[00:00:00] Intro: It's around the house. When it comes to remodeling and renovating your home. There is a lot to know though. We've got you coming. This is around the

[00:00:25] Intro: house.

[00:00:26] Intro: Welcome to around the house with Eric G in Caroline B. This is the post 4th of July midweek special. Welcome. Hey Caroline. Hey everyone. You kinda look like blueberry girl from Willie Wonka.

[00:00:44] Intro: Oh

[00:00:44] Intro: my God.

[00:00:46] Caroline Blazovsky: I literally have permanent blue teeth and tongue from eating so many blueberries over the weekend. Won't

[00:00:52] Intro: matches your shirt. It . It's

[00:00:56] Eric Goranson: so bad. This is pretty funny. This is pretty [00:01:00] funny. Well, I had an eventful weekend. Technology burned me a little bit on, you know, when you use technology around the house, it sometimes means that you can't go get a part right off the shelf on the 4th of July and fix it.

[00:01:14] Eric Goranson: Mm. And I ran into that over the weekend. So that was, uh, my, uh, awesome heat pump. Water heater had a rare failure and, uh, lost the control panel on it. And, uh, so I had to kind of MacGyver that. Got it figured out what's wrong. And the cool thing is. First thing in the morning I got on the phone and within an hour, they had that thing next day air.

[00:01:37] Eric Goranson: So fresh parts are coming out under warranty. So pretty good. But, uh, it did leave for not being able to track down parts on a, on a 4th of July, Saturday. But why does that survive?

[00:01:48] Caroline Blazovsky: That always happen. Like why does something always break on a major holiday or birthday or Christmas? It's

[00:01:54] Eric Goranson: always the holidays, right?

[00:01:56] Eric Goranson: Thanksgiving. It's just, it's just what it is and being new, [00:02:00] you know, it's a couple years old, but it's just one of those freak things. Aren't even sure what happened. They're like really those things never fail. My God. No, he pulled out the old,

[00:02:09] Caroline Blazovsky: you went old

[00:02:09] Eric Goranson: school. I did go old school. We'll talk about that later.

[00:02:12] Eric Goranson: Once I. Get the points parts, cuz I don't wanna talk about voiding, any warranties and stuff here. So , we'll keep that little story under wraps if you know what I mean. Well, did you see last week? I know you and I talked about it a little bit. Forbes came out with an interesting article for my friend, uh, Jamie gold.

[00:02:31] Eric Goranson: And she was talking about this new study that came out from Harvard, talking about the health hazards of gas cooking. Exactly saw it. You know, the first problem is, is that, you know, quite frankly, is either people not having the right ventilation or not using the right ventilation. Yes. Cause I don't, I don't blame as much of the, to me.

[00:02:56] Eric Goranson: I don't blame the gas cooking as much as the [00:03:00] cooking, you know, whether you're cooking on an electric stove top or you're cooking on a, on a, on a, on a gas one, you're still putting all those pollutants in the. No matter which cooking style you're using those particulates and, you know, burnt stuff, which can be carcinogens.

[00:03:16] Eric Goranson: You know what I mean?

[00:03:17] Caroline Blazovsky: Well, and the thing is you don't wanna think just because you're using electric over gas, that somehow you're avoiding all the other harmful pollutants. Obviously when you cook on natural gas or propane stove, you have to worry about carbon monoxide. You have to worry about formaldehyde.

[00:03:31] Caroline Blazovsky: You have to worry about other harmful. So, but electricity has its own issues as well. And electric is, is, you know, just as bad I think.

[00:03:40] Eric Goranson: Yeah. So here's, here's where I have a problem with the Harvard study that I wanna call out. You know, studies are as good as the sample you take. Right. I mean, that's kind of basic science, right?

[00:03:51] Eric Goranson: Mm-hmm yes. So the Harvard team. Went out and collected natural gas samples from 69 [00:04:00] kitchen stoves and building pipelines across greater Boston. Okay.

[00:04:05] Intro: 69. That's

[00:04:06] Eric Goranson: not a lot, no. To do a whole study on the industry with,

[00:04:11] Caroline Blazovsky: but public health studies traditionally are on very small samples. Believe it or not. It's not like you think there'd be 10,000 in a group, but that's not always the case.

[00:04:20] Eric Goranson: Cause yeah. So I look at that. Okay. So. Well, it's low budget, but the same point you look at that and go 69. I mean, we could probably pull our, our listening audience audience and get a better sample study of that. Yeah. You know what I mean? It's, it's crazy. So one of the things that they talked about though, out of that is that they were leaking, some of these were leaking gas that they actually had gas leaks, which I guess the one thing I wanted to say that.

