‘Garage Rehab’ star Richard Rawlings’ three moneymaking tips for garage owners

By Benjamin Brown, Fox News
 

Richard Rawlings, owner of Gas Monkey Garage and star of Discovery’s “Fast N’ Loud” series, has launched a new show with the cable network called “Garage Rehab” that’s aimed at giving struggling shops a second chance.

The idea for the show, which airs Wednesdays at 10 pm on Discovery, developed from Rawling’s personal experiences, when he faced similar challenges building his own business.

“I was so broke that I was sleeping at my sister’s house, could hardly pay rent. It was like, if I could just get that $2,500 loan for this piece of equipment, or if I could just get five-grand in the bank, I think I could turn the corner,” Rawlings said.

After becoming a successful entrepreneur, Rawlings is now focused on transforming shops in need of a makeover and struggling to make ends meet.

“If I can teach them a little bit about business, and put them on the right track, and try to point out where they’re doing things a little bit wrong, and get them rolling and pointed in the right direction, then maybe they too can succeed and take care of their families and their employees,” Rawlings told Fox News.

Most of the auto shops he sees have “gotten lax” and “lost their identity,” said Rawlings, who offered three pieces of advice that every garage owner should know to make money.

1.)   Clean work environment

“You need a good, clean working environment. You want to look professional when somebody walks in the door. And most of them are horrible – guys sitting around, smoking, drinking beer, barbecuing or whatever. You want a good, wholesome, clean environment and that’s number one.”

2.)   Dress to impress

“I’m tattooed and I’ve got a beard. But I keep it trimmed and I’m clean, and I have my work shirt on – these guys don’t do the same. So, an unkempt persona is just very scary to a lot of people. Keep yourself clean and professional.”

3.)   Customer service

“If you make somebody feel that you know what you’re doing and you’re polite and you communicated at a level they can understand, there’s a recipe for success: Nice shop, clean yourself up and just be nice to people.”

At the end of the day, garage owners only have two things to sell, the “space on the floor and time…turning wrenches,” added Rawlings, who emphasized the importance of keeping a clear work area.

“It’s amazing, we’ll go into a shop that could have seven or eight working bays and they’ll only be working out of one or two because they’ve accumulated so much junk.”

Link to the article: http://www.foxnews.com/auto/2017/09/21/garage-rehab-star-richard-rawlings-three-moneymaking-tips-for-garage-owners.html

Related articles: https://carljarl.wordpress.com/2018/02/01/top-10-garage-door-security-tips/

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Hire Quality Technicians For Garage Door Repair

Publié par JesseBrandt 6 Décembre 2017 à 09:05 PM

If your garage doors are damaged, need roller replacement, or if you need garage door parts replaced, who do you call? Because of the fact that the garage doors are used so often, and are essential in any home, if they aren’t functioning, it is quite difficult for many families to park their car safely or store items safely outside the home. From repairing a few mechanisms or springs, fixing the clicker or opener, or replacing dated garage door parts, you need to rely on the best service team for these and other door repair service needs.

Hire licensed specialists –

If a company is not fully licensed and certified, do not deal with them. If they aren’t fully bonded to perform repair services, do not hire them. Make sure a company has all required credentials, documentation, certification, and that all of this is up to date, prior to contracting them for repair services. Not only does it ensure their technicians are up to date in training and repair methods, it is also the only way to ensure the repair service is done properly and the work is going to be guaranteed to the customer, as well.

Know their service offerings –

A company that specializes in repairing openers is not necessarily going to know how to properly repair a spring or coil system. The same goes with a company that has technicians specializing in roller repairs, when a customer just needs to have a dent fixed in the door. So, when hiring a company, make sure you hire one that specializes in the area of repair services you need to have performed. Not only does this ensure they have dedicated technicians for the particular type of service you need, it also ensures they will have the required tools and equipment to do any job they are hired to do, as well.

Make sure they have the parts in inventory –

You don’t want to wait several weeks to have repairs performed. So hiring a company that has the parts in stock, has the tools and equipment to do the job, and can do the work immediately, are a few things that clients have to look for in choosing a good service team. Not only does this mean the work will get done in a timely fashion, but it will also keep costs down. When a company has parts in inventory and on hand, they do not have to order from a third party supplier. In turn, they can pass these savings down to the customer and they can also do the work far faster than if they would have to wait on those parts to arrive prior to getting the repair job underway for the client.
When garage door repairs or replacement garage door panels are needed, homeowners have to hire the most renowned technicians to perform those repairs. As no two repair jobs are completely alike, no two customers will hire the exact same company for the exact same services. Before hiring a company, these are some of the ways to ensure you hire the right one for all your garage door repair service needs.


