SideQuest 06: Q&A | Shellac, Hidden Valves & Mining Closets
Listen to the episode here: Podcast
We are back with another Side Quest episode! The squirrels in our brains are running wild today (Arly’s squirrel is named Gerald), but we managed to focus long enough to answer your burning DIY questions.
From plumbing emergencies to floor patching hacks, here is the breakdown of what we tackled in this week’s Q&A.
1. The Sticky Situation: Shellac vs. Window Clings
The Question: Can you use Shellac-based primer (like BIN) to cover up the sticky residue left behind by window clings, or is it only for water stains?
The Verdict: Yes, you can! Shellac primer is excellent at sealing in chemical residues so they don't bleed through your paint. However, there is a catch: Texture.
Paint and primer cover color, but they do not hide texture.
If you can feel the ridge of the adhesive with your hand, you will see it through the paint.
The Fix: Hit the area with a sanding block or sandpaper first to smooth out the transition. If you can still feel it, paint will only highlight it.
2. The "Oogity Oogity" Debate: Furniture Finish vs. Primer
The Question: Why do we recommend Shellac primer when everyone knows old Shellac furniture gets ruined by water rings (the dreaded "white ring" effect)?
The Verdict: We are talking about two different beasts.
Amber Shellac (The Finish): This is the old-school varnish made from beetle wings. It is beautiful but fragile—if you put a wet glass on it, it turns white.
Shellac-Based Primer (The Prep): This is a heavy-duty stain blocker. It is designed to be covered by paint. It seals in smells (like smoke) and stains so they don't ruin your topcoat.
3. Is It a Crime to Fold Sandpaper?
The Question: Is it wrong to take a round disc meant for a power sander, fold it in half, and use it by hand to clean rust off tools?
The Verdict: Absolutely not! Use what you have. While you can buy specific hand-sanding sheets, there is no shame in repurposing a sanding disc to clean rust off a putty knife. It works perfectly fine.
4. The Hole in the Wall: Drywall vs. Access Panels
The Question: A listener had to punch a hole in their drywall to reach a plumbing shut-off valve. Should they patch the drywall back over it?
The Verdict: NO. Never seal a shut-off valve behind a wall!
The Fix: Install an Access Panel.
They cost about $20 and pop right into the hole.
They are white plastic but can be painted or wallpapered to match your room.
Most importantly: In an emergency, you can open the panel to turn off the water instead of grabbing a hammer to smash your wall open again.
5. The Missing Floor: How to "Mine" a Closet
The Question: Anna has a 4x6 foot hole where both the subfloor and the hardwood flooring are missing. How does she match the old wood?
The Verdict: This is a two-part fix.
The Subfloor: You may need to "sister" new joists (screw new wood next to the old beams) to give your new subfloor something to sit on. Use OSB or Plywood and make sure the height matches the existing level.
The Finish Floor: If you can’t find new wood that matches your vintage 100-year-old floors, go "mine" a closet.
Pull the matching floorboards out of a closet or pantry.
Use those boards to patch the visible hole in the main room.
Put cheaper, mismatched flooring inside the closet where no one will see it!
Have a question for the crew? Shoot us an email at HTHM@MyHandymaam.com or find us on social media @HowToHandymaam.
Happy Building!
The Handyma'am Crew
Transcript
Here is a clean transcript of Side Quest 06 for your blog post.
Hi folks, welcome back to How to Handyma'am, the podcast where we're doing side casts kind of with this side quest episode because we won't try to stay on track in our main episodes but we have trouble. We have squirrels running around in our brains. Mine's squirrels are named Gerald and Gerald is busy.
All right. So we want to take an opportunity to answer some more listener questions. So I'm just going to like read these to you guys and we'll see if we can give our listeners some answers that are helpful. Stump the Handyma'ams.
All right. This is from Kate and she wants to know would shellac primer, which we talked about a couple episodes ago, would it also work on stains other than water stains? Could you use it like on the stains left by sticky window cling or by other things? Can you shellac to cover those up? Yes with a caveat. Got to make sure there's no sticky texture left. So yeah. It'll cover the residue but if you have like a bubble of adhesive left over, it's going to be hard to... it'll paint over that and probably cling to it but it will not hide the texture. You'll be able to see the texture of it. I think the best practice would be to just even if you think all the adhesive or whatever sticky bit is gone, just hit it with a little bit of sandpaper or sanding block, um, or even a microfiber and then you can prime it. Yeah. I will say one thing we don't always realize is that let's say you rub your hand over it and you can feel something but you can't see it. If you go ahead and paint over that then you'll be able to also see it. So you do need to make sure like if you can't tell yet just run your hand over it. If it's smooth but you can still see it because it's a color then you can use shellac primer and that will cover that right up. Yeah. And if you can't tell then you can paint over it and then you can always go back over the area that are problematic still. It's not super fun but you can sand through just about anything.
