The Evolution of Shutoff Valves: A Look at Modern Shovels and Their Impact on Home Plumbing

As we continue to explore the world of home improvement, it's fascinating to look back at how our understanding of plumbing and water management has evolved over time. One crucial aspect of modern plumbing is the shutoff valve, a simple yet ingenious device that has revolutionized the way we manage water pressure in our homes.

The first thing you'll notice on a modern shovel is the presence of shutoff valves, which allow for easy service and maintenance. These valves are a significant improvement over their predecessors, as they enable us to quickly and easily shut off the flow of water to specific areas of the plumbing system. This feature is particularly useful when it comes to servicing appliances or making repairs, as it allows us to isolate the affected area and work without worrying about flooding the rest of the house.

Another clever innovation found on modern shovels is a check valve, which prevents hot water from flowing back into cold water lines and vice versa. This feature is essential for maintaining a consistent temperature in our homes, ensuring that we always have access to warm or cool water as needed. The check valve works by allowing water to flow one way, but reversing the direction of flow when it tries to go back the other way.

Moving on to the spindle, which controls the flow of hot and cold water, we find a balancing spool. This ingenious device allows us to balance the pressure in our plumbing system, ensuring that both hot and cold water have equal pressure pushing them through their respective lines. When the pressure changes due to flushing a toilet or other appliance, the balancing spool adjusts to maintain the perfect balance.

The result of this clever design is a seamless flow of water throughout our homes, with no risk of temperature fluctuations or sudden changes in pressure. This constant adjustment ensures that our plumbing system remains efficient and effective, providing us with reliable access to hot and cold water whenever we need it.

A Closer Look at the Spindle: Temperature Control vs. Pressure Management

As we examine the spindle more closely, we find two distinct mechanisms at play: temperature control and pressure management. The temperature is controlled by a different mechanism altogether, which involves a separate spindle that allows us to regulate the flow of hot water into our system.

The spindle itself plays a crucial role in managing the flow of both hot and cold water. By adjusting the pressure through the balancing spool, we can ensure that our plumbing system remains stable and consistent, regardless of changes in temperature or pressure. This constant adjustment is what makes modern shutoff valves so effective, allowing us to maintain optimal performance throughout our homes.

The Importance of Proper Primer Application

When it comes to finishing a project like this one, the primer plays a crucial role in achieving a smooth, professional-looking finish. MDF (medium-density fiberboard) is an absorbent material that can be prone to swelling when exposed to moisture. To prevent this from happening, we use an oil-based primer to protect the surface and ensure a strong bond between the primer and the paint.

By applying the primer first, we create a solid foundation for our finish coat of paint. The oil-based primer provides excellent adhesion and protection, allowing us to achieve a smooth, even finish that will withstand the wear and tear of daily use.

Preparing for Painting: Sanding and Tack Cloth

Once the primer is dry, it's time to start sanding and preparing the surface for painting. We begin by using a 220-grit sandpaper to smooth out any rough edges or imperfections in the finish coat. This step is crucial in achieving a professional-looking finish that will last for years to come.

After sanding, we use a tack cloth to wipe away any dust or debris that may have been stirred up during the process. This final step ensures that our paint adheres evenly and consistently to the surface, providing us with a beautiful, long-lasting finish.

The Final Touches: Paint Application and Sealing

With everything primed and sanded, it's time to start painting! We use a high-quality water-based paint in a neutral color to match the surrounding décor. The brush is the perfect tool for applying this paint, as it allows us to achieve a smooth, even finish that will last for years to come.

Once the first coat of paint is dry, we apply a second coat if necessary to ensure that our finish is perfectly uniform. Finally, we seal the entire surface with a clear topcoat to protect it from dust and moisture.

A Job Well Done: The Finished Product

After hours of careful planning, preparation, and execution, we finally have our finished product! With its sleek design, functional shutoff valves, and beautiful new finish, this bench is ready to serve as the perfect mudroom or entryway for years to come. It's a testament to the power of modern plumbing and home improvement technology.

