March 23, 2025 • 36 mins
Dean addressed the weaknesses of tract homes, reducing and removing soffits. Dean says to get an inspection camera as it's a helpful tool when planning a remodel. Dean talks about relocating chandeliers and how a fireplace could screw up the living room’s improvements (design by demolition). Last, Dean finishes his key elements when it comes to remodeling tract homes.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
KFI AM six forty. You're listening to Dean Sharp the
house Whisper on demand on the iHeart Radio app. You know,
this very program is also the house Whisperer podcast that
you can listen to anytime, anywhere on demand, hundreds of episodes,
all searchable by topic. It is your home improvement reference library.
(00:24):
And if you're thinking, hey, that's all great, Dean, but
what we really need is you and Tina in our
house standing at looking at that you know, whatever that is,
you know you can do that too. You can book
an in home design consult with me and t Just
go to house Whisperer dot design. And yes, we have
ways of doing it, even if you don't live within
(00:47):
driving distance of southern California. There's always a way. Just
did a consult a couple of weeks ago in Albuquerque,
New Mexico. There's a way. There's a way, where there's
a will, there's a way. All right, back to our
conversation about big, big changes that can be made to
(01:08):
a tracked home during a remodel that yield specific changes
that yield a disproportionate amount of good and jug and
sexy and great and awesome for a disproportionate to the
amount of energy and effort and money put into them.
I've got a whole list of them for you. You know,
it's based on the idea that we're addressing the intrinsic
(01:31):
weaknesses of tracked homes in the first place. So let's
move up. I've moved up to the top of the
list based on one of our callers in the last hour.
This idea of reducing and removing soffits sofits. Some of
(01:51):
you in other parts of the country know them as bulkheads.
But a sofit a bulkhead, it's a structure. It's a
non st ructural build out inside the interior of a
home that allows space for something a plumbing pipe to
(02:11):
run through, a drainline to run through, an air conditioning
duct to run through, that kind of thing. Soffits and
bulkheads same thing, just a different name. Up in Canada,
our neighbors to the north, they are referred to almost
exclusively as bulkheads, and down here most often we call
(02:33):
them soffits. But they're not just soffits. There are also
double walls running from the floor to the ceiling areas
of your home that have been intruded upon an interior
space for the sake of making room for something. Now,
I know you're sitting there thinking, well, Dean, that thing
is making room for a thing. I get it, I
(02:54):
get it. But I want you to understand this in
terms of why it's there and its relations ship to
it being a tracked home. Okay. So a couple of
things that you got to know about a tract home.
They are built with the lowest possible cost of a
construction in mind. Okay. And so when we've got, for instance,
(03:19):
when we know we've got to get an air conditioning
duct from point A down the hallway to point B
out in the living room or something like that, the
lowest cheap but you know, the lowest cost way, the
cheapest way of getting a duct from point A to
point B is often just to drop the ceiling of
(03:40):
an entire area, like a hallway, drop the whole hallway
ceiling down below, you know, eight feet or so, you know.
And and as a result, it was really inexpensive for
the builders, for the developer to create this space for
an air conditioning contractor to come through and run a
(04:01):
traditional flex duct right in that space and boom, you're done.
They're done. There's the vent in the living room and
it's coming from you know, wherever the FAU is the
air handler in the house. But just because that's the
way they ran, it doesn't mean that's the only way
that duct could get from point A to point B.
(04:21):
What you have in your home is the least expensive
way for the builder for your duct to get from
point A to point B. That doesn't mean it has
to be that way. The builder left tons of room
for the HVAC contractor. I'm just using this as one
(04:41):
example for a vent contractor to run a traditional inexpensive vent.
They did not say to themselves, you know what, the
buyers of our homes deserve the highest ceilings possible and
the most interior space possible. So we're going to go
to extra expense to run ducting up a wall in
(05:02):
between studs. That would be a metal duct specially made
to fit in a stud wall bay from top to bottom.
Or we're gonna run. We're gonna run this duck twice
as long as it needs to go by jumping up,
getting into the attic, going over there, running through joists
in between, and then down. Instead of making this big soffet.
(05:23):
Those are the considerations that absolutely one hundred percent were
not taken into consideration when your tracked home was built,
because it's just cheaper to do it the other way. Now,
what do you and I do. We move into a house,
and if we don't understand that that's the way it
(05:43):
was done, we just accept it as it is, and
we start making do. To your credit, all right, to
all of our credit, all of us who live in
tracked homes. What do we do. We're resilient human beings.
We move in. It's not perfect, but we make do.
And if you've been in your home ten years, twenty years,
thirty years plus, you've been making do for a long time.
(06:07):
And now it may shock you to realize that it
never had to be that way. But that's the kind
of thing I'm saying. Sofits are non structural entities in
your house, which means they can simply be removed. You
don't have to worry about calling a structural engineer. You
don't have to worry about, oh, the house is going
to fall down if we take that thing off the
(06:28):
side of you know, And I realize now as I'm
saying these things to you that there are probably a
few other items that I want to talk about regarding
sofits and these empty spaces. So what we're going to
do is we're up against a break. When we come back,
I'm going to finish these thoughts on So I'm stretching
this one a little longer because it's a biggie and
(06:48):
you deserve to hear the truth about the soffits and
the dead spaces in your home that you could reclaim
if you're planning a remodel, and should reclaim if you're
planning a remodel, because getting rid of them is super easy.
Speaker 2 (07:02):
You're listening to Home with Dean Sharp on demand from
KFI AM six forty.
Speaker 1 (07:09):
So glad you've joined us on the program today if
you're just dropping in, we're doing part two of a
two part series this weekend of special very very specific
remodeling items to include in your remodel if you're working
with a tracked home. These specific items are the things,
the kinds of things you can do during a remodel
(07:31):
of very little cost and time and energy and a
huge disproportionate payoff. And that's the kind of stuff we're
all looking for, right because you remodels cost money and
we want to stretch that dollar and get the biggest
possible design effect out of everything that we do. So
before the break I was talking about that. I mean,
(07:51):
this is a biggie. This is just a biggie. And
that is the elimination or the reduction at least of
soffits and empty dead spases around the interior of your
home to give you more ceiling height, to give you
more wall space, to give you more square footage in
a room. The most commonplaces that these soffits occur in
(08:12):
tracked homes, and I already explained why they're They're there
because they enable the builder to allow their mechanical people,
their mechanical subcontractors, plumbers, electricians, HVAC people, these chases, these
easy ways of getting from point A to point B
in a house. They're not the only way it could
have been done. It's just for the builder. For the developer,
(08:35):
it was the least expensive way to get it done. Okay,
now some of you, I know I'm interrupting my own
thought here, but some of you are thinking, well, Dean,
if the builder did it the least expensive way, why
are you having me do it a more expensive way. Well,
(08:55):
two reasons. One because you could gain so much by
removing these artificially inflated, bloated areas that are intruding on
the interior of your house. Number one, no question about that.