[00:04:49] Eric Goranson: You wanna make sure that every once in a while you get that thing tuned up, that gas cooking appliance tuned up, and many times you can call your gas company and they'll come out on a moment's notice and test that thing [00:05:00] for a gas leak for you and not charge you.

[00:05:02] Caroline Blazovsky: I will not work on a home of my clients before.

[00:05:06] Caroline Blazovsky: If they have any symptoms that I think could be a gas leak, I always require that they have the gas company come out and check it. And you should do that every two years. Anyway, that's like my kind of go to, yeah, because you, if you move something, something gets bumped, you know, somebody hits something when they're servicing your a track.

[00:05:21] Caroline Blazovsky: Anything can happen. You can have a leak.

[00:05:24] Eric Goranson: That's simple. That's simple. Mm-hmm now that simple. Now there is a pretty decent California study that said that 39%. Of the people in California, households reported, never are rarely using the kitchen exhaust fans when cooking mm-hmm . I think that's the bigger problem outta the entire study is people not using those vent fans that vent to the exterior of the house.

[00:05:49] Eric Goranson: If you're using a circular fan where it's one of those recirculating ones, that's like having a recirculating toilet it's about as effecti. Yeah. And that's

[00:05:58] Caroline Blazovsky: like a lot of [00:06:00] condos, townhouses. I mean even, I mean, even homes, but

[00:06:05] Eric Goranson: they have no event. And we talk about that don't all the time. Don't that? Doesn't yeah.

[00:06:06] Eric Goranson: We talk about all the time that does not need code here in Oregon, where I'm at Washington. If you do a remodel, there is no way around that you have to put vent in that vents to the exterior when you do that remodel, when you're pulling permits and that's state code. So that's pretty interesting there.

[00:06:23] Eric Goranson: So the problem pushing problems in condo.

[00:06:26] Caroline Blazovsky: The problem with gas and propane is if you don't ventilate it, you've got a lot of carcinogenic activity happening. So you've got about 21. I think they found in that study. If I remember off the top of my head, mm-hmm, , um, different pollutants that were linked to cancer.

[00:06:39] Caroline Blazovsky: So, and that is with these petroleum products. You know, whether you store your car in the garage, unless you store your power equipment, all of that is the potential for these to raise your risk of having carcinogen. So that's something to keep in mind. It's not just stoves, it's other items that you store in the home as.

[00:06:56] Eric Goranson: Yeah, good point. Like you nailed me on early on last year, you nailed me on a bunch of [00:07:00] stuff, like break clean and all these things I had in my garage, which ends up getting inside your house.

[00:07:06] Caroline Blazovsky: You know, I just thought about something when you're talking about that study, if they took air samples and I, and I don't know how they collected them, but.

[00:07:12] Caroline Blazovsky: You could easily collect an air sample, close to a, a stove, but pick up all the extraneous stuff that people are storing in the house. So you could have high methane, you could have high tine, you could have all of these high levels, but it doesn't necessarily mean it's just coming from the stove. It could be in the air from numerous

[00:07:29] Eric Goranson: sources.

[00:07:30] Eric Goranson: Being that they don't discuss that. It lends me to believe that they probably were just taking a reader, a reading right next to the stove. And assuming that came from the stove and it exactly could have been coming from a fireplace or it could have been coming from the garage or anything else,

[00:07:44] Caroline Blazovsky: Uhhuh a hundred percent

[00:07:46] Eric Goranson: interesting.

[00:07:46] Eric Goranson: Come on Harvard, get your act together, guys. We're gonna

[00:07:49] Caroline Blazovsky: call you, but they are chin chin. The, the public health, um, studies they do out of there are pretty good. I mean, they're like the top. When I was studying public health. That's, you [00:08:00] know, they're the guys we like

[00:08:01] Eric Goranson: at, at, I just, when they get into home improvement, stuff like that, it's like, you guys should do a better job.

[00:08:05] Eric Goranson: I think I'm gonna call 'em out on it. There's better ways to do that. They should have been looking at a little bit more than just a handful of ranges. Yeah. In, in one sec. No. Anyway, that's my take on that one. There's my rant for the day. All fun. Oh yeah. So how was your fourth, uh, heard you were trying to.

[00:08:26] Eric Goranson: Instead of sword swallowing, you were, uh, trying to firework swallow.