As we reflect on the journey from concept to completion, it becomes clear that every step was essential in achieving our goal. From the careful planning and preparation to the final touches and finishing coat, each element played its part in creating this stunning piece of furniture. And as we use it for years to come, we'll be reminded of the importance of attention to detail, quality craftsmanship, and a commitment to excellence in all aspects of home improvement.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: entoday on ask this old house nice to meet you richard welcome to seattle nice to be here you know i will take any excuse to come to seattle this shower gets cold when anybody uses the kitchen faucet i'm heading to seattle to figure out what's wrong and just how to fix it this is a little bench that you would put by the back door with some cubbies underneath it a place to sit down and take your shoes off in the winter and a place to store them underneath for this building i'm going to build this entire piece of furniture using only one sheet of mdf and then i'm going to show you the right technique to paint it mdf very absorbent material we're going to use an oil-based primer to seal it for projects around the house homeadvisor helps find local pros to do the work you can check ratings read customer reviews and book appointments with pros online at homeadvisor.com homeadvisor is proud to support ask this old house hi there i'm kevin o'connor and welcome back to ask this old house we'd love to hear from you because we have got the experts to answer all of your questions so keep them coming hey good morning richard hey why you've been working out this morning tommy asked me to take the heavy end of a piece of mdf sounds like mr silver work smarter smarter all right and i got an email about a shower valve in seattle so i'm gonna take the trip you're gonna go all the way to seattle for a shower valve shower goes in the wash you can't bring it to me that's a good point and i guess that's what we do all right well if the mdf is here that means it's time for a build-it hey tommy hey kevin hawaii all right so uh build it today what are you thinking i'm thinking a real simple project this is a little bench that you would put by the back door with some cubbies underneath it a place to sit down and take your shoes off in the winter and a place to store them underneath all right sounds like a nice project all right and this is what you're thinking of using yep this is actually medium density fiberboard the only real problem with it is that it's very heavy it's actually made of wood flower it's real fine sawdust and they compress it with resins and they make a sheet out of it yeah the nice thing about this is it you don't have to worry about end grain so you don't have to cover it with a strip of wood you don't have to do face frames or veneer the edge whatever you want you could just sand that smooth right and it's great for a paint grade project and it's cheap about 30 dollars for the sheet and i want to build a whole project with one sheet just one huh just one well you are cheap you better believe it i get it from you to get started i want to cut the mdf to a usable size we found a cushion that we like for the top so we're going to size the piece based on that all right here's the piece that we cut and this one sheet represents the top and the bottom of our box and we're going to use these baskets inside the box to put things in okay i want to put two dividers in here and two sides out here i want those sides to sit in a dado because it's going to be stronger if it's in a dado and i want to make sure that those dados are lined up now i could cut the pieces to size and then data one but it would take a lot longer and i don't want to run the risk of the data as being off slightly because the data that's here and the data that's here has to be directly on top of each other exactly so what we're going to do is we're going to lay out and cut our dados first and then rip our pieces to size clever now i'm gonna do three quarters good with the dados cut we can now separate the top and the bottom the bottom needs to be a little narrower than the top and now we're going to cut that down all right now this piece is the bottom and the top piece has an overhang on the two sides and on the front on the bottom i don't want the overhang on the end so we're going to cut this off right here turning this dado into a rabbet to make sure the holes for our fasteners are centered in our dados and centered into the sides we'll pre-drill the holes through the dados now we can cut the pieces for the back the dividers and the ends and we'll do that on the table saw before we assemble i want to give everything a good sanding so okay all right now we're ready to glue and screw the pieces together but i want to do one joint at a time because the mdf will suck up that glue oh gotta go oh no gonna go more there it's that one just just oh that's it oh nice good okay the last piece we have to build is the toe kick for the cabinet to set on we've mited the front and we might at each side put them together like this so this piece will be a filler it's going to go on here like this we'll glue and pin nail it so i'll just put a little bit of glue on there we don't need a lot perfect all right okay now we'll glue the miter and the filler block ready okay and a piece in the center just for some extra support good good just hold it tight okay and we'll put a filler across the front here add some more glue