Number Two, the cost differential between doing it the way
it was done in your house and the way it
(09:17):
should be done for you is going to be shockingly,
shockingly minimal. You're like, well, if that's true, then why
didn't the builder do it well? Because, unlike you, the
builder wasn't just working on your house that cost differential
that they made the decision about. They took that cost
(09:38):
differential and multiplied it over the fifteen hundred or three
thousand homes in your development. That's where it makes a
significant impact on the bottom line. It was never going
to be that much more for your home, okay, And
that's why it's worth doing it this time around, because
(09:59):
you're only doing it once. Right. Here's a classic example.
You're gutting a kitchen. You've decided I need new kitchen cabinets,
I'm done with this old kitchen, and you've got a
soffit in your kitchen, a soft coming down from and
let's just say for the sake of argument that because
this is going to fit most people for the sake
of argument, you've got eight foot ceilings in your house.
(10:19):
In other words, you're the majority of tracked homes, older
built tracked homes, not the new style homes that where
we now do standard nine foot ceilings, but older style
where it was eight foot ceilings. An eight foot ceiling.
So many clients who we do consults for are are
shocked to realize that they're upper cabinets in their kitchen
(10:40):
because they're looking for more space. They're like, how can
I expand the kitchen to get a little bit more
storage space? And I just say, well, we don't necessarily
even have to expand the kitchen in square footage. We
could just get rid of the soft and run new
upper cabinets to the ceiling. And they're like, well, if
you get rid of the soffits, then the cabinets are
just going to sit there with open space over them.
And I say no, because if you do, you have
(11:00):
an eight foot ceiling kitchen with a soft it built down,
your upper cabinets are thirty six inches tall. Yeah, you
can go measure it right now. I'm not a psychic.
I just know that that's the case. If you've got
a soft and an eight foot ceiling, you have thirty
six inch tall upper cabinets. A standard full size upper
cabinet is forty two inches tall, Okay forty two, not
(11:24):
thirty six. And as a result, if you remove the soffit,
a forty two inch tall cabinet goes all the way
to the ceiling and increases the amount of storage in
that kitchen automatically just by removing the soffit. And you think, well,
they put that soffit there for a reason, because I
know there's an HVAC duct in it. You know what,
(11:47):
I would be willing to put bet serious money, serious
money with you that that AC duct just drops in
in one tiny location and the chances of us finding
a way to get it in the ceiling itself and
not in the soffit are amazingly high. In fact, I
will tell you, in decades of doing this, we've never
(12:07):
not been able to get the AC duct out of
the soffit. And the rest of the sofft is there
so that the builder didn't have to pay for forty
two inch cabinets, so that they could pay for thirty
six inch cabinets. That's why it's there. Period. You take
it out and you reclaim that space. So again, the
(12:29):
most commonplaces these soffits are found entryway ceilings. Have you
ever noticed that about your house, that when you walk
into the entry when people walk in, literally walk in
the front door, that for some reason, the ceiling there
is lower than everywhere else. I'll tell you where it's
most common, because you've got a long haulway off to
the left or the right, and then the family room
(12:51):
or the living room is on the other side of
the entryway right. So again, that ceiling was dropped so
that a duct could get down the hallway from the
fau and into the living room. It's not the only
way it could have happened. Now, if you live in
a two story house, like, it's a little trickier because
we don't have the attic to run into. But I
(13:12):
see these most of the time in single story homes,
meaning there's an attic overhead, meaning we can run that
ducked up into the attic and over to the living
room without having to drop the entryway ceiling. Just saying
it's not always the case. This is not a hard
and fast universal law, but it is super super common,
(13:37):
so common. That's why I'm putting it on this list
such an important item. So entry ceilings, hallways for the
same reason kitchen ceilings. We've already talked about that. And
if you live in nineteen eighties and newer homes, you
may have entire walls running down your hallway or in
areas of your house that have been doubled up. In
(13:57):
that sense that where I say folksphistication, because the vibe
is that, oh, look at how big and thick this
wall is. You see the end of this wall. This
is like a twelve inch thick wall. No, it's not.
It's not a twelve inch thick wall. There's one real
wall in there, two by four or two by six wall,
and then there's another false filler wall in there, and
(14:20):
the dry wall is bridging between the two to make
it look like it's twelve inches. Believe me, if you
had a real twelve inch thick wall, it is holding
up some massive weight up above it. Massive, not just
the second floor. Okay, So there are all of these
opportunities in a home. Now understand they're hidden, they're behind drywall.
(14:44):
So you're saying, hey, how can I know I don't
have plans? I may have suspicions, but I don't have
a set of plans for my house, so how can
I know without just tearing it all up? Well, tearing
it all up, that's nobody wants you to do that.
I want you to do that, but I do want
you to understand this. Drywall patches are inexpensive, okay, especially
(15:07):
if you're planning a remodel ahead of you, So a
little bit of forensic like most of the time, all
we need to do is open up in a questionable area,
maybe a twelve x twelve square of drywall. We cut
it out, we can stick our head in there, we
can see what's going on, we can get the lay
of the land. And sometimes we're like nope, now we're stuck,
(15:30):
and we put the drywall back on and we patch
it and we walk away. Okay, that's a few dollars
to learn something invaluable about your home. And if you
don't even want to go that far, then here's a tool, literally,
a physical tool that you should acquire as a homeowner
(15:50):
planning on investigating their house pre remodel. Get yourself an
inspection camera. An inspection camera is a camera that is
mounted on a very thin, flexible neck, maybe twelve sixteen
feet long, comes in a coil, a high def camera
(16:11):
with an LED light, and then back at the end
of that sixteen foot stretch of LED coil tubing or
flex tubing is an actual camera, five inch screen, full color,
and you drill a half inch hole into a piece
of drywall and feed this camera in behind walls, around sinks,
(16:35):
I mean, down plumbing pipes, down sewer pipes. An inspection
camera can do many of the things that I was
just talking about with just a half inch hole in
a piece of drywall and give you a look inside
the bones of your home. And you're like, all right, Dean,
but okay, the expense. Let me tell you. I'm just
(16:56):
going to tell you right now, and this is not
an advocation for this particular model or brand, but I'm
just gonna say I own a test long inspection camera. Okay,
dual lens boroscope camera with light, five inch full color screen,
sixteen foot snake scope, fully waterproof. It's rated for plumbing
(17:18):
pipes and indoor wall spaces. On Amazon today one hundred
and fifty nine dollars, Yes, one hundred and fifty nine dollars,
and you've got a full scale professional inspection camera that you,
as a homeowner, can use to look anywhere you want
in your home. These things are possible, and because they
(17:42):
yield such big results, they're so doable. So doable. All right,
I got more for you. You hang tight.
Speaker 2 (17:50):
You're listening to Home with Dean Sharp on demand from
KFI AM six forty.
