Copper State Home Maintenance and Repair

12/23/2025

Tiny lavatory wall moving job. New can lights in closet and lavatory. New ADA sized door.

10/27/2024

When you find out the guy installing your smoke detectors is not the level you are paying for

10/22/2024

10/15/2024

I don't do flooring. But when I have a pipe burst in my own home, it's flooring time

03/15/2024

It's a shame even Wayfair is making crap now. Securing studs don't go in far enough to put caster on.

03/15/2024

Has anybody delt with a company called eDuranoAutos?
I cannot find anything recent about them.

10/23/2021

It’s pretty clear that having mice in your home is not a pleasant experience. Even if they seem innocent, mice can create dangerous conditions in your home. However, getting rid of mice doesn’t necessarily mean buying a slew of mousetraps and cheese. Mice can be easily avoided around your household by simply adding the scent of peppermint in corners where they congregate. Yes, that’s right, peppermint.

Peppermint for Mice?
Although natural remedies aren’t always the answer when getting rid of pests (like using cucumbers to get rid of cockroaches, along with many other methods that don’t kill cockroaches), peppermint offers a successful natural remedy that works when trying to repel mice. This has to do with the nature of mice, which rely mostly on their sense of smell instead of their vision. Mice have incredibly weak vision but a strong, keen sense of smell. Which makes sense as to why mice typically go for a large chunk of stinky cheese, right?

Peppermint obviously has a strong scent, one that mice dislike. According to Victor Pest, peppermint contains very potent menthol compounds that irritate their nasal cavities. A whiff of peppermint certainly does keep them away.

Now, you can use two ways to incorporate the smell of peppermint into your home. The first is growing peppermint plants and leaving them around the house. The smell deters them from entering or roaming around in the first place.

Peppermint Oil to Repel Mice
If you don’t fancy a home full of peppermint plants, then you might prefer using peppermint oil instead. Spray the essential oil in different areas of your home that mice can access. If you’re trying to catch the mice, strategically spray the peppermint oil in places that don’t have a mousetrap. In theory, this should lead them to wherever you have placed it.

10/09/2021

Sometimes you travel to Colorado and build a couple of ponds

10/04/2021

Why Do Electrical Plugs Have These Two Holes?
If you have ever looked at the prongs of your electrical plugs on various electronics and appliances you have throughout your home, you may notice that some prongs have holes in them. There are 3 different purposes for these holes.
The first purpose is for stability. Inside the outlet that you plug your electronics into, there are bumps that match up with these holes to create a firm grip. This not only helps the plug from falling out, but also helps for the plug and outlet to have more contact between each other. Another reason for the holes would be for safety. You can slide zip ties with notes or even a small padlock in between the two holes to seal the plug if it shouldn’t be used or if there are special instructions involved. The last reason is for practical monetary reasons as having holes in the prongs means that the manufacturers can use less metal. Why Do Electrical Plugs Have These Two Holes?

07/16/2021

Understand GFCI
One of the most common service calls electricians get is about what appears to be a failure in a bathroom circuit. By code, all outlets within 6 feet of a water source are required to be protected by a ground fault circuit interrupt (GFCI). These are important safety devices that cut off power if a circuit is losing amperage, so GFCIs are most commonly seen in bathrooms and exterior outlets. The thing that your electrician wants you to remember is that a single GFCI device protects everything else “downstream” on that circuit. Because bathrooms are often not on an isolated circuit, that means a triggered GFCI will kill the power to outlets and lights that may seem unrelated. And things can be even more confusing when the GFCI is installed at the electrical breaker box itself.

This service call is especially common for outdoor circuits and in homes where multiple bathrooms are on a single circuit, and it’s the reason that checking the GFCI is an important part of troubleshooting dead outlets.

07/01/2021

Converted a light box to a canned light ceiling