[00:08:30] Caroline Blazovsky: Oh, no, not intentionally, but no, it was the best 4th of July. I think we've had in a long time, the weather was pristine. I think it was the nicest weather we had on the east coast. I mean just blaring sun and beautiful weather. But yeah, I, I accidentally ate some embers off of the, uh, fireworks, which was

[00:08:47] Intro: not, how did you that, how do you, how do you, how do you,

[00:08:50] Eric Goranson: how do you eat embers?

[00:08:52] Eric Goranson: I

[00:08:52] Caroline Blazovsky: don't know, but I don't recommend it unless you want serious pain, cuz it was not pleasant. Eric's lucky as a, a cohost this [00:09:00] morning,

[00:09:01] Intro: cuz

[00:09:01] Eric Goranson: somehow, well that is not good. Caroline,

[00:09:05] Caroline Blazovsky: stay far away. When these things blow off, you just, you think you're far enough away and you're not. And then no one believed me that I swallowed it.

[00:09:13] Caroline Blazovsky: And then when I looked at my phone video, you could see them hitting the phone and I'm like, see

[00:09:18] Intro: told you that's not good. It's like swallowing glass or something. Ouch. Yeah.

[00:09:26] Caroline Blazovsky: Fire. It's not good. Stay away from the fireworks. I think I'm done with them for a while.

[00:09:32] Eric Goranson: uh, you know what, I'm gonna call you on that one because you know what that means.

[00:09:36] Eric Goranson: That's just like people that drink too much tequila the night before. I'm never gonna drink tequila again. And guess what?

[00:09:46] Eric Goranson: We're not gonna eat fireworks again. It's never gonna weeks again. Next 4th of July tune back in and we can hear Caroline going, oh, we had the best time blowing stuff up. We'll have to replay this back.

[00:09:58] Eric Goranson: oh, well, man, I can't believe [00:10:00] it's July already. We got so many things going on this month. We got some great guests coming up. We've got some great shows coming up. So, uh, We've got some good stuff coming your way, guys. We are not tapping the breaks this summer at all. No best of shows. We are just gonna lock 'em in and load 'em up.

[00:10:16] Eric Goranson: And we've got a lot of great information coming ahead. And if you have

[00:10:18] Caroline Blazovsky: a topic you want us to talk about, we'd like to hear from you.

[00:10:23] Eric Goranson: Yeah. We got an email over the weekend on that. That was kind of cool. So we've got, uh, more people. Requesting, which I love. I like those, uh, I like those emails coming in. So feel free to do that.

[00:10:36] Eric Goranson: You can just message us over at, uh, around the house, online.com if you got something there. And then of course, if you're listening to us here on the podcast, make sure that you've subscribed that podcast by the way, because we wanna make sure that, um, you're getting every episode.

[00:10:52] Caroline Blazovsky: You know what I did, we, we never talk about gardening, but when you go to a garden center, a lot of the time they have.

[00:10:59] Caroline Blazovsky: The [00:11:00] leftover plants and things that, you know, it gets to that season and people aren't really planting anymore, which here is kind of the end of the season. Yeah. But I went and picked up all of these, you know, kind of leftover plants and you can sort of get a discount on that stuff. And I, and I went and did all the, uh, planters, cuz I just felt like, you know, I'm gonna try to save salvage some of these cuz they kind of leave them in the garden centers and they sort of don't attend to them towards the end of the season

[00:11:22] Eric Goranson: anymore.

[00:11:23] Eric Goranson: Yeah. They stop watering 'em they just kind of start yeah. Giving up on 'em.

[00:11:27] Caroline Blazovsky: So I got crates or cases of, of all kinds of different flowers and I went and planted a whole bunch of stuff. So it's kind of a nice thing to do. Save yourself some money, foster, some plants like fostering animals, right.

[00:11:41] Eric Goranson: and I'm

[00:11:41] Intro: bringing them back to life

[00:11:42] Eric Goranson: now.

[00:11:42] Eric Goranson: See. Nice, nice. I like it. I like

[00:11:46] Caroline Blazovsky: lots of that's cool sales out there. We picked up, we picked up two couches. Oh, yeah, couches. This weekend. Got some nice couches

[00:11:54] Eric Goranson: coming. There you go. There you go. I bet you, I bet you when you're out couch shopping. I bet you're [00:12:00] really checking out. What's built into that couch.

[00:12:02] Eric Goranson: Aren't you?