Speaker 1 (17:57):
Live streaming in HD everywhere on the iHeartRadio app Your
Home with Dean Sharp the house Whisper. So glad you're
with me on the program today, we're talking about big
changes that can be made in a tract home if
we know what we're doing. We're addressing the inherent weaknesses
of a tract home, big changes that can be made
that create disproportionately awesome results for a far far lower
(18:25):
time and money expenditure than you would think. And we're
going through that list this morning, the kinds of things
that every homeowner who's thinking about a remodel wants to
hear and wants to know about. I've got to from
from now until the end of the show. For the
next couple of segments, I'm going to share with you
(18:45):
these changes off my list in pairs, one super relatively
simple and one that's a little bit more engaged and involved.
It might. You know, here's here's a good pair to
start off this pairing with number one. Move the entry chandelier.
(19:06):
What what are you talking about, Tean? This is just
something that you know. Honestly, if you had asked me
fifteen years ago, before I had done literally hundreds, maybe
probably thousands of consults at this point, I wouldn't have
told you that I was aware of how common this is.
(19:27):
But it's common. In fact, I find it almost in
every home. If you have an entry that has a
vaulted ceiling or a higher ceiling, I come in the
front door, there's likely a chandelier hanging in your entryway.
It needs to move. I'm guessing in two different ways,
(19:49):
and if yours doesn't, then good on you. You're good to go. Okay,
But most entry ways, most houses tracked houses. The lighting
was not designed by a lighting consultant or a lighting designer.
The lighting was designed by contractor by the electrician. Electricians
love simple grids, and electricians, you know, they have a
(20:13):
certain logic to where they put a thing. Quite often
that logic does not hold up in the design world.
And so here is my thing Let's say you've got
a vaulted ceiling in your tracked home, and when you
walk in, you have an entry landing area. That's your
landing Maybe the stairs are out in front of you,
or maybe this is just here's the entry hall or
(20:34):
the landing area, okay. And so you look on a
set of plans and you think, well, my landing area
is you know, about six maybe eight feet long there,
and then it transitions into the rest of the room.
So where would you hang the chandelier. You would hang
the chandelier right in the center of that. So what
I'm saying is this, if you walk in. If I
walk in your front door, okay, and I have to
(20:57):
walk in by the way far enough for the door
to close behind me, that's when I'm actually in your entryway,
not when I'm standing in the threshold of your door,
but when you invite me in and I walk past
the swing of the door, okay, so that the door
can be closed behind me. Now I am standing in
your entryway. If I am at that point about three
(21:18):
and a half or four feet into your entryway and
the chandelier is directly over my head, it is in
the wrong place because you've got a vaulted ceiling, and
you want that chandelier to be a part of the
showiness of that vaulted ceiling and light the path. Right,
(21:38):
no human being is going to at that point look
straight up, cock their head backwards and look straight up
vertically in an uncomfortable position and say, oh, what a
lovely chandelier you have up there. Nope, it's above my head.
It's over I didn't even see it coming in. It
was a waste of a design element. So when you
(22:00):
were standing in the proper position, having entered your front door,
clear of the door, I should be able to look
up just with my eyes, without even calking my neck up,
and catch the view of this beautiful, shiny, you know,
blingy chandelier. That's when it's in the right position. So
(22:23):
most entry chandeliers need to move further away from the
front door in order to have their effect. Also, most
entry chandeliers have to move up up into shorten the chain.
I'm six foot three. It just so happens that when
I am barefoot and I reach up, I can touch
with my fingertips an eight foot ceiling. So my reach
(22:45):
is eight feet For a tall person like me, walking
in your home. I should not be able to reach
up and touch the bottom of your chandelier, because that's
essentially defeating the whole purpose of having a vaulted ceiling
in the first place. The chandelier needs to be up higher,
out of at least two feet out of my reach
so that I feel like, yeah, that's wait, that's up there.
(23:06):
So yeah, most chandeliers should be hanging a minimum of
ten feet off the floor of the entryway, and some
much higher than that. So there you go, and moving
a chandelier, it's moving one electrical box a few feet
and changing over the electricity there and patching the old hole.
Not a big deal, but a really really efficient and
(23:28):
effective design tool for a remodel. Now that's that. The
other pair is something you're going to scratch your head
and say, all right, now you've lost it, But I
think most of you will agree. I know this is
a big move. I know this seems crazy. But for
a lot of homes out there, the living room and
(23:50):
or the family room you've been making do with, and
if you really think about why you're making do in
that room and why it just never works for you,
the hard truth is the fireplace is just screwing everything up. Now.
I love fireplaces. I probably use I think I use
my fireplace more than anybody else. I know. I love fireplaces.
(24:12):
I'm not saying get rid of the fireplace. But in
today's day and age, we can take a masonry fireplace
and remove it, okay, and improve the room. Just by
removing the fireplace means that we could put the furniture
on that wall, we can orient the room in a
completely different direction, all those kinds of things. That's called
(24:33):
design by demolition, that's what I call it. And it's
the least expensive kind of renovation to make because to
demo out of fireplace it's going to cost you some money.
But to remove something and once it's gone, to simply
improve the room or the house because of its absence,
that is the best use of your remodeling dollars. Now,
(24:54):
I don't necessarily want you to get rid of a
fireplace in the room, but a house that was designed
in the nineteen forties, nineteen fifties, sixties, seventies, even lace
and even eighties and nineties, because these were carryovers, kind
of thoughtless carryovers. But the point is houses that are
older tracked homes were designed with a completely different lifestyle
(25:16):
in mind. Right If I walk into a nineteen twenties
a century house, of course the fireplace is sitting big
and proud in the middle of a family room because
nobody was thinking where are we going to put the
TV in nineteen twenties, No, we're going to put the
flat screen? How are we going to we do life
different now? Nor was anybody thinking the nineteen twenties that's
(25:38):
the wall. I actually want to put the sofa on
because I want to view of the rest of the house,
or I want to view out these big windows. Nope,
that's not how they were thinking either. But that's how
we're thinking today, and that is not going to change
because architecture has evolved. It's not just a fad. It's
simply a greater understanding of how living in our home
(25:59):
and embrace seeing larger vistas and larger views of the
outside better than staring at a wall. So with today's
modular fireplaces, we can move the fireplace to a different
part of the room. We can move the fireplace up
a wall, down a wall, put a linear fireplace underneath
the flask. There are tons of options. If you lived
(26:20):
outside of California, You've got every imaginable option, including just
relocating a new wood burning fireplace. In California, we're a
little more limited, but we still have tons and tons
of options. And all I'm saying is, all I'm saying
is think outside the box. Thinking and dreaming is free.
There's no charge ahead of time. But maybe the key
(26:43):
to your living room or your family room is removing
or moving the fireplace. All right, move the entry chandelier easy,
moving a fireplace. Oh, I know that gets everybody right here.
But that's a pair of things worth considering. I've got
another one for you that we'll talk about right after.
Speaker 2 (27:04):
You're listening to Home with Dean Sharp on demand from
KFI AM six.