Link to the article: http://www.pvhvac.com/blog/indoor-air-quality-vs-garage-habits/

Related articles: https://medicaldeviceslegal.com/2014/03/05/3d-printing-of-custom-medical-devices-under-future-eu-law/

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Do you have an attached garage? I do. It’s convenient for storing tools, bicycles, and holiday decorations. Oh, and my car. That, too.

Unfortunately, attached garages are also a source of indoor air quality problems. Cars live in them, which means internal combustion engines live in them. Every time you start your car, it exhausts carbon monoxide, or CO, into the air.

In some cases, the CO can seep into your home.

Shutting the garage door is important, but it’s not the only solution.

By now you’re probably thinking, “Ok. I already open the garage door before cranking up my car. What else is there to know?”

Well, that is the main thing to remember if you don’t want car exhaust to make you sick. Always open the garage door before you put the key in the ignition. Pretty simple.

The thing is, car exhaust can linger in your garage for awhile – even after you’ve backed into the driveway or after you’ve parked the car in the garage and shut off the engine. According to a fact sheet from the Iowa State University Department of Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering extension service, closing the garage door immediately after backing out the car might create an unintended threat to health and safety:

The effect of backing the car out of the garage should be monitored with a CO detector in the house (several detectors have digital displays and memories that can help determine if the CO in the house is elevated by backing the vehicle out of the garage). If carbon monoxide enters the house, it will be necessary to leave the garage door open after backing out until the CO clears.

Every home is different. Every garage is different. Every garage ventilates differently. If you happen to have a garage that doesn’t ventilate particularly well – or one where air inside the garage tends to migrate into your living space – you might need to change your garage habits.

Here’s how to prevent car exhaust from polluting your home.

The following primer isn’t a set of instructions. Rather, it’s a guide for determining whether CO from your car’s exhaust enters your home – and taking the appropriate steps to stop it.

1. Don’t ever close the garage door while your car is running. By the same token, don’t ever crank your car before the door opens. Doing so presents real danger. CO concentrations in car exhaust are extremely high and can harm you very quickly.
2. Keep the door open for a few minutes after parking your car. This gives the exhaust time to dissipate into the outdoor environment.
   Install a CO detector in the room adjoining your garage. This might be a hallway, foyer, kitchen, or laundry room. Whatever room contains a door that opens to your garage, put a CO detector in there. And make sure you get a quality unit with sufficient CO sensitivity.
3. Monitor indoor CO concentrations after cranking or parking your car. Does the alarm go off following normal activity? If it does, then you definitely need to heed steps 4 and 5.
4. Air seal the area between your garage and your living space. When we say “air seal,” we’re talking about applying fire-rated foam around wiring and plumbing penetrations between the garage and the living space. You should also have a quality weather seal around the door to the garage so that fumes can’t leak in.
5. Install an exhaust fan in the garage. Here’s a great way to remove CO from your garage. Install a small exhaust fan that turns on every time you close your garage door. Connect it to a timer, and it will turn itself off after several minutes. You can also use a switch to turn it on and off manually. A properly-sized fan will remove lingering car exhaust from your garage so that it doesn’t enter your living space.

Even if your carbon monoxide detector doesn’t go off while you’re testing things out (see #3 above), air sealing and/or installing an exhaust fan is smart. After all, “normal” conditions aren’t consistent.

You might be in the habit of opening and closing the garage door at the appropriate times, but that doesn’t mean you’ll always remember to do so.

Forgetting to open the garage door before cranking your car is an innocent mistake, but the consequences can be serious. Good air sealing and an automatic exhaust fan can pick up the slack for our own absentmindedness.

The exhaust fan is also a good idea when:

• You’ve got a really “tight,” energy efficient house. Indoor air quality is the achilles heel of many supposedly high performance homes. They’re so well-sealed, the indoor air takes forever to escape! But while these homes are well-sealed in their entirety, the air sealing between the garage and the living space isn’t always so robust.
• You don’t like keeping the door open after you park. Maybe you’re afraid people will steal your stuff or you’re worried about letting in cold air, hot air, humidity, or rain. Whatever your reasons for keeping that door shut tight, an exhaust fan is a way to mitigate the heightened CO risk.

We’ve all got our habits.

And they can be tough to break. However, when it comes to protecting yourself and your family from CO poisoning, changing your habits is worth the effort.

If you’re like most people, you won’t have to change anything about your garage habits – and that’s good! The only way to be sure is to get a CO detector, adopt good habits, and take action to reduce your risk.

Garages are great. Just be aware of the hazards they may pose.