surface put a couple of tacks in those good all right let's see if it fits heavy little cabinet yeah okay i like it tommy nice all right i'll put a couple of tacks in it all right i think that's it the glue will set up and hold that on with no problem tomorrow will come in fill the holes and paint it it's going to look great with that cushion on top too there it is looks good tommy you must be manuela yes i am nice to meet you nice to meet you richard welcome to seattle nice to be here you know i love seattle's one of my favorite cities wow great because as the sole house is one of my favorite shows so we're both happy yes um i have a shower problem that i wrote you about okay so follow me i'll show you where this follow you anywhere here we go so here's the bathroom okay the issue that i have is that when someone opens the hot water in the kitchen or the dishwasher is turned on and someone is taking a shower here i lose completely the hot water for a little bit of time and then it takes a while to come back we've heard this complaint before let me jump in here and turn the water on you can go to the kitchen and just open up the hot water fuzz let's see what you got all right right there all right manuel open up the hot water faucet full please okay oh yeah getting colder okay close it all right good it definitely got cold let me run and grab a few tools i'll be right back okay all right so first we're going to remove the handle right here there's a little cover plate that'll expose a screw hold the handle turn counterclockwise okay now there's a cover plate right here with two additional screws and once we loosen those the plate should come off so there's the second one now you've got a fair amount of caulking right here so before i pry it i'm just going to score it with a knife okay okay all right so here is our single lever shower valve there's a hot and there's a coal pipe that comes in here this goes down to the spout this goes up to the shower head now sometimes there are shut off valves right inside they're called service valves that we can shut it off so we shut up just the fixture you don't have them so it means i'm going to go to the basement turn the hot and cold off okay all right so the water is off and now we're going to take you through what's going on here so this thing is a single level valve that really has one serviceable part the cartridge which sits right inside the valve body here and you know even though the tile looks like it was done in the 80s i think this valve was original to the house how old was this house 1964. 64. i mean it's 50 or 60 years that this cartridge has been sitting inside of this valve body so that's the challenge for me how to get this thing out so it starts with a little clip right here i'm going to pry that clip up that came easy good don't lose it in the wall that wouldn't be good the challenge is to get this cartridge out and the cartridge has been jammed into this valve body for all these years so i'm afraid that if i just tried to pull it this way with pliers i could break it and leave parts inside the wall and that would be a mess enough to do the whole shower valve so they make a special tool that has a pair of shoulders on the tool that correspond to the matching shoulders on the cartridge itself so i fit it right in here and then i want to twist and what i'm trying to do is to break that o real o-ring seal that's been crusting up for the last 50-60 years all right so that's released so now i take a pair of pliers and hopefully pull it straight out this way so come up come on oh yeah there it is good all right that has not seen the light of day in about half a century all right now if this house has been built about 10 years earlier it probably wouldn't even have a single level valve it would have a three valve hot handle here cold handle here a handle in the middle to determine if the water went down to the spout or up to the shower head but the modern single lever valve was such a convenience it was such a cool thing to add because it had a single handle you could pull it on and off you could turn it so the way this cartridge works it sits inside the valve body in this constant hot supply at this port right here cold to the port on the other side now when you pull the handle back watch what happens you see how there's a hole that lets some of the hot come into this chamber and come out through these holes out to the shower head but when you turn the handle it makes less hot makes more hot and you can constantly precisely mix inside this chamber but this convenience piece didn't change the fact that it didn't take into account changes in pressure so that means if you had a drop in cold water pressure when the toilet got flushed hot would come in and scald people or in your case what did you have you had to drop in hot water pressure and now the cold came in and this didn't change it so nowadays this type of valve body this basic valve in here is no longer even legal by code we have to have a valve body that has a device inside of it called a pressure balancing device and that pressure balancing device will constantly adjust for changes in pressure to make consistent temperature come out of the shower head this manufacturer realized that all this inventory of valves inside the wall so what they did is they went back to the drawing board and redesigned the inside of this cartridge and changed the size and geometry of the openings on both the hot and the cold side to try and get the size of the ports proportional to