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Fortunately, if you are a homeowner or a business owner and you need to have mold removed from your property, the fact is that you can probably deduct this from your taxes at the end of the year.  The remediation is recognized as a repair that you have to do to safeguard your home, because your home is considered an investment. 

Depending on the size of the contamination, the remediation costs can be fairly large, especially if you choose to hire a professional remediation business instead of doing a lot of it yourself.  If you know what you are doing and are careful enough, a lot of the mold remediation can be done by you, but hiring a professional is usually the best thing to do.

Sometimes an entire wall or perhaps even more has to be taken out due to a mold infestation on a property and then there is the cost of the professional help that you will probably need to do this on top of the cost of protection equipment and chemicals. 

What the IRS has decided is that the cost of the remediation of the mold in your home is a necessary expense.  To be counted as a business expense, an expense must be both necessary and ordinary, no matter how great the cost may be. 

There are guidelines to this tax deduction, however.  If the mold removal and remediation is part of a larger renovation of the household, then you cannot count it as tax deductible at the end of the year; you must capitalize on it.  The removal of the mold cannot increase the financial value of the home or property in any way.  

Hiring a professional mold remediation company to do the work for you is usually the best thing to do and whatever they bill you at the end of the work is what you will count as deductible.  Building materials that you need to buy after the remediation is completed are deductible as well, since you will need these items to finish up the repairs.

Relocation expenses could possibly also be deductible if your family had to relocate while the remediation was taking place, since the relocation is a direct result of the mold removal.  Talk to the person who prepares your taxes every year and ask if this is an option.

New Haven Wet Carpet Drying 

If you take a look inside the case of your cell phone, you should see a round white sticker placed somewhere on the device.  What is it?  This is called a water damage sticker and if your phone is exposed to moisture that makes its way inside the phone, this can be used to completely void your warranty, no matter the reason your phone may stop working.  It does not seem to take much, either; a simple drop of water placed onto this sticker is enough to change its color and void the warranty on your cell phone.  For honest consumers who accidentally get a small bit of water on their phone and then 5 or 6 months later, suddenly notice that the phone is having problems, knowing about this sticker is quite useful.

What exactly can you do to stop this little devil from voiding the warranty on your phone should is accidentally get a little damp?  The best thing that you can do is to take a piece of satin finished scotch tape and put it over the sticker to keep the color from changing if it gets wet.  If you drop your phone into the toilet or the bathtub, this probably isn’t going to be that effective, but if you are just worried about general moisture problems or an accidental quick spill of something on the phone, this should work just fine.  If your phone stops working for some other reason, remove the tape and take it back to the manufacturer for repairs or a replacement. 

It is was not exactly a bad idea for these stickers to be put on the inside of phones, though; a lot of phones get returned that are supposedly not water damaged, but are.  At the same time, though, it is bad for the consumer because having such a sticker can completely void the warranty regardless of whether the liquid was the reason the phone stopped working or not.  The phone could have just been a defective model and it would make no difference.

Hopefully people will use the information presented here honestly and not try to defraud the phone company into giving them a new item after their phone was irreparably damaged by having a hot cup of coffee spilled onto it or something like that.  For honest consumers just having a bit of bad luck, it is great to know these kinds of things about our electronics just in case.  Unfortunately, there are those that will attempt to misuse this information.

 Orlando Water Damage Repair

Water damage is one of the worst things that can happen to your home that you can almost completely prevent, unless it is caused by mother nature. Floods and hurricanes are something that we can’t really prevent; all we can do is just try to prepare for it and often our preparations aren’t good enough. We should not feel bad about this, however, because nature will almost always win over any preparations that we make to try and keep her out of our homes. There are a few things that you can do to prevent water damage to your home on a smaller scale, but you will have to be diligent in your efforts if you are truly going to make it work.

Pay attention to your water heater. This and anything else in your house that uses a large amount of water is at risk of leaking out onto the floor and doing some serious damage. It should always be installed on the lowest level of your home, preferably in the basement raised up off the floor and sitting on a drain pan that is connected to a water drain in the floor. This will make sure that even if your water heater does start to leak, the water goes back into the sewer or your septic tank instead of onto your floor.