Link to the article: http://www.pvhvac.com/blog/indoor-air-quality-vs-garage-habits/

Related articles: https://medicaldeviceslegal.com/2014/03/05/3d-printing-of-custom-medical-devices-under-future-eu-law/

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How to Deep Clean Your Home in Six Minutes a Day

The clever way to deep clean your home! Get a sparkly clean home in just 6 minutes a day and never lose an entire week to cleaning your home again!

You know what I love even more than a home that looks clean all the time? A home that actually is clean all the time! I really love the idea of giving my home a thorough deep clean, organizing every nook and cranny, and having things just right for my family. And I’d like it to be like that always, if possible.  If you think about how most homes with families living in them are, then you know that you’d probably need to spend at least one week out of every month doing a “spring cleaning” style cleaning to keep that up. Who has time for that? I know I can’t just give up a whole week of my life, really ever, to dedicate to cleaning. But I just love a good deep clean!

So here’s what I do instead!

I’ve always been a fan of tackling big projects a little bit at a time, because I just hate to give up a whole day and let all of my carefully crafted routines get out of whack. When you have a big project to tackle, whether it’s organizing the basement, or cleaning up your yard, I find that doing just a few minutes of focussed work each day is so much more effective than wasting a whole week on it. And it works if you want to deep clean your house too!

I know we always think of deep cleaning as the kind of thing where you tear your whole house apart, but it really doesn’t need to be that way. Actually, when you do the “let’s clean this whole house all in one shot” method, you actually waste a lot of time and you’re much more inefficient because you get tired. Or bored. Or distracted. It’s just the way things work! But anyone can find a few minutes to focus on something and get real results. Here’s how I do it!

Have a List

Having a list written down somewhere of tasks you’d like to accomplish goes such a long long way in helping you stay focussed and really get stuff done when you’re working with such a small amount of time. If you’re a big planner, spend a few minutes writing down a simple task for each day to deep clean your home.

If you like to go with the flow a little bit more, just keep a running list somewhere. I use the notepad in my phone usually, that way I can just write something down when I think of it. I’m a big fan of planning but for this stage in my life, the more free-form method of just having a list in my phone makes more sense because I don’t have to mess up my whole system when something goes awry and I miss a day. I just pick back up the next day, right where I left off. Starting out with a list when you want to deep clean your home sounds so ridiculously obviously and simplistic, I know, but it’s a key part of keeping yourself organized for this whole 6 minute deep clean process and it’s also something a lot of people seem to skip.

Set a Timer

If you’re going to be accomplishing big things in a teeny-weeny amount of time, you’re going to need to keep track of those minutes and seconds really well. Luckily, a lot of us carry around a timer in our pocket all day long on our phone without even realizing it. The timer on your phone is the perfect tool for this because you can adjust the volume and change the sound effect to suit whatever mood you might be in when you’re deep cleaning your home. So when you have your one task decided upon, and you have your tools at hand, and you have your phone with you, go ahead and set your timer for 5 minutes. That’s right, I said 5 minutes, not 6.

The reason for the extra minute is to give you a little bit of breathing room. When your timer goes off at 5 minutes, you may just find that you’re almost-but-not-quite done a job. That extra minute gives you a chance to complete the job without having to consider yourself having “failed” at getting it done in time. The extra boost from that feeling of crushing a task in your goal time will give you a great feeling of accomplishment and a boost of motivation for starting on your next task the next day!

There will be other times where you accomplish your task in much much less time than 5 minutes. You may think it’s crazy for me to say that you’ll be able to tackle your most dreaded tasks in that little time, but it happens to me constantly! Just a few minutes ago, I set a timer for 5 minutes and set out to clean out a really messy drawer that had been bugging me for weeks. Less than two minutes later, I was done and I was able to look around and see what else I could do for the remaining 3 minutes of my 5 minute timer. Then I had one more minute to do even more! It’s little moments like this that can really change how you feel about cleaning your home.

Use Great Tools for Efficiency

Having great tools to deep clean your home can make all the difference. It’s not just about how clean they’ll make your home look, it’s also about how you’ll feel when you use them. Using tools that get the job done well can actually be fun and this will motivate you to feel like “Yes! I can DO this!” every time you go to tackle a deep clean task.

I use e-cloth cleaning tools because they just work, every single time. You’ve heard me talk about this many times before, but I just love how they clean perfectly with just water so you can just dampen whichever specially-designed cloth or tool you’re using for your specific task and go to town! All of the tools are uniquely designed for specific cleaning tasks around the house and they really do make tough cleaning jobs easier and more fun.

Break Up Bigger Tasks in to Bite Size Pieces

So what if you have a task you’d like to do that takes longer than 6 minutes? Just break it up into smaller chunks! We all know that we can do this with large tasks at work or even home improvement projects, but for some reason, when we think about deep cleaning, we think that we need to do everything all in one shot. If you have a something like house full of dusty, marked up baseboards that need to be cleaned, feel free to just tackle it for a few minutes each day instead of working on it for hours at a time.