[00:12:03] Caroline Blazovsky: I am. And you know what? I found out that the fabric has latex backing. So you have to be very cautious about the fabric that you actually pick. Cause who wants to lay on latex? I mean, I don't.

[00:12:14] Eric Goranson: I didn't know that. Well, then you gotta think of what what's inside, the different foams that are inside, how those are gonna off gas.

[00:12:20] Eric Goranson: Right. Mm-hmm absolutely for Malda hides, that kind of stuff. Well,

[00:12:26] Caroline Blazovsky: the flame retardants. Yep. Mm-hmm but they've reduced a lot of that stuff now, but yeah, it's interesting. I, and you know, I'm very particular about the wood. Like I actually want real wood framing or real plywood. I don't want a lot of this.

[00:12:37] Caroline Blazovsky: Yeah. You know?

[00:12:37] Eric Goranson: Well, but you gotta be careful with the plywood. You need to find out where that plywood came from because there can be. From Alde high Malda high filled plywood coming out of, uh, Southeast Asia.

[00:12:49] Caroline Blazovsky: There you go. My couch is made in the us. I don't know if that helps me, but it is all right.

[00:12:54] Eric Goranson: There you go. There you go. Lots of great tool sales this week as well. And those are just kind [00:13:00] of wrapping up usually at the home centers here and last couple days. So you wanna make sure and get on that. And then I can't wait. We have, uh, what is that Amazon deal day or whatever that is coming up here soon too, you know, the Amazon day.

[00:13:13] Eric Goranson: No kinda like Amazon's black Friday. I like that that's coming up. So that's gonna be cool. And, uh, man, we're gonna, we've got a lot of good stuff. I was just talking with our old host of around the house. That was my old co-host handyman Bob. He wants to come in and talk about asbestos, which I love and he's an asbestos expert, so, oh my gosh, we're gonna, we're gonna get him on again.

[00:13:37] Eric Goranson: So being prepared for that one, him and I were chatting this morning. So he calls it the miracle mineral. Because that's how they used to market it back in the fifties and sixties. Yeah.

[00:13:51] Intro: whoa. No,

[00:13:52] Eric Goranson: there we go. There we go. I like it. I like it. So anyway, we've got a lot of good stuff coming up and, uh, we'll be [00:14:00] talking gardening too, I think, on the coming week. So stay tuned

[00:14:03] Intro: for all of that.

[00:14:05] Caroline Blazovsky: Bank time. I wanna learn to make my garden last longer into, into the fall because there's gotta be tricks to doing that.

[00:14:12] Caroline Blazovsky: And that's what I'm focused on with our gardening guest. I wanna know, like, can you, can you keep it going and have crops coming? And I know OB obviously it's what you plant, but how do you do it? Yeah. And have good stuff going into the fall.

[00:14:25] Eric Goranson: See for us here, our water is so expensive. It's hard to do a big garden and make it cost effective.

[00:14:33] Eric Goranson: Mmm. So if I have a garden, if I do a, you know, like a garden of your size, oh, that would add probably a hundred dollars a month onto my water bill watering that every day or two dang. Doing that

[00:14:49] Caroline Blazovsky: four months, you need no water, but you get a lot of water out there. Maybe you don't need to water that much.

[00:14:54] Eric Goranson: no, but here's the problem. And this is what the problem is, is because we don't get rain [00:15:00] from, you know, mid-June till September, it's rare. True. So literally to keep our rose bushes and everything alive, we literally have to water those every time, other day in the summertime. To keep those things going.

[00:15:17] Eric Goranson: And I realized last year when I was doing some work around them, I thought I was watering 'em long. I wasn't even close. I should have been hitting them twice as hard as I did last year. So this year we're really trying to get a little deeper on the watering. I was only watering that that soil would only let it go down an inch or two before it would run off and do other stuff.

[00:15:35] Eric Goranson: And so I was under watering my roses, which is why they didn't do like they were supposed to last year. So they need a lot of water and you need those. It's always good to dig down and

[00:15:43] Caroline Blazovsky: see they, well, they need those hoses. You need those hoses that sort of have, you know, the permeations in them. So they.

[00:15:49] Caroline Blazovsky: You can spread it out and they can water just for long periods and you have to leave it on for hours and just let it S drips those slowly. Yeah.

[00:15:58] Eric Goranson: Yeah. That's smart. Yeah, I've gotta do [00:16:00] that. I can't just put a sprinkler on 'em cuz it no, just runs right off

[00:16:04] Caroline Blazovsky: and you know what I do, I end up like watering them in the middle of the sun and then they just fry up.

