and he could shoot a deer and hunt from it. This is all property so you can get away with it. Right? Yeah, it’s a couple 100 acres and family. But yeah, He was an interesting cat. Yeah, some interesting ideas. Yeah.
10:04
I imagine he did. He probably had a very interesting life. I mean, for me, I’d be like, That’s my nutty crazy uncle. But
10:10
yeah. He married into the family. So he was, I seen his side of the family his most work, Dennis, and he kind of strayed from the he actually went to school and became a civil engineer, and worked for worked for the city.
10:24
But anyway, yeah, that’s funny. Yeah. Oh, my God, he
10:28
worked for San Francisco. Anyway, so you didn’t get me this, you got this great list of seven HVAC and plumbing upgrades that add value to your home. So you know, a lot of these things that I’ve done is a lot like maintenance is to maintain the value of your home. And some of them are just that, you know, like one of the first things they say is, well, let’s see, are you preparing to place your home on the market, maybe you’re gradually upgrading it to improve its overall value for future sale or current enjoyment, plumbing upgrades, and other changes, like replacing an old HVAC system are great ways to boost your home’s ability to sell. So there are things that if you have a furnace that’s 30, or 40 years old, or even 20 years old, these days, it can devalue the the value of your house, I know, we bought a property or apartment building in Minnesota, with a boiler that was 30 years old, I knew that was gonna have to be replaced. I factored that into our offer, right? So and when somebody is buying a property, they don’t factor in that cheap price, they factor in the worst case scenario, right. So like, if you’re going to buy a house, and the furnace is 2030 years old, you’re gonna want to factor in 25 to $35,000. To think of the worst case scenario, I got to replace all the ductwork I replaced the HVAC the entire system, right. And I’m going to ask for that off the top of the house. But if you were to replace that furnace, or air conditioner, you could save substantially and not lose that potential discount that that person is going to offer you. So just maintaining it.
12:07
Well, I’m free. Before you go to the next topic on that list. It reminds me we covered I want to say it was in the is this February, I think in the February newsletter, we taught we kind of ran through if you’re going to buy a home, there’s like a checklist specifically for your plumbing, right? Before you commit to purchasing a house. You know, it’s not just as simple as walking through and turning on the water it there’s some other things that you should do, because like you said, that you get this great deal, you buy a house, and then the first couple months, all of a sudden, if it’s known to you, that’s one thing. If it’s unknown to you, it says unexpected cost where it just really feels like why didn’t we take Why didn’t I know about this? Or why didn’t so
12:53
there I spend that 250 or $300, or whatever recorded ours? Yep. And I could have potentially saved 10s of 1000s of dollars. Had I had the foresight to do that. You know, and then that we talked about, you know, having a video inspection of your sewer line, and location of your sewer line. That is one of those critical things that could be you know, it could be a $5,000 repair or it could be a $30,000 repair. If if that sewer is really long and really deep, the excavation and that can be really expensive. So yeah, definitely, you know, the last place I bought we had we had it was out of our area, so I didn’t have a camera with me. But I hired somebody to come in and camera, the sewer. And it was in Minnesota, so the sewers are 12 feet deep because of the cold. It’s $30,000 repair, and if
13:41
it’s old, but today is a lot of those are clay pipes because I have something similar in Michigan, where, you know, got in there, and
13:50