Speaker 1 (27:08):
Forty Welcome home. Okay, here we are. We are in
the home stretch here, last segment of our show, but
still lots to cover on our list of key elements
keyed in specifically, if you're planning on remodeling your tracked home,
keyed into the intrinsic weaknesses or malleability of your tracked
(27:33):
home that you should consider including in your remodel because
they yield a disproportionate amount of effect for the A
relatively small amount of time and energy to be put
into them, and they're larger and smaller items on the list.
I've been pairing them up here, a cheap, easy one
with a more involved one so you can get the
(27:55):
full spectrum of it. So we're into the lightning round side.
I've got four items that I need to finish up
to finish this essential list with you, and I'm just
going to blow through them the best I can. Uh So, first,
for this segment, it should go without saying. We already
talked about soffits and relocating HVAC, ducting and all of that.
(28:16):
If you happen to have an h what's called a
vertical HVAC air handler in furnace, like it's in a
closet in your hallway, and you're thinking about remodeling and
the time and it's also time to replace or upgrade
the HVAC system, then you have to have at least
the conversation about getting that air handler and furnace unit
(28:38):
up vertical in an attic space. Now, if you got
a two story home, you know in the in the
air handlers downstairs, you know there are always considerations, but
chances are uh if you've got a two story home,
the air handler is actually out in the garage and
or an exterior cabinet. If you've got a traditional single
(28:59):
story tracked home, there's a really good chance that there's
a vertical air handler in a closet in a hallway.
And of course, I know you always want more closet space.
We always want to take advantage of more space in
the usable areas of the house. So if you have
any decent kind of attic whatsoever, even a smallish er
kind of attic, chances of getting a horizontal unit hanging
(29:23):
up there and getting it out of your living space,
it's just better. You can have more room. You could
just make that a closet, more storage, you can expand
another room into that little niche area. It's quieter up
in the attic than it is down in your hallway.
All of these things move the ac air handler into
the attic if possible, and while you're doing it, dual
(29:44):
zone the HVAC. If it so happens that your house
has an issue with uneven heating and cooling, like a
two story house tracked home often does upstairs, it gets
so hot downstairs we're freezing, dual zone the HVA systems
so that it handles each floor or area zone separately.
(30:06):
More on that when we do our next air conditioning show.
Here is another one rethinking interior doors in your home.
This is something that just gets skipped over all the time.
We just spent two hundred thousand dollars remodeling our house,
Dean and I said, great, how did the interior doors go?
And you're like, what about the interior doors? Oh, so
(30:29):
you didn't take the few extra dollars to change out
those hollow core interior doors to solid core doors and
to make them sexier looking as well and more in
line with your new look. People just tend not to
think about the interior doors going into their bedrooms and
(30:51):
so on, but they're there, and in most tracked homes
they're hollow, which means, okay, they provide visual privacy because
when you close the door you can't see through it,
but that's about it. As far as their sound privacy
into those rooms. Uh, you know, you do just about
as well hanging a blanket across the room. And the
(31:12):
fact is those interior doors at the time that they
were purchased by the builder and put in blankets were
more expensive than those doors, which is why that they're there.
And you know, I can imagine your home right now.
It has a white interior doors. They're kind of molded,
two or three paneled. I've seen them. I've seen them
a billion times. There are so many door options, and
(31:36):
so many people think about the big moves on a
house without thinking, Hey, you know what if we change
the character or the look of every door in the house,
that's a lot of changed character. Plus we privatize each room.
Plus it's just better, just better rethink the interior doors.
That's a simple move. And then the last one that
(31:57):
I'm going to leave you with today is again in
kind of the same line as getting rid of empty
dead spaces and removing sowfits. There are some special rooms
in your home, the most important rooms. Maybe it's the kitchen,
maybe it's the living room or the family room area,
or maybe it's the the master suite, the primary bedroom,
(32:20):
where you may have the opportunity, if you've got attic
up above you to vault the ceilings in those rooms,
vaulted ceilings. You're like, well, Dean, why are you so
obsessed with vaulted ceilings. Well, I'm not obsessed with them.
But I know this as a designer who works with
the fundamentals of human architectural design. We can expand the
(32:45):
space of your house. Okay, by making room additions. Room
additions are incredibly expensive expanding the square footage space of
your house. But quite often, I'm going to say eight
out of ten ten times when I'm been posed with
that issue by a client, we will find ways of
(33:06):
expanding the spacious ness, not the space, but the spacious
ness of a home, and shockingly it satisfies them in
a way they didn't expect. So without enlarging your family room,
and I'm not saying it doesn't have to get it,
it doesn't need to get bigger, I haven't seen it.
But without enlarging the family room or the primary bedroom
(33:28):
or whatever room we're talking about, without enlarging its square footage,
which means moving walls and doing all sorts of other
stuff that's gonna get expensive. We need to take a
look in the attic and the space above and see
if there isn't and there usually is a pathway to
raising the ceiling or at least vaulting the ceiling in
an angular way to get more volume in the room,
(33:52):
because guess what volume equals spaciousness. It doesn't increase the
square footage of the space, but increases the spaciousness. And
that's actually what you really want. Nine times out of ten,
that's what you're looking for. All right. I made it
through the list. I'm shocked that I made it through
(34:14):
the list, and I know that was a bit of
a lightning round. But the moral of the story is
very simple. We live in tracked homes and we're not
going to you know, pooh pooh that and look down
upon that, because it's what has enabled most of us
to live in a home, period, to own a home period.
(34:35):
All Right. The inexpensive cost, you know, that's crazy to
say these days, but the relative expense of buying a
tracked home in a development versus building a custom a
home from the ground up, there's no question about A
mass produced item is cheaper than a one off, get it.
That's why you're there. I don't look down on your
(34:55):
tracked home, nor do I get discouraged by it, because
if you see it for what it is, right, if
you see it as the blank canvas longing for what
it never had a real identity, then the advantage of
working with a tracked home is you can probably make
it just about anything you want it to be. There
(35:17):
are really only two kinds of houses in the world.
There are houses that have this strong architectural pedigree. You know,
you can't take a Victorian gingerbread house and turn it
into a mid century modern house. It's just not going
to happen. A Victorian house if you're remodeling it, it
gives you the playbook. It says, hey, you got to
remodel me like a Victorian house, and there aren't a
(35:37):
lot of questions as to how we go about doing that.
There's a playbook there. But the typical tract home is
a more amorphous thing. It's blurrier. It doesn't have a
strong architectural pedigree. You can either bemoan that or you
can celebrate it and say this is a blank canvas
to paint as we please. And what that means. Every
(35:58):
house has a path forward, Every house has hope. I
always say this most renovations, they don't need a bigger budget,
they just need a better story. And when that story
merges with your story, that's when your ordinary tracked home
becomes an extraordinary home. That's all I got for you today.
I hope that you make the most of this beautiful Sunday,
(36:21):
the first weekend of spring. Whatever you've got planned to
do this, make sure you get busy building yourself a
beautiful life, and we will see you right back here
next week. After this has been Home with Dean Sharp,
the House Whisper. Tune into the live broadcast on KFI
AM six forty every Saturday morning from six to eight
(36:44):
Pacific time and every Sunday morning from nine to noon
Pacific time, or anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio app.
