The war against weeds may be won in trenches — if they’re filled with moss

INSULATING GARAGE DOOR

Q How can I add insulation to my garage door? I’m thinking of gluing pieces of half-inch foam to the outside, followed by V-groove boards (about threeeighths of an inch thick) on top, finished with marine varnish over dark brown stain.

A This could look good at first, but I can see a couple of problems with your plan. One is the thickness of wood. They don’t make V-groove boards that thin and if they did there would be quite a bit of warping over time because of exposure on one side only. A bigger problem is water getting behind the wood and foam. It’s almost certain to happen and if even a little moisture got behind things it would cause a lot of warping and possibly delamination.

If your door is smooth and relatively free of hardware on the inside face (my garage door is), then applying rigid insulation on the inside would be your best bet. You wouldn’t have the issue of sun and rain causing problems with your wood and foam and the extra thickness of the door wouldn’t interfere with opening and closing as it probably would on the outside.

SPRAY PAINTING A HOUSE

Q How can I spray water-based paint without access to electricity? I’ve got an off-grid home I’m working on and I was thinking of using a pump-up weed sprayer to speed progress.

A A weed sprayer will work for applying very thin, watery liquids to wood, but paint is far too thick. That said, even the smallest portable electric generator can provide the power you need to run a real paint sprayer.

There are many options out there. The cheapest is one of the plug-in electric sprayers that cost between $200 to $300 and they do a passable job.

For a little more money you can get better results with what’s called an airless sprayer. That said, you can also cover a lot of

ground with a roller and paint brush.

Spraying makes sense for very large areas that are easy to mask, but it’s not as simple and time saving as you might think.

WEED-FREE FLAGSTONES

Q What’s the best way to get rid of weeds in gaps between flagstones? We normally wage war annually, but it’s so bad now that I’m thinking of cleaning out the gaps and refilling with clean material. Granite screenings are one recommendation, but I can’t get any nearby. I was thinking of polymeric sand, but the gaps are much bigger than recommended.

A You mentioned you’ve waged war on the weeds. What sort of warfare have you engaged in? Have you considered flaming the weeds?

You can get long-handled propane torches for this job. Usually just a touch of the flame is enough to kill weeds, even if the whole plant doesn’t die right

away. Burning part of the plant causes the rest to die fairly soon.

Some method of quickly and easily killing the weeds seems better than tearing out the current soil then adding new stuff. I’ve used polymeric sand for paving bricks, but I don’t think it would age well with the big joints typical of flagstone installations.

Keeping weeds and ants out of paving gaps isn’t easy, but I have discovered something interesting.

If you can encourage the growth of moss between flagstones and bricks, it stops weeds and ants from moving in. I originally noticed that moss grows between stones where fertilized water runs off of plant pots that my wife waters in the summer. I’ve asked her to fertilize our whole paving brick pathway every time she waters in the hopes of getting a complete growth of moss. It seems to be working.