it’s a clay, it’s a clay sewer. Fortunately, it was in decent condition. I wasn’t too worried about some minor intrusion, but nothing huge. But I know eventually we’re gonna replace it. But hopefully, hopefully we’ll have sold it by then hopefully it’d be 20 years down the line. 30 years down the line. But speaking of pipes, so you know, updating the pipes in your home, you know, I been in the trades my whole life, starting when I was about five or seven, really when I was five. My father is a general contractor. So that makes me I’ve been in the trades for 50 years. I remember watching people pour lead for sewer lines, you know, lead an Oakland I actually learned how to do that because we still were still doing that to a certain degree back in the day because I’m you know, I’m a dinosaur at this point. But so you’ve got these old and old water galvanized wire lines. They weren’t really installing and when I’ve been in alive, but we still find them all over the place in houses. So think about that. So if you’ve got galvanized water lines in your house, I’m 55 years old, we were installing copper 55 years ago, we’re installing copper 67 years ago. Those pipes in your wall are six is seven at least 67 years old. How old is that car that you drive, you know, that is beyond vintage that is an antique that is, you know, that is so old, you are lucky that it’s lasted as long as it has. But now it’s just a matter of time before those things fail. So if you are going to sell your house, and you’ve got galvanized slides, guess what they’re gonna do, they’re gonna discount that from the price. They’re gonna say, you know, and worst case scenario, you got a two story two story house. That could be seven to $30,000. Again, depending on how many how many bedrooms you have, and how many walls we have to open. And can we can we find a chase way that we can run in through, you know, all these different things, how much painting and texturing and stuff are we gonna have to do? So those are the kinds of things that people start thinking about. So if you do have some of those old waterways, yeah, it’s definitely time to think about recovering either copper or packs, and we were using pecks more than we’re using copper these days. Old waistlines, Clay sewer lines is a prime example. It’s one of those things, it’s not a matter of if it’s going to fail, but when it’s going to fail, if you’ve got roots in the system, it’s already broken roots. If the pipe is intact, if there’s no breaks in the line, you will not have roots, there has to be a hole there has to be a fracture, there has to be a way for the roots to get in. And all you need is the thickness of a hair for root to get in. Unfortunately, what happens is the roots grow, because they’ve got a source of water and they got a source of nutrients. And we’ll come in there with our routing machines or sewer cables, and will prune them. But when you prune, just like when you print a route, just like when you prune a tree, you prune one branch, two branches come back, you prune two branches for come back. And as this continues to compound over the years, and that route gets bigger and bigger. And eventually we’ll collapse the pipe because that that route gets to the point where it can be as thick as a finger, it can be as thick as a wrist I’ve seen. And as long as you know I’ve pulled loose, they’re 20 feet long out of pipes, and just completely impacted. And cave, the clay pipe in clay doesn’t have any memory. So once it’s broken, it’s broken. It’s not like plastic work and bounce back. It will just fracture. And like a knee you went through that experience with your house to Detroit, right. I mean, how much did that cost you? Well,
17:15
the quote was 10 grant, the grant was 10 grand. And it was so far underground. And it was kind of it was far off the street, by the way, right? So Oh, yeah.
17:26
And then if you have to go tight like in depending on the jurisdiction that you’re in, you may be responsible to the tie in in the street, which now you get Street. If you got to do the street job you can guaranteed at five to 10 grand because now all of a sudden, it’s a totally different jurisdiction or can be a jurors different jurisdiction. And it can it adds a whole other set of complexities to the job. And just like you right, it started at 10. And what would it go up to?
17:53
Well, I don’t know for sure, because we chose some other route. But we chose to deal with it later route. But
18:01
the house was only 20 grand or something anyway. Right. Right. So it was kind of like, all right, I mean, well, the sewer is more expensive than the whole property.
18:08
Yeah, we’ll see what happens here. Yeah.