each other as you change them to try and reduce the amount of pressure balance issues it's not going to fully fix it but this cartridge can improve dramatically this performance so what we're going to do is to put a little bit of grease on it not too much on the o-rings a little retainer clip there we go i'm going to set a foam bead into some wet caulking for a watertight seal then we can reinstall the trim and now the handle all right water is back on why don't you go into the bathroom and run the shower and i will turn on the hot water from here we'll give it a test okay it's hot now all right i'm gonna open up here still hot that's a good thing again yep still hot all right you're all set then okay great new cartridge can make quite the difference yeah thank you so much for your help you know i will take any excuse to come to seattle anytime all right it's nice that they make a part that keeps a 40 year old valve in service right otherwise she might have needed a full bathroom model so it's great so but they made a lot of improvements on the modern shower valve over manuela's so here it looks very similar you got hot you got cold right here you've got uh the control spindle right here this is where your handle so tub showers in this direction yep but you'll see let me tip it over here oh cut away huh so first on a modern shovel it's great to see this these are shutoff valves so that you can do for service on the valve uh and it's really important and they also have a thing called a check inside here and that actually helps if you ever had a chance of hot going this way or cold going the other way it'll stop it the water can come by it and push it up but when it tries to go back the little black nub stops it right cool so here's the spindle but the addition is this it's called a balancing spool right here so let me pull this out okay and when i do listen oh something in there okay sliding around inside of it wait a second a cutaway of a cutaway so here's your cold water port right here here's your hot water port so now if the balance the pressure in the system in the house itself is in balance on either side of this valve it looks just like this cold is coming into the top right hot is coming into the bottom and those holes are wide open so now let's say you flush a toilet that means the cold water pressure would drop that means in this case the hot water pressure would be stronger and would push this thing this way and what would it do it would close off the hot and increase the cold to keep them in balance and then sort of the vice versa absolutely you drop in hot water pressure cold water wins and it keeps it in balance perfectly and so this just goes back and forth back and forth all the time constantly adjusting the pressure in the system wow and so you would in that case you'd feel the pressure drop because less water be coming through but you wouldn't feel a temperature change that's right this thing only controls the pressure the actual the temperature is controlled by that same spindle because here's the heart going this way and here's the call going this way and it's only in this spindle that you control temperature this is pressure this is temperature now here's your hot and cold side and it would constantly give you just a perfect precise temperature that's amazing simple little device but what a huge improvement so brilliant it changes everything tomorrow was our uh sanding up to your approval i like it and i think it's ready for priming all right how do you want to attack it well mdf very absorbent material we're going to use an oil-based primer to select well it's going to be a hard-working bench and probably a mud room so i can imagine wet boots or rain jackets on it we don't want it to swell up so you think the oil base primer is going to help oil base will protect this and then for the top coat we can use a water-based paint all right ready to go i'm ready now roll new paint we're going to start by the inside of this box we're going to prime all the edges and then kevin will roll the fields getting good coverage with the roller speeding it up a little bit there that looks pretty good it could be a good pair well it's like priming cardboard maro the way it is sucking up the primer here exactly sucking up the primer and it's very nice and it's mature people like because of this muttness of it and always look good but remember it's a very soft material all right let me attack the top here oh now two coats of permits are dry we're ready to fill the net holes so why fill them now after the primer's on as opposed to before the primer the putty sticks better on the primer just using a regular wood putty just like a wood filler kevin regular one all right i'm gonna hit inside the box with the 220 grit sandpaper in the meantime kevin if you want to do the tops and the sides with the sander we can get it done now let's wipe off the dust with tack cloth we're going to use this water-based just simply white i'm going to start inside the cubs again i'll go with the brush if you want to start the back got it look at this all painted up three nice baskets and a great cushion looks good do you approve i do very nice yeah i think it's a good one i mean one sheet of mdf that's pretty economical and that's a good look right here yeah very nice piece nice nice job guys all right keep your letters and your emails coming we'd love to hear from you so until next time i'm kevin o'connor i'm mauro henrique and i'm tom silva for ask this old house i like the color gray it looks