[00:16:08] Caroline Blazovsky: Cause all it does is like attract the sun to it and then you gotta water at night. You know, off hours. Yeah.

[00:16:14] Eric Goranson: We've been well. And then sometimes you don't wanna water at night because you can get mildew and stuff on 'em. So you're almost wanting to do it in the morning in some spaces. Cause you don't.

[00:16:21] Eric Goranson: Yeah. Early morning. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like 4:00 AM. So there's a lot of cool things with that. Oh. Oh, I'm already out doing stuff at 4:00 AM. I don't need one more thing to do at 4:00 AM. So at least you're not, there's a lot. Eh, good point, good point. Fireworks and blueberries. You got it down this weekend.

[00:16:41] Caroline Blazovsky: My mouth is electric.

[00:16:44] Eric Goranson: literally. Oh, so we, uh, we did one little little project. We installed the TV out in the outside, uh, barbecue

[00:16:51] Intro: bar. Oh,

[00:16:55] Eric Goranson: you did? That's awesome. So we got that out there. So in, in, in full disclosure, did we do any of the [00:17:00] safety things of buying the exterior TV? Or one of the cabinets? Nope. It's fully undercover.

[00:17:08] Eric Goranson: It's a 10 year old LG. That's good, perfect. 39 inch television. That when it fails, cuz it will, it will, it will not like the dust and stuff that's out there, you know? And uh, we'll cover it up on the rainy times and that kind of stuff. It's fully undercover. So it's well under a, a cover out there. So, but it's, it's something that it has no value to it really, you know, that's good.

[00:17:34] Eric Goranson: And it's gonna go to the recycle when it's done and it's in a place where it's never gonna be a fire hazard, but uh, Yeah, it it's great to have it out there got a little Roku so we can stream everything you wanna see or, or watch our, uh, Xfinity cable on it. Cuz they have an app on that and got that mattered up, which changed the entire outside area.

[00:17:56] Eric Goranson: Just by putting that out there.

[00:17:58] Caroline Blazovsky: It is, it makes it just so [00:18:00] comfortable and now you can watch whatever you want. That's excellent.

[00:18:03] Eric Goranson: Good choice. Oh, so on Sunday it was like, I was watching that, you know, that access TV or whatever that has all the concerts on it on cable. So I had like Pearl jam concert going.

[00:18:13] Eric Goranson: I had stone temple pilots going out there while I was doing some yard work on the TV. I was like, man, I can double get stuff done outside while I'm rocking out, outside at the bar out there. So it was perfect. It was perfect. It worked out. Excellent. So that was good. Well, we got a fun show coming up this weekend, Caroline, before we go, let's tease ahead for that.

[00:18:34] Eric Goranson: So we're gonna be talking hour. Number one, we're gonna be talking about my top secrets, my top five for modeling that kitchen

[00:18:43] Caroline Blazovsky: guys. This is so good. Like if you wanna know before you get involved with your kitchen, how to just prevent disaster, this is gonna help you tremendously. And there's so many secrets that Eric, that I learned.

[00:18:55] Caroline Blazovsky: To help me get it done without a problem. You've gotta tune into, if you're gonna do redo a kitchen or [00:19:00] even thinking about it, you need to get your education here

[00:19:04] Eric Goranson: and then we're gonna talk air quality testing in the next hour. That's gonna be fun as well. So there's some good stuff on that one there as well, talking about, uh, mold and everything else.

[00:19:16] Eric Goranson: That's, uh, kind of a different look that we're doing this time. Yeah, how to

[00:19:19] Caroline Blazovsky: monitor your home. Like what you can actually do. You can monitor for COVID. You can monitor for mold, allergens all with a device that looks like an Alexa and just put it in the space and you're gonna be good to go. So you've gotta see if you're concerned about indoor air quality or you have anybody in the home that has health issues.

[00:19:35] Caroline Blazovsky: This is the show for you to learn how to do it yourself. Yeah.

[00:19:38] Eric Goranson: Wow. So we've got Michael and Rachel coming on. This is gonna be a lot of fun this weekend. You don't wanna miss that one. And, uh, you can see where you're at on the, on the, uh, interior health of your home real time. So that's pretty cool. Very cool.

[00:19:54] Eric Goranson: All right. Well, I hear that music, Caroline. It's time to roll. I'm Eric G and I'm Caroline B [00:20:00] and you've been listening to around the house