The holidays are right around the corner and now is the time to take care of the improvements you’ve been procrastinating about all year long. From dead doorbells and jammed doors, to caulking the bath and replacing broken tiles, here are our top quick fixes, and all the information you need to get the job done right.

A house with good bones has pleasing lines on the outside, but that artful composition has to be echoed on the inside, too. And nothing’s better for giving rooms a handsome, well-built look than wainscoting on the walls.

A combination of decorative boards or panels and moldings that extend partway up a wall’s face, wainscoting is a centuries-old marriage of form and style. Dating to the 1300s, the Dutch used it to shield the bottom half of plaster walls from such hazards as jostled chairs, spurs on riding boots, perhaps even carelessly swung scabbards. Wainscoting still guards our walls, but today it’s from dirt-caked gardening shoes in mudrooms, olive-oil fingerprints in kitchens, and the inevitable scuffs in the close quarters along hallways and stairways.

Noise disrupts a peaceful home and can interrupt sleep and increase stress. New housing developments place houses closer together on smaller lots, so it’s easier to hear your neighbors. Indoors, home theaters and powerful stereo systems are creating more noise. What’s worse, noise travels easily around walls, under doors and through floors and ceilings.

There are two basic pathways by which sound can travel from room to room: through the air and through the solid building materials. The easiest way to make your home quieter is to use sound control insulation in the interior walls. Even if you only insulate key rooms, you’ll notice the difference.

Baseboard trim covers the joints between the walls and the floor and adds an essential finishing touch to a room. You can choose from many styles of baseboard and shoe moldings to get the look you want, from understated to elaborately detailed.

Drywall repair is a project that most homeowners will have to face at one time or another. It encompasses a wide range of problems that include everything from nail pops to holes from doorknobs to major repairs like water damage and cracks caused by a settling foundation. Whatever your problem is, it’s important to understand the scope of the repair so that you don’t get in over your head if you’re a do-it-yourselfer.

here are few home improvement tasks greeted with more dread than finishing drywall. If you’re like most people, you hope that you’ve already done your last finishing job. Unfortunately, if you enjoy working on your home, you are bound to be confronted by this task again. So it’s worth your while to check out the tips and techniques we discuss here.

Q: What tools/stuff do I need to skim coat?

A: Some prefer to put joint compound in a ‘mud pan’ (like a bread-making pan), and use what is called a broad knife, which is a wide putty knife. Beyond a 3 inch putty knife, you pretty much start calling them broadknives. I like to use a 10 inch one. it is wide enough. Too wide a knife and you wind up with a weird flex in the blade that can leave hump and ridges in your mud at overlap points.

Others will use what is called a ‘hawk’ (which is a flatboard ontop of a short stick, and then use a trowel with it (like what you use for cement). IMO, the hawk and trowel is good for ceilings as you can catch slobber that falls, towards your face for one thing.

For walls, I like the feel of the control I get using a broadknife vertically on the wall. Something about grabbing the handle of the trowel and pulling sideways bothers me.

So get yourself a 5 gallon pail of ‘lightweight’ ready mix joint compound. It sands easier. Too bad for you, trying to learn mudding by skim coating an entire wall is not easy for the first time. Mudding is like learning how to ride a bike – the training wheels thing, etc. The idea is so you don’t have to sand a ton of mud back off! Unfortunately, you can bet on you are going to have to do a lot of sanding.

Therefore you also need a sanding pole and sanding screen and/or those sanding sponge blocks. I love those things. They come in different grits. Get them all.

You also might consider getting one of those halogen floodlights that you can sit on the floor that adjusts, and has like a 300 watt skinny lamp bulb in it. As you mud, and especially as you sand, you want to cast the light on the wall at an acute angle so that you can see any waves, high spots, low spots, gouges, etc.

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You want to wallpaper – or put new texture -  but it’s not smooth enough. Some helpful steps to skim coat and prepare for a beautiful paper, or texture, job.