KFI AM six forty. You're listening to Dean Sharp the
house Whisper on demand on the iHeart Radio app. You know,
this very program is also the house Whisperer podcast that
you can listen to anytime, anywhere on demand, hundreds of episodes,
all searchable by topic. It is your home improvement reference library.
(00:24):
And if you're thinking, hey, that's all great, Dean, but
what we really need is you and Tina in our
house standing at looking at that you know, whatever that is,
you know you can do that too. You can book
an in home design consult with me and t Just
go to house Whisperer dot design. And yes, we have
ways of doing it, even if you don't live within
(00:47):
driving distance of southern California. There's always a way. Just
did a consult a couple of weeks ago in Albuquerque,
New Mexico. There's a way. There's a way, where there's
a will, there's a way. All right, back to our
conversation about big, big changes that can be made to
(01:08):
a tracked home during a remodel that yield specific changes
that yield a disproportionate amount of good and jug and
sexy and great and awesome for a disproportionate to the
amount of energy and effort and money put into them.
I've got a whole list of them for you. You know,
it's based on the idea that we're addressing the intrinsic
(01:31):
weaknesses of tracked homes in the first place. So let's
move up. I've moved up to the top of the
list based on one of our callers in the last hour.
This idea of reducing and removing soffits sofits. Some of
(01:51):
you in other parts of the country know them as bulkheads.
But a sofit a bulkhead, it's a structure. It's a
non st ructural build out inside the interior of a
home that allows space for something a plumbing pipe to
(02:11):
run through, a drainline to run through, an air conditioning
duct to run through, that kind of thing. Soffits and
bulkheads same thing, just a different name. Up in Canada,
our neighbors to the north, they are referred to almost
exclusively as bulkheads, and down here most often we call
(02:33):
them soffits. But they're not just soffits. There are also
double walls running from the floor to the ceiling areas
of your home that have been intruded upon an interior
space for the sake of making room for something. Now,
I know you're sitting there thinking, well, Dean, that thing
is making room for a thing. I get it, I
(02:54):
get it. But I want you to understand this in
terms of why it's there and its relations ship to
it being a tracked home. Okay. So a couple of
things that you got to know about a tract home.
They are built with the lowest possible cost of a
construction in mind. Okay. And so when we've got, for instance,
(03:19):
when we know we've got to get an air conditioning
duct from point A down the hallway to point B
out in the living room or something like that, the
lowest cheap but you know, the lowest cost way, the
cheapest way of getting a duct from point A to
point B is often just to drop the ceiling of
(03:40):
an entire area, like a hallway, drop the whole hallway
ceiling down below, you know, eight feet or so, you know.
And and as a result, it was really inexpensive for
the builders, for the developer to create this space for
an air conditioning contractor to come through and run a
(04:01):
traditional flex duct right in that space and boom, you're done.
They're done. There's the vent in the living room and
it's coming from you know, wherever the FAU is the
air handler in the house. But just because that's the
way they ran, it doesn't mean that's the only way
that duct could get from point A to point B.
(04:21):
What you have in your home is the least expensive
way for the builder for your duct to get from
point A to point B. That doesn't mean it has
to be that way. The builder left tons of room
for the HVAC contractor. I'm just using this as one
(04:41):
example for a vent contractor to run a traditional inexpensive vent.
They did not say to themselves, you know what, the
buyers of our homes deserve the highest ceilings possible and
the most interior space possible. So we're going to go
to extra expense to run ducting up a wall in
(05:02):
between studs. That would be a metal duct specially made
to fit in a stud wall bay from top to bottom.
Or we're gonna run. We're gonna run this duck twice
as long as it needs to go by jumping up,
getting into the attic, going over there, running through joists
in between, and then down. Instead of making this big soffet.
(05:23):
Those are the considerations that absolutely one hundred percent were
not taken into consideration when your tracked home was built,
because it's just cheaper to do it the other way. Now,
what do you and I do. We move into a house,
and if we don't understand that that's the way it
(05:43):
was done, we just accept it as it is, and
we start making do. To your credit, all right, to
all of our credit, all of us who live in
tracked homes. What do we do. We're resilient human beings.
We move in. It's not perfect, but we make do.
And if you've been in your home ten years, twenty years,
thirty years plus, you've been making do for a long time.
(06:07):
And now it may shock you to realize that it
never had to be that way. But that's the kind
of thing I'm saying. Sofits are non structural entities in
your house, which means they can simply be removed. You
don't have to worry about calling a structural engineer. You
don't have to worry about, oh, the house is going
to fall down if we take that thing off the
(06:28):
side of you know, And I realize now as I'm
saying these things to you that there are probably a
few other items that I want to talk about regarding
sofits and these empty spaces. So what we're going to
do is we're up against a break. When we come back,
I'm going to finish these thoughts on So I'm stretching
this one a little longer because it's a biggie and
(06:48):
you deserve to hear the truth about the soffits and
the dead spaces in your home that you could reclaim
if you're planning a remodel, and should reclaim if you're
planning a remodel, because getting rid of them is super easy.
Speaker 2 (07:02):
You're listening to Home with Dean Sharp on demand from
KFI AM six forty.
Speaker 1 (07:09):
So glad you've joined us on the program today if
you're just dropping in, we're doing part two of a
two part series this weekend of special very very specific
remodeling items to include in your remodel if you're working
with a tracked home. These specific items are the things,
the kinds of things you can do during a remodel
(07:31):
of very little cost and time and energy and a
huge disproportionate payoff. And that's the kind of stuff we're
all looking for, right because you remodels cost money and
we want to stretch that dollar and get the biggest
possible design effect out of everything that we do. So
before the break I was talking about that. I mean,
(07:51):
this is a biggie. This is just a biggie. And
that is the elimination or the reduction at least of
soffits and empty dead spases around the interior of your
home to give you more ceiling height, to give you
more wall space, to give you more square footage in
a room. The most commonplaces that these soffits occur in
(08:12):
tracked homes, and I already explained why they're They're there
because they enable the builder to allow their mechanical people,
their mechanical subcontractors, plumbers, electricians, HVAC people, these chases, these
easy ways of getting from point A to point B
in a house. They're not the only way it could
have been done. It's just for the builder. For the developer,
(08:35):
it was the least expensive way to get it done. Okay,
now some of you, I know I'm interrupting my own
thought here, but some of you are thinking, well, Dean,
if the builder did it the least expensive way, why
are you having me do it a more expensive way. Well,
(08:55):
two reasons. One because you could gain so much by
removing these artificially inflated, bloated areas that are intruding on
the interior of your house. Number one, no question about that.