good thanks for watching this whole house has got a video for just about every home improvement project so be sure to check out the others and if you like what you see click on the subscribe button to make sure that you get our newest videos right in your feedtoday on ask this old house nice to meet you richard welcome to seattle nice to be here you know i will take any excuse to come to seattle this shower gets cold when anybody uses the kitchen faucet i'm heading to seattle to figure out what's wrong and just how to fix it this is a little bench that you would put by the back door with some cubbies underneath it a place to sit down and take your shoes off in the winter and a place to store them underneath for this building i'm going to build this entire piece of furniture using only one sheet of mdf and then i'm going to show you the right technique to paint it mdf very absorbent material we're going to use an oil-based primer to seal it for projects around the house homeadvisor helps find local pros to do the work you can check ratings read customer reviews and book appointments with pros online at homeadvisor.com homeadvisor is proud to support ask this old house hi there i'm kevin o'connor and welcome back to ask this old house we'd love to hear from you because we have got the experts to answer all of your questions so keep them coming hey good morning richard hey why you've been working out this morning tommy asked me to take the heavy end of a piece of mdf sounds like mr silver work smarter smarter all right and i got an email about a shower valve in seattle so i'm gonna take the trip you're gonna go all the way to seattle for a shower valve shower goes in the wash you can't bring it to me that's a good point and i guess that's what we do all right well if the mdf is here that means it's time for a build-it hey tommy hey kevin hawaii all right so uh build it today what are you thinking i'm thinking a real simple project this is a little bench that you would put by the back door with some cubbies underneath it a place to sit down and take your shoes off in the winter and a place to store them underneath all right sounds like a nice project all right and this is what you're thinking of using yep this is actually medium density fiberboard the only real problem with it is that it's very heavy it's actually made of wood flower it's real fine sawdust and they compress it with resins and they make a sheet out of it yeah the nice thing about this is it you don't have to worry about end grain so you don't have to cover it with a strip of wood you don't have to do face frames or veneer the edge whatever you want you could just sand that smooth right and it's great for a paint grade project and it's cheap about 30 dollars for the sheet and i want to build a whole project with one sheet just one huh just one well you are cheap you better believe it i get it from you to get started i want to cut the mdf to a usable size we found a cushion that we like for the top so we're going to size the piece based on that all right here's the piece that we cut and this one sheet represents the top and the bottom of our box and we're going to use these baskets inside the box to put things in okay i want to put two dividers in here and two sides out here i want those sides to sit in a dado because it's going to be stronger if it's in a dado and i want to make sure that those dados are lined up now i could cut the pieces to size and then data one but it would take a lot longer and i don't want to run the risk of the data as being off slightly because the data that's here and the data that's here has to be directly on top of each other exactly so what we're going to do is we're going to lay out and cut our dados first and then rip our pieces to size clever now i'm gonna do three quarters good with the dados cut we can now separate the top and the bottom the bottom needs to be a little narrower than the top and now we're going to cut that down all right now this piece is the bottom and the top piece has an overhang on the two sides and on the front on the bottom i don't want the overhang on the end so we're going to cut this off right here turning this dado into a rabbet to make sure the holes for our fasteners are centered in our dados and centered into the sides we'll pre-drill the holes through the dados now we can cut the pieces for the back the dividers and the ends and we'll do that on the table saw before we assemble i want to give everything a good sanding so okay all right now we're ready to glue and screw the pieces together but i want to do one joint at a time because the mdf will suck up that glue oh gotta go oh no gonna go more there it's that one just just oh that's it oh nice good okay the last piece we have to build is the toe kick for the cabinet to set on we've mited the front and we might at each side put them together like this so this piece will be a filler it's going to go on here like this we'll glue and pin nail it so i'll just put a little bit of glue on there we don't need a lot perfect all right okay now we'll glue the miter and the filler block ready okay and a piece in the center just for some extra support good good just hold it tight okay and we'll put a filler across the front here add some more glue surface put a couple of tacks in those good all right let's see if it fits heavy little cabinet yeah okay i like it tommy nice all right i'll put a couple of tacks in it all right i think that's it the glue will set up and hold that on with no problem tomorrow