Your Place | When doing ceramic tile, consider stability first

Question: I am going to replace my vinyl bathroom floor with ceramic tile. One contractor tells me he's going to use WonderBoard; another says wet bed is the way to go. My home is a little over 100 years old. What do you recommend?

Answer: Wet bed is the best, hands down. The reason the tile contractor is using WonderBoard is he might not know how to do a wet bed. Few recently minted tile installers do, and some older ones can't be bothered.

I have no serious problems with WonderBoard. In fact, I used it as a backing in a wall-tile job when it was new to the market. The Hometime video I watched 100 times to learn how to tile in 1990 used WonderBoard.

A 3- by 5-foot sheet of one-quarter- or one-half-inch WonderBoard is made of particles of cement sandwiched between two layers of fiberglass. It is porous and soaks up moisture, but is designed not to rot, especially if sealed properly.

WonderBoard is meant to be used by anybody - but it's easy to make mistakes when using it. Most of the problems I've heard from contractors center on failure to nail or screw it tightly to joists or whatever is underneath.

When not properly anchored and then covered with tile (which requires stability to stay in place), the board starts to move as people walk on the tile; the adhesive and grout loosen. Moisture reaches the board, and the stress can cause it to crack and flake.

Wet bed, however, is very stable. It's also very heavy, so there are support issues. But the tile contractor who suggested wet bed to you seems to know what he's doing and is quite experienced. I'd go with wet bed.

Q: We have aluminum capping around the opening for our garage doors that's been really dinged up over the years. Is this something I can replace myself? It seems like too small a job for a contractor, but I have no idea how to do it myself.

A: Highly unlikely you'll get a contractor to do the job, but you can give it a shot. A lot of vinyl-siding contractors are using aluminum capping, especially around vinyl window installations, so you might call one or two. Some people moonlight, including employees of subcontractors. I've also seen that Craigslist had ads for aluminum window capping.

If you know who made the garage doors, you could contact the manufacturer and get some information there, too.

Is it a do-it-yourself job? If you don't have the expertise, it will take you a while to get it, and the job will likely end up taking longer and being more expensive than if you had hired someone.

Q: The representative from our water company suggested we should "flush" our water heater to improve the taste and quality of our faucet drinking water. Is that necessary?

A: Unless you drink hot water directly from the tap, better-tasting water is not the reason most often mentioned for flushing a water heater regularly.

But longevity is. Flushing aims to remove sediment buildup caused by minerals in the water that can reduce the life of your heater. It is very unlikely that the heater would affect the taste of the water coming from a faucet, since cold water comes from a line independent of the water heater. A cold-water supply line feeds into the heater, but that's all.

You may want to look into a water filter that can be fitted to the cold-water line under the sink, or even a whole-house filter that would clean out impurities. All this is no guarantee that the water would taste any better, but in most cases impurities in the water will affect the taste.