If you are worried about your dishwasher leaking, check the pipes and hoses that are leading to it first and make sure they are connected tightly and are not cracked anywhere. If you are buying a home that comes with a dishwasher already installed, you will want to check around the base of it to check for water damage. If the floor around it is discolored or if the base of the cabinet near it is warped, you might have a leaky dishwasher.

One thing that most homeowners have to do at least once a year is cleaning out the gutters that run around the roof and drain the water from the roof, through the downspout, and away from the house. These always end up collecting leaves, sticks, and other debris and if the gutters become clogged with this material, it will cause water to simply drop off the roof to the base of your house. If water saturates the ground at your home’s foundation, it will eventually cause it to sink into the ground.

Wet Carpet Drying

We all want the same action Stevie Ray Vaughan had. I mean guitar action, string height, neck relief, fret level. I’m talking the way the ‘action’ on his guitar is set up. Why would someone want a guitar ’setup’ like Stevie Ray’s? Well for one thing, he is one of the best blues guitar players that ever lived.  A relatively close second to Jimi Hendrix.

‘Lenny’, was one of Stevie Ray’s favorite guitars. Because I do some setup work and understand the specs Stevie Ray used for this particular guitar, I wanted to share the specifications with you. I reviewed a ‘Lenny’ guitar, and boy oh boy is it setup nice. Briefly, I love to do setup work, it’s very mechanical and precise and I enjoy setting up guitars for people and then hearing them say “it never played like this before.” I am not a guitar maker though, I am a setup artist.

Stevie Ray’s ‘Lenny’ Setup specs:

Scale length  25-1/2″  with a compounded 7-1/4″ to 12″ compound radius.

Frets are huge, .110″ x .055″ new.

Strings  are GHS Nickel Rockers, super large guage .013″to .058″. Must have had giant super human strength in his hands!

Nut action  is .o20″ on low E at nut and 3.5/32″ at 17th fret. On the high E the action is .012″ at nut and 5/64″ at 17th fret.

Simply put, these are the most critical points of adjustment. Not the only ones, but combine the different adjustments in the proper order and you have a guitar set up like Stevie Ray. Realistically speaking, if you have the specs, than it can be setup up  your way or to your favorite guitarists specs.

Personally I like an even lower action, or string height over the frets. As low as I can get it without fretting out. I came up with my own strategy from  reading and trying setup adjustments from many players, such as Jeff Beck and Eric Johnson, to name a few. I also craft a bone nut as a replacement nut for all of my guitars.

With that being said, I don’t recommend doing your own setup work. Especially if you have never done a setup or don’t have the correct tools. I would like to suggest trying it on a cheap guitar the first time. If not, for a perfect setup find a competent luthier and give him the setup specs that you want.

Got any questions? Fell free to ask Guitar Players Center via our comment area. I will attempt to answer all questions. If you like the vibe, please share it with others. Enjoy.

With median prices on 1 BR apartments jumping 6% since last year in New York City, it is no surprise to find that homeowners are holding off on unnecessary improvements. Nevertheless, institutions have picked up the slack, taking advantage of a glut in construction to get needed upgrades built or installed at discount as contractors look to fill their slower schedules with lower prices.

For instance, office remodels and school renovations top the list of renovations made this year, according to a report published by Gibralti & Elis. NYC kitchen remodeling and bathroom renovation, however, slowed to a percentage of projects so low it hasn’t be experienced since the slump of the late 70’s. All of this goes to show that although prices have risen in the core NYC market, consumers aren’t confident about the future of those prices and that, as a result, they aren’t as willing to invest in homes whose prices will either keep appreciating without improvements or which will fall regardless of the improvements.

What this is overall is that consumers do not feel that they can outwit the market with value-added renovation. And this is a bad sign from the standpoint of consumer confidence about the economy. Obviously a consumer who feels completely determined by the economic environment is one who will be reluctant to take big risks so long as the status quo is maintained. In other words, the reduction of homeowner spending in NY on apartment remodeling is a symptom of a bigger problem of consumer insecurity – an insecurity whose implied prophecy, a weak housing market, may be self-fulfilling. (Many thanks to Gibralti & Elis for their insight.)