will come in fill the holes and paint it it's going to look great with that cushion on top too there it is looks good tommy you must be manuela yes i am nice to meet you nice to meet you richard welcome to seattle nice to be here you know i love seattle's one of my favorite cities wow great because as the sole house is one of my favorite shows so we're both happy yes um i have a shower problem that i wrote you about okay so follow me i'll show you where this follow you anywhere here we go so here's the bathroom okay the issue that i have is that when someone opens the hot water in the kitchen or the dishwasher is turned on and someone is taking a shower here i lose completely the hot water for a little bit of time and then it takes a while to come back we've heard this complaint before let me jump in here and turn the water on you can go to the kitchen and just open up the hot water fuzz let's see what you got all right right there all right manuel open up the hot water faucet full please okay oh yeah getting colder okay close it all right good it definitely got cold let me run and grab a few tools i'll be right back okay all right so first we're going to remove the handle right here there's a little cover plate that'll expose a screw hold the handle turn counterclockwise okay now there's a cover plate right here with two additional screws and once we loosen those the plate should come off so there's the second one now you've got a fair amount of caulking right here so before i pry it i'm just going to score it with a knife okay okay all right so here is our single lever shower valve there's a hot and there's a coal pipe that comes in here this goes down to the spout this goes up to the shower head now sometimes there are shut off valves right inside they're called service valves that we can shut it off so we shut up just the fixture you don't have them so it means i'm going to go to the basement turn the hot and cold off okay all right so the water is off and now we're going to take you through what's going on here so this thing is a single level valve that really has one serviceable part the cartridge which sits right inside the valve body here and you know even though the tile looks like it was done in the 80s i think this valve was original to the house how old was this house 1964. 64. i mean it's 50 or 60 years that this cartridge has been sitting inside of this valve body so that's the challenge for me how to get this thing out so it starts with a little clip right here i'm going to pry that clip up that came easy good don't lose it in the wall that wouldn't be good the challenge is to get this cartridge out and the cartridge has been jammed into this valve body for all these years so i'm afraid that if i just tried to pull it this way with pliers i could break it and leave parts inside the wall and that would be a mess enough to do the whole shower valve so they make a special tool that has a pair of shoulders on the tool that correspond to the matching shoulders on the cartridge itself so i fit it right in here and then i want to twist and what i'm trying to do is to break that o real o-ring seal that's been crusting up for the last 50-60 years all right so that's released so now i take a pair of pliers and hopefully pull it straight out this way so come up come on oh yeah there it is good all right that has not seen the light of day in about half a century all right now if this house has been built about 10 years earlier it probably wouldn't even have a single level valve it would have a three valve hot handle here cold handle here a handle in the middle to determine if the water went down to the spout or up to the shower head but the modern single lever valve was such a convenience it was such a cool thing to add because it had a single handle you could pull it on and off you could turn it so the way this cartridge works it sits inside the valve body in this constant hot supply at this port right here cold to the port on the other side now when you pull the handle back watch what happens you see how there's a hole that lets some of the hot come into this chamber and come out through these holes out to the shower head but when you turn the handle it makes less hot makes more hot and you can constantly precisely mix inside this chamber but this convenience piece didn't change the fact that it didn't take into account changes in pressure so that means if you had a drop in cold water pressure when the toilet got flushed hot would come in and scald people or in your case what did you have you had to drop in hot water pressure and now the cold came in and this didn't change it so nowadays this type of valve body this basic valve in here is no longer even legal by code we have to have a valve body that has a device inside of it called a pressure balancing device and that pressure balancing device will constantly adjust for changes in pressure to make consistent temperature come out of the shower head this manufacturer realized that all this inventory of valves inside the wall so what they did is they went back to the drawing board and redesigned the inside of this cartridge and changed the size and geometry of the openings on both the hot and the cold side to try and get the size of the ports proportional to each other as you change them to try and reduce the amount of pressure balance issues it's not going to fully fix it but this cartridge can improve dramatically this performance so what we're going to do is to put a little bit of grease on it not too much on the