LESLIE: Peggy in Utah’s got some unexpected visitors to the carport. What’s going on?
PEGGY: We don’t have bats in our belfry. We’ve got birds in our rafters. I have a double carport – it’s about 25×30 – and the birds just lived under the rafters and mess up our cars. How can I finish that off to make it both look nice and not too expensive? And my husband hates to paint.
TOM: There are – I’m thinking, Leslie, that she might want to invest in some of those products like …
LESLIE: Those little spiky …
TOM: Yeah, Bird-X makes them.
LESLIE: Yeah, it’s a …
PEGGY: Bird-X?
TOM: Yeah.
LESLIE: It’s a long strip that has these sort of spiky materials that stick off of it that makes it so that the birds can’t land on the area and you can get them in a variety of lengths and, you know, different looks. You can even get them in different colors so that they can blend in a little bit more appropriately with your setting.
TOM: Yeah, they have metal ones. They have plastic ones. The website is BirdX.com.
PEGGY: OK.
TOM: There are control spikes there that are very safe for the birds because once they figure out that they’re there …
LESLIE: They don’t want to land there anymore.
TOM: … they don’t want to land there. Exactly. And they’ll go and bother your neighbor and roost in your neighbor’s carport.
PEGGY: Right. And now, a question is, too, if I want to finish that off so it looks like a nice, finished area so that the top of the carport is finished, what would you suggest?
LESLIE: You mean sealing off the rafter so perhaps you have a beadboard ceiling or maybe just, you know, thickening up those rafters so they look more like proper yield-y type of supports?
TOM: How about some nice, flowy material …
PEGGY: OK.
TOM: … that would make – you know, that would make it very, very attractive? What kind of a batting material or something like that, Leslie, would be available for that?
LESLIE: You would have to use exterior fabric. Even though it’s in a covered carport area you would want to make sure you use something like Sunbrella or any of the other brands that make an exterior fabric just so that it doesn’t get affected by the moisture, mildew potentials. And then what you could do is – the way those outdoor fabrics are made, they don’t – oh gosh, what is that? They don’t fray on the edge.
PEGGY: Oh.
LESLIE: So you can cut it and not worry about having to hem it. If you wanted to create a finished look you can even use an iron-on, like a fusible bonding, to create a finished edge if sewing is not your favorite task. And then you could go ahead staple it to the rafters or put grommets in the fabric edge and then maybe some eye hooks into the rafter itself and sort of drape it so it swags up and along and that might make a nice, finished look. And you can even do it the opposite way so that when you look from the street you see the swag going from front to back rather than you see the sides of it. It’s really up to you. And you know, I did – on a new show that I worked on the WE network called The Ugliest House on the Block, Peggy, I dressed up a carport that had those simple, steel support column poles holding up the carport. I got these beautiful…
PEGGY: We do. The round ones.
LESLIE: Mm-hmm. I got these beautiful sort of PVC columns that came in four pieces and they wrapped around the existing pole and this was sort of a craftsman-styled tapered column, so it started off real narrow at the top and then came down in a beautiful tapered column with even raised panelings and they really just snap together. The only work that I needed some tools for was to adjust the length or the height of each of these pieces. And it went together beautifully. It even went together with just gorilla glue. So if you wanted to really spruce up that space, you know, for a couple of hundred bucks you could get these wrap-around pieces.
PEGGY: Oh, thank you kindly.
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