It will still get done and you won’t feel like you’ve wasted your whole day just to get your home looking semi-acceptable. I love to use my e-cloth general cleaning cloth when I have really built-up grime that I need to tackle. One or two cloths is usually perfect for tackling about 5-6 minutes worth of mess and when I’m done, I toss them in the wash and they’re ready to go again the next day!

Do it Every Day

This is the key, of course! Just 6 minutes of cleaning isn’t going to deep clean your house but you will be amazed at how much you can accomplish if you do 6 minutes every day!

What Kind of Tasks to Add to Your List

So what kinds of tasks should you be adding to your deep clean list? What kind of task counts as a deep clean task instead of just a regular ol’ everyday cleaning task? Well, think of these tasks as the ones you’d do maybe one to ten times a year, not the type of thing you’d like to get to once every few days. Save this time for the real heavy-hitters and you’ll start to notice real progress and get that feeling of having a home that really is clean, not just a home that looks clean.

I have a few really thorough lists in my book The Cleaning Ninja, so definitely make use of those if you have a copy of that. If you’d like to just start making your own, think of things like those really inconvenient high-dusting jobs that can sometimes get left for years because they just seem so inconvenient. Chances are, those will actually take you less than 6 minutes if you have something like this handy dandy 2 in 1 Extendable Duster.

Also think about adding things like cleaning the oven, cleaning upholstery, washing windows, and cleaning glass light fixtures.

Deep Clean the Oven

I think cleaning the oven is definitely one of those most dreaded of all deep cleaning tasks. I’ve just discovered this product called Universal Stone which e-cloth sells and it has totally changed my perspective on oven cleaning. I hate really strong, toxic chemicals so this is right up my alley. This product is 100% natural and safe and it can be used on any surface that needs a really, really good deep clean, more than you can manage to tackle with just your e-cloths and water alone. You just wet this special sponge that comes with the Universal Stone, rub it a few times across the stone, then start gently scrubbing your oven. You’ll see a ton of that baked on mess start to come up right away, which is pretty amazing for a non-toxic cleaner!

This Universal Stone is also perfect for my six minute method. You don’t need to worry about setting aside a whole day to clean your oven, you really can just work on a small section (like the glass on the door) for five minutes, rinse it off by wiping with an e-cloth and continue on with your day. No need to worry about what kind of crazy chemicals you’re leaving behind, like I do with traditional harsh chemical cleaners.

Washing windows seems to be another thing that we often feel like we need to set aside an entire day for, so it doesn’t end up getting done as often as it should. Who has time to lose a whole day to washing windows? I love using the e-cloth window genie on windows because you just need to spray the window with water, then wipe it down with the window genie for a totally smudge-free, streak-free clean. That’s it! This tool works really well inside and out and gets right up into hard-to reach corners and edges too. The fact that it cleans windows so efficiently and with so little fuss means that you can get to more windows in your 6 minute time frame! It’s also great for glass light fixtures!

When you’re putting together your deep clean planning list, you’ll also want to add thoroughly wiping down your walls, door and window trim, light switches and baseboards. When it comes to general dusting and wiping like that, I generally like to make a list that tackles these items in each room from the top of the room, down. While you’re on a roll, definitely make sure you use this time to declutter a few areas of your home that have been really bugging you because you can’t get a good deep clean with a bunch of junk in the way! Decluttering 6 minutes at a time is a magical thing too.

No matter what jobs you’re tackling around the house, always carry a glass and polishing cloth with you as you go about your speedy cleaning duties for that perfect final touch. This is truly the best, completely lint-free, grabs-on-to-any-smudge polishing cloth that I’ve ever used and I love it. It’s my secret weapon for making me feel like I’ve done a really beautiful job of cleaning my home, even if I’ve only worked on it for a few minutes.

I just did a thorough decluttering of my cleaning pantry area because I really don’t use a lot of my old cleaning tools and cloths anymore now that I have these e-cloths. This has definitely made the whole 6-minute-a-day deep cleaning process a whole lot more efficient!

How do you go about deep cleaning your home? Have you tried something similar to my 6-minute-a-day method?

Thanks so much to e-cloth for sponsoring this post! I was compensated for my time spent putting this post together, but all opinions, ideas, and suggestions are my own as always!

Link to the article: https://www.creeklinehouse.com/how-to-deep-clean-your-home-in-six-minutes-a-day/

Related articles: http://www.kiwiservices.com/angela-says/how-to-clean-the-bedroom-quickly/

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