Hi! I’m Bob Schmidt with Home Remodel Workshop.
I got me a little kitchen tear-out going here, but prior to starting the tear-out, there’s always a couple of things you need to do before you over start a project where you’re going to be ripping in the walls. I’ll show you how it’s done. Let’s get to work.
One of the two critical things that you need to make sure that you know where they are, number 1 is the electrical panel. The last thing you want to do is find yourself in some type of difficulty where you accidentally got in to some electric, and you need to find the panel and get it shut off. You also need to make sure that it’s clear of debris that you can get to it, and hopefully you check before you start to make sure it’s clearly marked, so you’re aware of where things are. If for some reason it isn’t, take a little bit of time, check some of your breakers, see what it shuts off, so you’re at least familiar with the areas that the breakers cover.
The second thing that’s critical to know is where your water shut off is, the main that’s coming into your house. Usually it’s coming through a concrete wall if you have a full basement, or if you don’t if you’re in a slab house usually it’s coming up through the floor on an interiors part of your house. You need to know where that is because if you accidentally get into a water line, and you have water squirting around your basement or around your house, you definitely don’t want to figure out where the plumbing shut off is at that point. There’s a few minutes it may take you to find it and get it shut off could make thousands of dollars of difference in damage, so you want to be aware where this is.
Also, this has an older crank valve on it, prior to starting this project I went ahead and shut this off and I shut it off real slow because of it being older and I wanted to make sure that I didn’t have any leaks here, and that it actually did shut off all the way so that when I turn the water on in other areas of the house, that it wasn’t still running. If this had been an issue, I would have definitely remedied this, had a plumber come in and replace this valve prior to starting the project because you want to be able to shut the water off completely in the event that there’s an emergency.
Another good thing to know prior to the start of your project, is where your gas shut off is. It’s right here on this meter on the outside on this project. It requires this wrench to shut it off. Now, one thing to keep in mind prior to shutting off your gas, in a lot of houses, there are pilot lights, and old stoves, old furnaces, older water heaters. I would not shut this gas off unless it was in an event of an extreme emergency where something accidentally got disrupted inside the house. If I was to shut this gas off in an emergency, I would definitely make sure that before I turn it back on, that I had somebody who is qualified to relight all the pilot lights in the house, reset anything that had to be set prior to turning this back on. That’s very important. Generally, I don’t shut this off during a project, gas line is in a heavy cast pipe, it’s pretty hard to break, but I’m sure that this doesn’t happen. So, that’s another thing to keep in mind.
One more thing, if you have a security system inside the project that you’re working on, you may also want to make sure that you know what the procedures are in the event that the security system gets disrupted. Know what the code word is, know how to shut the system down, or even call the security company in advance and let them know that there’s going to be some work done in this house. A lot of security systems will go ahead and send a fire truck or the police directly to your house, and there are charges for that in the event that there are too many false alarms. So, you may want to make sure that you’re very aware of that procedure also.
So there you go, follow these couple of pieces of advice and you’re probably save yourself a little heartache in case you get into trouble on your job.
I’m Bob Schmidt with Home Remodel Workshop. If you like these tips, please subscribe and if not, we’ve got plenty of other videos back at our home channel. Check us out. Thanks!
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