18:12
So those are something you have to you want to take in consideration. If you’re selling a house? Is that person gonna want to deal with it? And can I fix it for cheaper than they’re going to want to take off the price of the house? Right? Nine times out of 10? Yes. Yeah, because they’re going to automatically go for Worst case scenario. So replacing pipes, energy efficient, air conditioning, and heating. Again, if you’ve got an old system, those older systems were running around 80%. When they’re new, as they grow older, they become less efficient, just like most things in our life, you know, when we buy a car, and it gets 30 miles to the gallon when it’s broken in. Now it’s got 200,000 miles on it, it’s probably getting 25 miles to the gallon. The same sort of thing happens with your HVAC system. They may be you know, the furnace may be 90% 95% efficient when it’s new. But as it gets older, it get the efficiency goes down. And to be honest, we’re installing 80 percenters for a long time. And before that, they were 60%. So for every dollar that you’re putting into heating your house, you’re only reaping 80 To 60 to 80 cents out of that dollar into your house for heat. So if you can kind of equate it that way with efficiencies. So is that that 2030 4050 year old furnace going to make that house less value when you go to sell for sure? Because they’re automatically going to think it’s going to cost me 25,000 Rs? 50. I mean, they may even come in with $50,000 Just because we throw big numbers when we’re buying a house right? And we asked for that as a discount because of the other multiple problems that we find. But if you take care of those to begin with, you may be you know, if you’ve got an older system, but once part of the system is fixed one and more parts old, you may be able to get away with it. For under 10 grand, you know, it might be a five or 10 grand dollar job five to $10,000 job as opposed to 20 or 30, or $50,000, which the new buyers thinking. This one was kind of funny, but it is really true. Most houses now have pull out spout faucets. Very few homes have side sprays, or no spray at all, most every kitchen modern kitchen will have a pop pop pull out faucet in the kitchen, it’s prior to kind of ambiguous in terms of buying a home these days rentals, you’re not going to see it so much because they’re, you know, added costs and stuff out of maintenance. But if you’re thinking of selling the home and you don’t have a pull out faucet, pull up kitchen faucet, not a bad idea to throw in it. Can I ask you a question? And that’s a DIY thing. If you can do it, you know.
20:47
So when you say pull out faucet are you talking about? You’re not talking about that? Like pull out and like it’s like a spout. Right? Are you talking about this?
20:55
So you’ve got you’ve got the old vegetable sprayer side spray. Okay, now everything is that the actual head
21:03
of Oh, faucet? Oh, yeah, retractable. Yep,
21:07
and has a sprayer on it and a regular grater stream. That’s kind of the norm. Now most modern kitchens have that if you don’t have that. There’s people are going to discount that. Right? Or they’re just gonna say, Well, I don’t have a pull out faucet, I might be looking at replacing the entire kitchen that I mean, literally, that is the thought process of buying a home. So now all of a sudden, you know, now they’re thinking 50 grand, right? Wow. Okay, okay. I know what the buyers mind is mindsets going towards right.
21:39
And as far as DIY goes, installing a replacing kitchen faucet is that a big DIY are pretty simple.
21:47
It’s an advanced DIY, because you can run into some problems, it’s plumbing, and water. And yeah, you could. If you try to reuse the old, or emergency shutoff valves or angle steps, that can be a whole thing. Or if you try to pull them sometimes you got to deal with the feral. And if you don’t have the right tool to pull off barrel, that can be a whole thing. I mean, the tool for it is only like 25 bucks, but most of the stuff most people don’t know about them or even how to use them. So it’s one of those if you can, if you got a good sense, watch the videos, you could attack it. And like we were talking to beginning at what point do you call in the Calvary to come and save you, you’re going to to deep call the Calvary and the most time we can come in to save you on that something like that. So if you’re somebody handy, yeah, go for it. I will say though, that some of my most difficult jobs have been replaced in kitchen faucets because getting the old one out. I’ve literally pull pulled the sides off my truck and cut faucets in half to try to get them out. So it can be it can be tricky. So you know the nuts that hold the faucet down. Can if they’re old metal lens, they can rest and corrode. And you’re not getting them off without special tools. Like I had a couple tools that literally broke the faucet and that’s that that’s all the tool was designed for was just that one job was just to break old rusted bib nuts. And it was a 14 part tool that I carried around for that one, one thing, you may not have that neutral egg, when that one thing will will save your bacon when I
23:31
break things. It’s by accident. That’s what I say.
23:35
And with that, if you need any help with plumbing, electrical, heating and air, give us a call you can reach to be reached at 530-230-9092 That number again 5309092. You can find us on the web at easiest abt.com or abt plumbing.com. Like us on Facebook, and now we’re on Instagram, and LinkedIn. And we’re working on YouTube. So you can find us all over the place. Like our pages, see your content. We have a lot of fun stuff and a lot of stuff that can teach you how to do a lot of things. Now with that, thanks for listening, and we’ll catch you guys next week. Bye.
24:12
Thanks, Andrew. Thanks, Rosalie. Now let’s get that project started. You got this. We’ll be back next Friday morning at nine o’clock on Cancio Newstalk 830
Transcribed by https://otter.ai