All right. So next one. This is a TikTok handle so it's a handle rather than a name and one of my absolute favorites. It's Oogity Oogity. Oogity Oogity what do you got for us Oogity? It says everything I've heard about shellac is related to cup rings on tables because it's wax. So I think this question is alluding to the fact that like me growing up we had real wood furniture and you would get murdered if you just put a drink glass on it because then it would leave white rings. And those were surfaces we always referred to as shellacked. So I think there's a term shellacked which we use to describe when something has a very hard clear coat on it. It's what you see on church pews and like other kinds of like high use wooden items. Um that's different than what we're referring to which is shellac based primer which is a paint product as opposed to a let's say I don't know polyurethane. Like a finish. A varnish. So there's something called Amber Shellac which my lovely father grew up in the time where you put Amber Shellac on anything and it makes it beautiful. And it's kind of like yellowy golden soup? I don't know. I don't like it. But it was on everything. All hardwood furniture if you're refinishing furniture all the time. That's probably um I'm assuming what they're referring to because if you put your glass on it it will change the color of your shellac or your top coat of that furniture. This is more it's literally like if you put white paint with water that's what it looks like. Except it smells like death. Yes it smells like death. Not according to a few TikTok comments. I know. The person was like I don't think it smells bad I make my own and it's out of dead bugs. And I was like whoa. Okay. To each their own. Yeah. Oh um and sometimes it's varnish which is a little different than a shellac finish and you'll see that like when you see like old wood trim get really dark and start like alligator or skinning that's a varnish so. Yeah. All of those are basically finish coats on wood that are clear. Yes. I have seen people if you do get a white ring or something apparently if you put a towel on it and use like an iron or something it takes the ring out. But I would look for that up. Don't just go at your table with an iron please.
All right. So um our next one is also from TikTok. The handle is New Discovery. And this person watched my TikTok video where I was sanding a little bit of rust off my small putty knife and there were and I had taken a sanding disc from a power sander and just folded it in half. So they're like why are you doing that? Just put it on the sander and use it like it's supposed to be used. So I will say okay I bought the sandpaper so I'll use it however I want. And if you see my response video I was like this is why we didn't use it in a video cause it goes errrr. It yeah. What it is important to note is that the reason I was using sanding by hand is it was a small amount of rust on a small putty knife. Like it's a bit of overkill to use a power sander. But it's a I'm glad that they mentioned that because we do often use our power sanders when we have larger items that are rusty and need to be sanded down or when we have been using our metal putty knives with Bondo which it's very difficult to like scrape it completely off and then it will dry and it's hard. Bondo is an epoxy based wood filler by the way. Yes. Yeah like a two part wood filler. Um when you get that on there really the only way to get your putty knife back down to metal is to use a power sander. I mean you could use a hand sander but it's like a lot of work. Also as a child of a man who frequents estate sales and garage sales you can get sanding paper at in a estate sale or whatever and you don't have a sand sander. It works exactly the same as like sand paper in like the sheets. You can just use it however you want. It makes sense not to it's more expensive so it makes sense not to like use all your power sander discs for hand sanding but touche. Touche New Discovery we say touche.
