There are a lot of potentially harmful quick fixes in the home repair business: ones that use junk products or "special" installation methods. Sales pitches and promotions offering easy solutions to common problems in the home are designed to appeal to your expedient nature. They always sound too good to be true. Well, guess what?
One such quick fix is to use vinyl or aluminum siding as a short-term, cheap way to cover up serious problems. Now, properly installed, such siding is a perfectly acceptable exterior finish. But with a home badly in need of a coat of paint or with rot showing around the foundation, the owner is often enticed to use siding to hide the problem, rather than actually fix it. The practice became popular in the 1970s, when aluminum siding was put on hundreds of thousands of homes, leaving them to deteriorate under this lipstick and mascara. I've seen hundreds of them -- reeking with mould, floors collapsing, rotten almost beyond repair. And it's just because the homeowner couldn't resist the to-good-to-be-true quick fix.
A more recent, well-known quick fix is installing a vinyl tub surround to cover over an old tub and shower enclosure. You've seen them being sold at home shows, right beside the guy selling super-absorbent mops that start your car, and the other guy selling glass cleaner that melts brick. The promise is that, once installed -- blam! -- all your mould, caulking and water-damage problems go away.
In fact, you'll make the problem infinitely worse. Now, not only are your problems not fixed, they are hidden under an impervious vinyl membrane and will destroy your home without you having any idea of the damage being caused until it's too late. Not only that, being trapped under non-breathable vinyl accelerates the destruction.
What a mess. But it's no worse than a wallpaper quick fix, where it is installed as an easy cover-up for failing drywall and plaster. Or oil-based paint as an exterior brick repair! And quick, down-and-dirty solutions for flooring have made recent inroads, with wood flooring that comes in panels that click together without the need for nails or fastenings. Easy to install, true, but also an easy way to cover up problems that will fester without your attention and eventually suck the value right out of your house.
Here's another quick fix I've seen over and over: A homeowner wants new kitchen cabinets but wants them cheap, so he decides he'll take out the old and put in the new without touching the drywall. That means patched electrical wires and makeshift plumbing, while no attempt is made to repair or replace anything behind the walls. The results look lousy, function badly and are dangerous. Cheap fix. Down and dirty. Terrible.
One of the most common quick fixes I see is new tile being laid over old flooring, because it's less work than tearing up the original floor and laying the new tile on a properly prepared substrate. What makes contractors -- or homeowners, for that matter -- think that makes any kind of sense? All it will lead to is cracked grout and tile, and your make-up job won't look good for long.
Don't buy into the quick-fix mentality and don't get caught with a quick-fix contractor. Look at your home with different eyes. When I see the first signs of damage occurring, I see it for what it is: a clue revealing facts that I need to know in order to care properly for the home. I follow the clue to its source and evaluate how to proceed to the solution. And once I've got it, I look to the rest of the house and ask, "What does this work give me the opportunity to do? Repair or replace old wiring? Improve the insulation value of a cold wall? Never close up any work before you are satisfied that you've done everything you can to improve your home's health, quality and safety. Make your home a no-quick-fix zone.
What people need to do is start repairing and renovating their houses from the inside out, not the outside in. Make sure you tear out the old, the ugly and the bad, and start fresh. Don't just cover it over and hope for the best.
Mike Holmes is the host of Holmes on Homes on HGTV.