Number Two, the cost differential between doing it the way
it was done in your house and the way it
(09:17):
should be done for you is going to be shockingly,
shockingly minimal. You're like, well, if that's true, then why
didn't the builder do it well? Because, unlike you, the
builder wasn't just working on your house that cost differential
that they made the decision about. They took that cost
(09:38):
differential and multiplied it over the fifteen hundred or three
thousand homes in your development. That's where it makes a
significant impact on the bottom line. It was never going
to be that much more for your home, okay, And
that's why it's worth doing it this time around, because
(09:59):
you're only doing it once. Right. Here's a classic example.
You're gutting a kitchen. You've decided I need new kitchen cabinets,
I'm done with this old kitchen, and you've got a
soffit in your kitchen, a soft coming down from and
let's just say for the sake of argument that because
this is going to fit most people for the sake
of argument, you've got eight foot ceilings in your house.
(10:19):
In other words, you're the majority of tracked homes, older
built tracked homes, not the new style homes that where
we now do standard nine foot ceilings, but older style
where it was eight foot ceilings. An eight foot ceiling.
So many clients who we do consults for are are
shocked to realize that they're upper cabinets in their kitchen
(10:40):
because they're looking for more space. They're like, how can
I expand the kitchen to get a little bit more
storage space? And I just say, well, we don't necessarily
even have to expand the kitchen in square footage. We
could just get rid of the soft and run new
upper cabinets to the ceiling. And they're like, well, if
you get rid of the soffits, then the cabinets are
just going to sit there with open space over them.
And I say no, because if you do, you have
(11:00):
an eight foot ceiling kitchen with a soft it built down,
your upper cabinets are thirty six inches tall. Yeah, you
can go measure it right now. I'm not a psychic.
I just know that that's the case. If you've got
a soft and an eight foot ceiling, you have thirty
six inch tall upper cabinets. A standard full size upper
cabinet is forty two inches tall, Okay forty two, not
(11:24):
thirty six. And as a result, if you remove the soffit,
a forty two inch tall cabinet goes all the way
to the ceiling and increases the amount of storage in
that kitchen automatically just by removing the soffit. And you think, well,
they put that soffit there for a reason, because I
know there's an HVAC duct in it. You know what,
(11:47):
I would be willing to put bet serious money, serious
money with you that that AC duct just drops in
in one tiny location and the chances of us finding
a way to get it in the ceiling itself and
not in the soffit are amazingly high. In fact, I
will tell you, in decades of doing this, we've never
(12:07):
not been able to get the AC duct out of
the soffit. And the rest of the sofft is there
so that the builder didn't have to pay for forty
two inch cabinets, so that they could pay for thirty
six inch cabinets. That's why it's there. Period. You take
it out and you reclaim that space. So again, the
(12:29):
most commonplaces these soffits are found entryway ceilings. Have you
ever noticed that about your house, that when you walk
into the entry when people walk in, literally walk in
the front door, that for some reason, the ceiling there
is lower than everywhere else. I'll tell you where it's
most common, because you've got a long haulway off to
the left or the right, and then the family room
(12:51):
or the living room is on the other side of
the entryway right. So again, that ceiling was dropped so
that a duct could get down the hallway from the
fau and into the living room. It's not the only
way it could have happened. Now, if you live in
a two story house, like, it's a little trickier because
we don't have the attic to run into. But I
(13:12):
see these most of the time in single story homes,
meaning there's an attic overhead, meaning we can run that
ducked up into the attic and over to the living
room without having to drop the entryway ceiling. Just saying
it's not always the case. This is not a hard
and fast universal law, but it is super super common,
(13:37):
so common. That's why I'm putting it on this list
such an important item. So entry ceilings, hallways for the
same reason kitchen ceilings. We've already talked about that. And
if you live in nineteen eighties and newer homes, you
may have entire walls running down your hallway or in
areas of your house that have been doubled up. In
(13:57):
that sense that where I say folksphistication, because the vibe
is that, oh, look at how big and thick this
wall is. You see the end of this wall. This
is like a twelve inch thick wall. No, it's not.
It's not a twelve inch thick wall. There's one real
wall in there, two by four or two by six wall,
and then there's another false filler wall in there, and
(14:20):
the dry wall is bridging between the two to make
it look like it's twelve inches. Believe me, if you
had a real twelve inch thick wall, it is holding
up some massive weight up above it. Massive, not just
the second floor. Okay, So there are all of these
opportunities in a home. Now understand they're hidden, they're behind drywall.
(14:44):
So you're saying, hey, how can I know I don't
have plans? I may have suspicions, but I don't have
a set of plans for my house, so how can
I know without just tearing it all up? Well, tearing
it all up, that's nobody wants you to do that.
I want you to do that, but I do want
you to understand this. Drywall patches are inexpensive, okay, especially
(15:07):
if you're planning a remodel ahead of you, So a
little bit of forensic like most of the time, all
we need to do is open up in a questionable area,
maybe a twelve x twelve square of drywall. We cut
it out, we can stick our head in there, we
can see what's going on, we can get the lay
of the land. And sometimes we're like nope, now we're stuck,
(15:30):
and we put the drywall back on and we patch
it and we walk away. Okay, that's a few dollars
to learn something invaluable about your home. And if you
don't even want to go that far, then here's a tool, literally,
a physical tool that you should acquire as a homeowner
(15:50):
planning on investigating their house pre remodel. Get yourself an
inspection camera. An inspection camera is a camera that is
mounted on a very thin, flexible neck, maybe twelve sixteen
feet long, comes in a coil, a high def camera
(16:11):
with an LED light, and then back at the end
of that sixteen foot stretch of LED coil tubing or
flex tubing is an actual camera, five inch screen, full color,
and you drill a half inch hole into a piece
of drywall and feed this camera in behind walls, around sinks,
(16:35):
I mean, down plumbing pipes, down sewer pipes. An inspection
camera can do many of the things that I was
just talking about with just a half inch hole in
a piece of drywall and give you a look inside
the bones of your home. And you're like, all right, Dean,
but okay, the expense. Let me tell you. I'm just
(16:56):
going to tell you right now, and this is not
an advocation for this particular model or brand, but I'm
just gonna say I own a test long inspection camera. Okay,
dual lens boroscope camera with light, five inch full color screen,
sixteen foot snake scope, fully waterproof. It's rated for plumbing
(17:18):
pipes and indoor wall spaces. On Amazon today one hundred
and fifty nine dollars, Yes, one hundred and fifty nine dollars,
and you've got a full scale professional inspection camera that you,
as a homeowner, can use to look anywhere you want
in your home. These things are possible, and because they
(17:42):
yield such big results, they're so doable. So doable. All right,
I got more for you. You hang tight.
Speaker 2 (17:50):
You're listening to Home with Dean Sharp on demand from
KFI AM six forty.
Speaker 1 (17:57):
Live streaming in HD everywhere on the iHeartRadio app Your
Home with Dean Sharp the house Whisper. So glad you're
with me on the program today, we're talking about big
changes that can be made in a tract home if
we know what we're doing. We're addressing the inherent weaknesses
of a tract home, big changes that can be made
that create disproportionately awesome results for a far far lower
(18:25):
time and money expenditure than you would think. And we're
going through that list this morning, the kinds of things
that every homeowner who's thinking about a remodel wants to
hear and wants to know about. I've got to from
from now until the end of the show. For the
next couple of segments, I'm going to share with you
(18:45):
these changes off my list in pairs, one super relatively
simple and one that's a little bit more engaged and involved.