o-rings a little retainer clip there we go i'm going to set a foam bead into some wet caulking for a watertight seal then we can reinstall the trim and now the handle all right water is back on why don't you go into the bathroom and run the shower and i will turn on the hot water from here we'll give it a test okay it's hot now all right i'm gonna open up here still hot that's a good thing again yep still hot all right you're all set then okay great new cartridge can make quite the difference yeah thank you so much for your help you know i will take any excuse to come to seattle anytime all right it's nice that they make a part that keeps a 40 year old valve in service right otherwise she might have needed a full bathroom model so it's great so but they made a lot of improvements on the modern shower valve over manuela's so here it looks very similar you got hot you got cold right here you've got uh the control spindle right here this is where your handle so tub showers in this direction yep but you'll see let me tip it over here oh cut away huh so first on a modern shovel it's great to see this these are shutoff valves so that you can do for service on the valve uh and it's really important and they also have a thing called a check inside here and that actually helps if you ever had a chance of hot going this way or cold going the other way it'll stop it the water can come by it and push it up but when it tries to go back the little black nub stops it right cool so here's the spindle but the addition is this it's called a balancing spool right here so let me pull this out okay and when i do listen oh something in there okay sliding around inside of it wait a second a cutaway of a cutaway so here's your cold water port right here here's your hot water port so now if the balance the pressure in the system in the house itself is in balance on either side of this valve it looks just like this cold is coming into the top right hot is coming into the bottom and those holes are wide open so now let's say you flush a toilet that means the cold water pressure would drop that means in this case the hot water pressure would be stronger and would push this thing this way and what would it do it would close off the hot and increase the cold to keep them in balance and then sort of the vice versa absolutely you drop in hot water pressure cold water wins and it keeps it in balance perfectly and so this just goes back and forth back and forth all the time constantly adjusting the pressure in the system wow and so you would in that case you'd feel the pressure drop because less water be coming through but you wouldn't feel a temperature change that's right this thing only controls the pressure the actual the temperature is controlled by that same spindle because here's the heart going this way and here's the call going this way and it's only in this spindle that you control temperature this is pressure this is temperature now here's your hot and cold side and it would constantly give you just a perfect precise temperature that's amazing simple little device but what a huge improvement so brilliant it changes everything tomorrow was our uh sanding up to your approval i like it and i think it's ready for priming all right how do you want to attack it well mdf very absorbent material we're going to use an oil-based primer to select well it's going to be a hard-working bench and probably a mud room so i can imagine wet boots or rain jackets on it we don't want it to swell up so you think the oil base primer is going to help oil base will protect this and then for the top coat we can use a water-based paint all right ready to go i'm ready now roll new paint we're going to start by the inside of this box we're going to prime all the edges and then kevin will roll the fields getting good coverage with the roller speeding it up a little bit there that looks pretty good it could be a good pair well it's like priming cardboard maro the way it is sucking up the primer here exactly sucking up the primer and it's very nice and it's mature people like because of this muttness of it and always look good but remember it's a very soft material all right let me attack the top here oh now two coats of permits are dry we're ready to fill the net holes so why fill them now after the primer's on as opposed to before the primer the putty sticks better on the primer just using a regular wood putty just like a wood filler kevin regular one all right i'm gonna hit inside the box with the 220 grit sandpaper in the meantime kevin if you want to do the tops and the sides with the sander we can get it done now let's wipe off the dust with tack cloth we're going to use this water-based just simply white i'm going to start inside the cubs again i'll go with the brush if you want to start the back got it look at this all painted up three nice baskets and a great cushion looks good do you approve i do very nice yeah i think it's a good one i mean one sheet of mdf that's pretty economical and that's a good look right here yeah very nice piece nice nice job guys all right keep your letters and your emails coming we'd love to hear from you so until next time i'm kevin o'connor i'm mauro henrique and i'm tom silva for ask this old house i like the color gray it looks good thanks for watching this whole house has got a video for just about every home improvement project so be sure to check out the others and if you like what you see click on the subscribe button to make sure that you get our newest videos right in your feed\n"