All right. So um oh this one Emily is for you. You gave the person an answer but I liked it so much I thought others would really like to hear it. Occasionally builders plumbers homeowners will do something that I am always confused by which is put the shut off valves inside the wall and then drywall over it. Which means you have to hole punch a hole in the wall in order to get to your shut off valves. And that's actually what happened to this listener is that they had to cut or hammer a hole in their drywall to get to their shut off valves. So they're like now what? And the question was about really about primer was about putting it back together. But Emily had a different suggestion completely. So if if you have shut off valves inside your wall Emily what would be a great alternative? Well they were asking if they should like it was a thing about Arly talked about in an episode to prime patches so they don't do a thing called flashing which is just where the sheen looks different from the rest of the wall so even though you've done a beautiful wonderful job patching you can still see the dang patch which is frustrating. So this person was saying with this should I prime this patch? This works really well. And I said yes and a bonding primer just cause I that's my favorite type of primer supposedly bonds to glass I haven't tried that but it works really well. But I also said here is an access panel. So they make 'em for like 20 bucks I think. I think Oatey is the brand we usually use. And it's literally just this one is a 14 by 14. You cut a hole in your drywall you stick the frame in and then you stick the access panel in and it can just be pried off. But they're paintable and wallpaperable. So. Yeah. Yeah. We use those um last time I was doing like a bathroom repair and those if you have to go I wouldn't always just go straight in if you have no problems but if you have to go into your wall to get into shut off valves instead of drywalling back over it you know put a access panel in it or I mean heck put a painting over it and leave it open. I mean. Especially if you are DIYing plumbing and you are not an experienced plumber experienced plumbers still experience leaks I know. But us DIYers. Yes. We like us six years ago. We are open minded but know that we may make mistakes sometimes. So. Yeah. Well I mean if when it comes to your shower you can't turn that off you know unless you turn off your main unless you have access to your your shut off valves. So there's a lot of different uses for it. Plus if you have a problem and then you get it re-drywalled and then you have another problem then you're going to have to get it torn out the plumbing done and re-drywalled again. You know just putting an access panel in if you come to it. 20 bucks or so depending on what it is. You used to have to build them out of wood but now you can just buy one and pop it in the hole. Yeah. And the one we talked about is honestly it's pretty cheap like it like I maybe would put it like in an area you can't notice very much but they do make attractive ones. Yeah they do. You can make your own. They're just quite expensive like the attractive ones I was seeing that like are like flush paneled and they like look really beautiful those were like a hundred something dollars but I mean if it's going to be out and about then maybe that's what you want. So.
All right. Well last question for today. This one's from Anna. Hello Anna. And she said I have a piece of flooring where the subfloor is missing. It's about four by six feet area. What do I do with it and are there any ideas what to do with the area if I can't find floor hardwood floor planks to match when I put it back together? So the subfloor is missing or the floor is missing? Sounds like both. So once the subfloor goes in and the flooring goes back in what does she do about matching if she can't find the same planks? Mm. That's interesting. You know I've seen people take um tile edging if you cut like a very straight line around that area you could put in I mean I guess it kind of depends on where it is if it's in some random corner it might be kind of awkward but you can put tile edging in and match it as close as you can. Um but it basically looks like a cutout. Yeah. Like a decorative area. Yeah. So you could try to do something like that or you can cut more of the flooring away and have like that half of the room or I mean make it look purposeful. Yeah I mean doing the whole room or something if you have a big living room that's kind of a a big commitment um to do that. A lot of older houses have the hardware floor extends into the closets. So that's a great place to mine extra planks that will not only be the same wood but will be the same age. And the same color. And the same color. That's a great tip. Yeah. So you can that happens all the time we did it in a house that we worked on about five years ago we pulled the wood out of the closet and used it to patch in the areas in the main area and then you just put different flooring in the closet. Yeah. So. And then you have a natural transition point though too right at the doorway. Yes absolutely. And if you have multiple closets and you have a four by six area you could probably get away with doing that. Yeah. Also I think they were asking about the subfloor as well. And if there isn't so for a subfloor to place your subfloor you need to think about it like you need to have something on every edge of the subfloor. So if the area that is missing right now there isn't a joist on either side to screw new subfloor into um you can just add blocking or you can cut back till you get to another joist. Yeah. And if you have um if it's on the main floor and your basement has an open ceiling then you can go like if your current floor joists are two by eights then you can sister additional two by eights right next to your floor joist and that just gives you that extra inch and a half to put the edge of the subfloor on. Sistering's just um screwing. Yeah. Putting them side by side screwing them together. And I would look for structural screws if you're going to do that. Yes. Also think about um your if your floors are hardwood the subfloor underneath it might also be like hardwood planks that run diagonally. Yes sometimes it is. And sometimes those are three quarters of an inch but sometimes they're an inch. And usually nowadays we use uh OSB uh for subfloor which you can get but you might need to put either two pieces of half inch subfloor or a piece of three quarter inch subfloor with quarter inch luan on top. Yeah quarter inch. So measure that gap of the the flooring together and make sure that it's going to because your you'd probably be pretty upset if you get to that and your floor is like a quarter inch underneath or right above your other flooring. Yeah.
All right well that brings us to the end of this side quest. Thank you for joining us and if you are interested in us being your Handyma'ams you can find us at myhandymaam.com and myhandymaam on all the socials. If you want to be your own Handyma'am then you can find us at howtohandymaam pretty much everywhere. And if you want to email us questions you can do hthm at myhandymaam.com and you'll go right to our inbox. Yeah. And you can join our Facebook group How to Handyma'am. We got lots going on. There's plenty for everybody. Yes. So thanks for joining us we'll see you Friday for the full episode. See you Friday. Mwah.