It might. You know, here's here's a good pair to
start off this pairing with number one. Move the entry chandelier.
(19:06):
What what are you talking about, Tean? This is just
something that you know. Honestly, if you had asked me
fifteen years ago, before I had done literally hundreds, maybe
probably thousands of consults at this point, I wouldn't have
told you that I was aware of how common this is.
(19:27):
But it's common. In fact, I find it almost in
every home. If you have an entry that has a
vaulted ceiling or a higher ceiling, I come in the
front door, there's likely a chandelier hanging in your entryway.
It needs to move. I'm guessing in two different ways,
(19:49):
and if yours doesn't, then good on you. You're good to go. Okay,
But most entry ways, most houses tracked houses. The lighting
was not designed by a lighting consultant or a lighting designer.
The lighting was designed by contractor by the electrician. Electricians
love simple grids, and electricians, you know, they have a
(20:13):
certain logic to where they put a thing. Quite often
that logic does not hold up in the design world.
And so here is my thing Let's say you've got
a vaulted ceiling in your tracked home, and when you
walk in, you have an entry landing area. That's your
landing Maybe the stairs are out in front of you,
or maybe this is just here's the entry hall or
(20:34):
the landing area, okay. And so you look on a
set of plans and you think, well, my landing area
is you know, about six maybe eight feet long there,
and then it transitions into the rest of the room.
So where would you hang the chandelier. You would hang
the chandelier right in the center of that. So what
I'm saying is this, if you walk in. If I
walk in your front door, okay, and I have to
(20:57):
walk in by the way far enough for the door
to close behind me, that's when I'm actually in your entryway,
not when I'm standing in the threshold of your door,
but when you invite me in and I walk past
the swing of the door, okay, so that the door
can be closed behind me. Now I am standing in
your entryway. If I am at that point about three
(21:18):
and a half or four feet into your entryway and
the chandelier is directly over my head, it is in
the wrong place because you've got a vaulted ceiling, and
you want that chandelier to be a part of the
showiness of that vaulted ceiling and light the path. Right,
(21:38):
no human being is going to at that point look
straight up, cock their head backwards and look straight up
vertically in an uncomfortable position and say, oh, what a
lovely chandelier you have up there. Nope, it's above my head.
It's over I didn't even see it coming in. It
was a waste of a design element. So when you
(22:00):
were standing in the proper position, having entered your front door,
clear of the door, I should be able to look
up just with my eyes, without even calking my neck up,
and catch the view of this beautiful, shiny, you know,
blingy chandelier. That's when it's in the right position. So
(22:23):
most entry chandeliers need to move further away from the
front door in order to have their effect. Also, most
entry chandeliers have to move up up into shorten the chain.
I'm six foot three. It just so happens that when
I am barefoot and I reach up, I can touch
with my fingertips an eight foot ceiling. So my reach
(22:45):
is eight feet For a tall person like me, walking
in your home. I should not be able to reach
up and touch the bottom of your chandelier, because that's
essentially defeating the whole purpose of having a vaulted ceiling
in the first place. The chandelier needs to be up higher,
out of at least two feet out of my reach
so that I feel like, yeah, that's wait, that's up there.
(23:06):
So yeah, most chandeliers should be hanging a minimum of
ten feet off the floor of the entryway, and some
much higher than that. So there you go, and moving
a chandelier, it's moving one electrical box a few feet
and changing over the electricity there and patching the old hole.
Not a big deal, but a really really efficient and
(23:28):
effective design tool for a remodel. Now that's that. The
other pair is something you're going to scratch your head
and say, all right, now you've lost it, But I
think most of you will agree. I know this is
a big move. I know this seems crazy. But for
a lot of homes out there, the living room and
(23:50):
or the family room you've been making do with, and
if you really think about why you're making do in
that room and why it just never works for you,
the hard truth is the fireplace is just screwing everything up. Now.
I love fireplaces. I probably use I think I use
my fireplace more than anybody else. I know. I love fireplaces.
(24:12):
I'm not saying get rid of the fireplace. But in
today's day and age, we can take a masonry fireplace
and remove it, okay, and improve the room. Just by
removing the fireplace means that we could put the furniture
on that wall, we can orient the room in a
completely different direction, all those kinds of things. That's called
(24:33):
design by demolition, that's what I call it. And it's
the least expensive kind of renovation to make because to
demo out of fireplace it's going to cost you some money.
But to remove something and once it's gone, to simply
improve the room or the house because of its absence,
that is the best use of your remodeling dollars. Now,
(24:54):
I don't necessarily want you to get rid of a
fireplace in the room, but a house that was designed
in the nineteen forties, nineteen fifties, sixties, seventies, even lace
and even eighties and nineties, because these were carryovers, kind
of thoughtless carryovers. But the point is houses that are
older tracked homes were designed with a completely different lifestyle
(25:16):
in mind. Right If I walk into a nineteen twenties
a century house, of course the fireplace is sitting big
and proud in the middle of a family room because
nobody was thinking where are we going to put the
TV in nineteen twenties, No, we're going to put the
flat screen? How are we going to we do life
different now? Nor was anybody thinking the nineteen twenties that's
(25:38):
the wall. I actually want to put the sofa on
because I want to view of the rest of the house,
or I want to view out these big windows. Nope,
that's not how they were thinking either. But that's how
we're thinking today, and that is not going to change
because architecture has evolved. It's not just a fad. It's
simply a greater understanding of how living in our home
(25:59):
and embrace seeing larger vistas and larger views of the
outside better than staring at a wall. So with today's
modular fireplaces, we can move the fireplace to a different
part of the room. We can move the fireplace up
a wall, down a wall, put a linear fireplace underneath
the flask. There are tons of options. If you lived
(26:20):
outside of California, You've got every imaginable option, including just
relocating a new wood burning fireplace. In California, we're a
little more limited, but we still have tons and tons
of options. And all I'm saying is, all I'm saying
is think outside the box. Thinking and dreaming is free.
There's no charge ahead of time. But maybe the key
(26:43):
to your living room or your family room is removing
or moving the fireplace. All right, move the entry chandelier easy,
moving a fireplace. Oh, I know that gets everybody right here.
But that's a pair of things worth considering. I've got
another one for you that we'll talk about right after.
Speaker 2 (27:04):
You're listening to Home with Dean Sharp on demand from
KFI AM six.
Speaker 1 (27:08):
Forty Welcome home. Okay, here we are. We are in
the home stretch here, last segment of our show, but
still lots to cover on our list of key elements
keyed in specifically, if you're planning on remodeling your tracked home,
keyed into the intrinsic weaknesses or malleability of your tracked
(27:33):
home that you should consider including in your remodel because
they yield a disproportionate amount of effect for the A
relatively small amount of time and energy to be put
into them, and they're larger and smaller items on the list.
