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Search the Globe: Today Yesterday

A month's worth of Peter Hotton, Globe Handyman on Call Click here for an alphabetical list of topics covered by Peter Hotton's columns during the past several years.

Get ink, stickers off wood floors
(10/11/2001)
Q. My daughter's hardwood floors were marked with an indelible ink and a lot of little stickers. How can she remove the stickers and the ink?

Lime dust mars large brick patio
(10/4/2001)
Q. I have a problem with my brick patio. It is 20 by 20 feet. Half is made up of 4 to 6 inches of old concrete, topped by 1 inch of new concrete, then a layer of special asphalt to which the brick is applied, literally glued down. The other half is 2 feet of crushed stone topped by 6 inches of new concrete, then the asphalt and bricks as in the other half. Sand was swept between the bricks. Now, half of the patio has a white powder on it, very hard to sweep off; some of the bricks are covered, others only partially. The white goes away when it rains, and comes right back when the water dries out. The mason says the white is efflorescence, the leaching of lime out of the concrete by water. No one seems to know how to keep it away. Do you? The patio is sloped and seems to drain properly. The weird part of it is that most of the efflorescence occurs on the sunny half of the patio, which crosses the ''old'' concrete and the ''new.''

You may want to let spiders hang around
(9/27/2001)
Q. My house has had a serious spider problem for the past three years. They are the size of a dime including tightly bent legs. I find them in bed, in cabinets, and other places. I see only one at a time, and I squish them, but I am not winning. I do not see many webs around, although sometimes I walk into a single strand. Anything I can do about this?

Trying to spruce up concrete foundation
(9/20/2001)
Q. There is a lot of concrete foundation showing in my house - 3 feet in the front and tapering from 18 inches to almost nothing along the sides. I would like to paint or stain that foundation to take away the concrete look. What can I use and what color is appropriate?