I've been pairing them up here, a cheap, easy one
with a more involved one so you can get the
(27:55):
full spectrum of it. So we're into the lightning round side.
I've got four items that I need to finish up
to finish this essential list with you, and I'm just
going to blow through them the best I can. Uh So, first,
for this segment, it should go without saying. We already
talked about soffits and relocating HVAC, ducting and all of that.
(28:16):
If you happen to have an h what's called a
vertical HVAC air handler in furnace, like it's in a
closet in your hallway, and you're thinking about remodeling and
the time and it's also time to replace or upgrade
the HVAC system, then you have to have at least
the conversation about getting that air handler and furnace unit
(28:38):
up vertical in an attic space. Now, if you got
a two story home, you know in the in the
air handlers downstairs, you know there are always considerations, but
chances are uh if you've got a two story home,
the air handler is actually out in the garage and
or an exterior cabinet. If you've got a traditional single
(28:59):
story tracked home, there's a really good chance that there's
a vertical air handler in a closet in a hallway.
And of course, I know you always want more closet space.
We always want to take advantage of more space in
the usable areas of the house. So if you have
any decent kind of attic whatsoever, even a smallish er
kind of attic, chances of getting a horizontal unit hanging
(29:23):
up there and getting it out of your living space,
it's just better. You can have more room. You could
just make that a closet, more storage, you can expand
another room into that little niche area. It's quieter up
in the attic than it is down in your hallway.
All of these things move the ac air handler into
the attic if possible, and while you're doing it, dual
(29:44):
zone the HVAC. If it so happens that your house
has an issue with uneven heating and cooling, like a
two story house tracked home often does upstairs, it gets
so hot downstairs we're freezing, dual zone the HVA systems
so that it handles each floor or area zone separately.
(30:06):
More on that when we do our next air conditioning show.
Here is another one rethinking interior doors in your home.
This is something that just gets skipped over all the time.
We just spent two hundred thousand dollars remodeling our house,
Dean and I said, great, how did the interior doors go?
And you're like, what about the interior doors? Oh, so
(30:29):
you didn't take the few extra dollars to change out
those hollow core interior doors to solid core doors and
to make them sexier looking as well and more in
line with your new look. People just tend not to
think about the interior doors going into their bedrooms and
(30:51):
so on, but they're there, and in most tracked homes
they're hollow, which means, okay, they provide visual privacy because
when you close the door you can't see through it,
but that's about it. As far as their sound privacy
into those rooms. Uh, you know, you do just about
as well hanging a blanket across the room. And the
(31:12):
fact is those interior doors at the time that they
were purchased by the builder and put in blankets were
more expensive than those doors, which is why that they're there.
And you know, I can imagine your home right now.
It has a white interior doors. They're kind of molded,
two or three paneled. I've seen them. I've seen them
a billion times. There are so many door options, and
(31:36):
so many people think about the big moves on a
house without thinking, Hey, you know what if we change
the character or the look of every door in the house,
that's a lot of changed character. Plus we privatize each room.
Plus it's just better, just better rethink the interior doors.
That's a simple move. And then the last one that
(31:57):
I'm going to leave you with today is again in
kind of the same line as getting rid of empty
dead spaces and removing sowfits. There are some special rooms
in your home, the most important rooms. Maybe it's the kitchen,
maybe it's the living room or the family room area,
or maybe it's the the master suite, the primary bedroom,
(32:20):
where you may have the opportunity, if you've got attic
up above you to vault the ceilings in those rooms,
vaulted ceilings. You're like, well, Dean, why are you so
obsessed with vaulted ceilings. Well, I'm not obsessed with them.
But I know this as a designer who works with
the fundamentals of human architectural design. We can expand the
(32:45):
space of your house. Okay, by making room additions. Room
additions are incredibly expensive expanding the square footage space of
your house. But quite often, I'm going to say eight
out of ten ten times when I'm been posed with
that issue by a client, we will find ways of
(33:06):
expanding the spacious ness, not the space, but the spacious
ness of a home, and shockingly it satisfies them in
a way they didn't expect. So without enlarging your family room,
and I'm not saying it doesn't have to get it,
it doesn't need to get bigger, I haven't seen it.
But without enlarging the family room or the primary bedroom
(33:28):
or whatever room we're talking about, without enlarging its square footage,
which means moving walls and doing all sorts of other
stuff that's gonna get expensive. We need to take a
look in the attic and the space above and see
if there isn't and there usually is a pathway to
raising the ceiling or at least vaulting the ceiling in
an angular way to get more volume in the room,
(33:52):
because guess what volume equals spaciousness. It doesn't increase the
square footage of the space, but increases the spaciousness. And
that's actually what you really want. Nine times out of ten,
that's what you're looking for. All right. I made it
through the list. I'm shocked that I made it through
(34:14):
the list, and I know that was a bit of
a lightning round. But the moral of the story is
very simple. We live in tracked homes and we're not
going to you know, pooh pooh that and look down
upon that, because it's what has enabled most of us
to live in a home, period, to own a home period.
(34:35):
All Right. The inexpensive cost, you know, that's crazy to
say these days, but the relative expense of buying a
tracked home in a development versus building a custom a
home from the ground up, there's no question about A
mass produced item is cheaper than a one off, get it.
That's why you're there. I don't look down on your
(34:55):
tracked home, nor do I get discouraged by it, because
if you see it for what it is, right, if
you see it as the blank canvas longing for what
it never had a real identity, then the advantage of
working with a tracked home is you can probably make
it just about anything you want it to be. There
(35:17):
are really only two kinds of houses in the world.
There are houses that have this strong architectural pedigree. You know,
you can't take a Victorian gingerbread house and turn it
into a mid century modern house. It's just not going
to happen. A Victorian house if you're remodeling it, it
gives you the playbook. It says, hey, you got to
remodel me like a Victorian house, and there aren't a
(35:37):
lot of questions as to how we go about doing that.
There's a playbook there. But the typical tract home is
a more amorphous thing. It's blurrier. It doesn't have a
strong architectural pedigree. You can either bemoan that or you
can celebrate it and say this is a blank canvas
to paint as we please. And what that means. Every
(35:58):
house has a path forward, Every house has hope. I
always say this most renovations, they don't need a bigger budget,
they just need a better story. And when that story
merges with your story, that's when your ordinary tracked home
becomes an extraordinary home. That's all I got for you today.
I hope that you make the most of this beautiful Sunday,
(36:21):
the first weekend of spring. Whatever you've got planned to
do this, make sure you get busy building yourself a
beautiful life, and we will see you right back here
next week. After this has been Home with Dean Sharp,
the House Whisper. Tune into the live broadcast on KFI
AM six forty every Saturday morning from six to eight
(36:44):
Pacific time and every Sunday morning from nine to noon
Pacific time, or anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio app.
Home with Dean Sharp News
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