All Calls Saturday! | Hour 2

head about your home. The number to reach me eight three three two. Ask Dean A three three the numeral two, and then you just spell out ask Dean A three three to ask Dean tomorrow's show. By the way, we're talking about sound control. Sound control, not soundproofing. That's one facet of it. Soundproofing. Get a lot of questions about soundproofing, but sound control, sound noise, noise pollution. It's an ever growing part of our lives. It is something that is

not healthy for us, both psychologically and physically. It is something we've learned a lot about in the last couple of decades and we need to do more to get control of So we're going to talk about everything from soundproofing to adding sound to your home in all the right ways, to masking sound in areas that you can't proof,

like your backyard, in your outdoor areas. So we're going to take a deep dive on the whole subject, and as always, I'm going to guide you through and give you all the interesting and practical goodies that you need to transform that place where you live. Also, remember follow us on social media. We're on all the usual suspects Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, x Home with Dean, same handle for them all. And of course this very program also the House Whisper podcast

that you can listen to anytime anywhere on demand. This is the live broadcast right now. If you happen to be listening to me on the Saturday morning, but if you're not listening to me on Saturday morning and you're hearing me talk right now, you have found the podcast and hundreds of episodes, all searchable by topic. It is your home improvement reference library. And finally, if your home is in need of some more personal house Whisper attention, you think to yourself. What I really need is Dean

and Tina standing in my living room staring at the problem. Well, that can happen to You can book an in home design consult with us. Just go to house whisperer dot design for more information. All right, let's go back to the phones. I want to talk to Gus. Hey, Gus, welcome home.

long running show. Chip and Joanna is it Fixer Upper?

that go into a house. I find people walk away with more practical understanding, uh than they do.

improvement entertainment. And I say that you know understanding that that this program that you're listening to is categorized as a home improvement show. Every time we sit down and talk about it, you know, at iHeart, it's like, Okay, our home improvement show is you know, Home with Dean Sharp. But I try and approach it differently, and maybe one of the things that's a little different about our show.

I think one of the things that is different is that number one, you know, we don't we don't set up false scenarios for things to happen dramatically in the show. I always joke about the fact that, you know, the typical formula for a home improvement show these days is Okay, we're gonna renovate these this couple's house, Jane and Bob and they've got a budget of you know, sixty thousand dollars and we're gonna do this, that and the other thing.

We dive in and then, of course the dramatic moment is everything's going along peaches and cream until oh my gosh, we uncovered this wall that we're plenty on moving and we didn't real nobody realized it was a bearing wall that's gonna blow their budget right out of the water. And then, you know, and I always laugh because as a home designer and a builder in the real world, Okay, if I'm suggesting a design for your home and I don't know that a wall is a bearing wall, you

should not have hired me. Okay, this is this is home design one oh one. Of course I know where the bearing walls in your house are and where they're not. We've got structural engineers involved in every project. I mean, it is simply not reality. And again, you know it should become as no surprise. Reality TV is the furthest thing usually from reality. So uh, it's entertainment. And if you love it as entertainment, then there you go. Then entertain yourself all day long. I'll tell you what I

got to go to a break, Gus. But when we come back, and thanks for the question. You kind of got me on my soapbox, I am going to share with you. I will share with y'all number one why we don't have a TV show yet and number two what my favorite actual home design television show is. We'll talk about that, Kayfi, Gean Sharp, the House Whisper at your service. It's an all call Saturday morning. The number to reach me eight three three two. Ask Dean A

three to three the numeral two ask Dean. Giving you a call, you get to set the agenda. Anything that's got you scratching your head about your house. Be it a design issue, yes, please, architecture, construction, DIY concern?

And I don't mean that as a diss on any and simply you know, things are what they are, and if you find those shows entertaining, then go for it. But I promised that I would say right after the break here that I would tell you number one why we don't have a show, and number two what my actual favorite design show is. And yeah, I do have one. I have one that I will watch and enjoy because generally speaking, I don't watch home improvement television too. It's

too frustrating. It's too frustrating prep because I'm like, this is not helping people at all. So we've actually been approached just FYI, I'm thinking about is it five, five or six times by producers from those networks and you know,

related networks. You know, got a call, hey buddy, yeah, you guys are going to be the new You could be the new Chip and Joe Anne and and you know, we take the calls and we talked to him, and first of all, it's like, hey, we don't want to be the new Chip and Joeanne.

to do a limited series about actual design. We could call it Design Matters Most And here's a rough treatment layout for how we I would want to do the show, and they're like, okay, well that that could be great, but we just do we just do our regular formulaic stuff. And I'm like, yeah, I don't want to do I don't want to be another formula you know, DIY show on TV. I'd like to do something more unique, more helpful, more fun, more entertaining, I think ultimately, but ultimately more

helpful as well. So anyway, if you're a pretduce out there and you're thinking, how do I get Dean to do a show with me, give me a call. I'll tell you exactly what I'm interested in doing. And it won't be on one of the DIY networks, I'll tell you, unless they're ready to break out of their mold, which I don't think they are. It'll be a Netflix or

an Apple TV thing or whatever. Anyway, there you go. Now, finally I'm taking the whole segment to do this, but a lot of people have asked, so I just figured I'll throw it out there. What design show does Dean really enjoy watching? Grand Designs? And if you're scratching your head, you're like, I've never heard of that show. It's a BBC show, the British show Grand Designs. Hosted by Kevin McLeod It is I think arguably the longest running home design show on the planet. I think they started in

ninety nine, nineteen ninety nine. I think they're in their twentieth or twenty first season or something like that. They may have skipped a lot anyway, twenty plus season. Okay, Grand Design is a show. And why is there no Grand Designs America? Because again, try getting a network to invest in the show the way the BBC did, which is this, he doesn't do the build or the design. He's a presenter. He's a host. Now he's a designer, really really good one. He knows what he's talking about.

But they find interesting one off custom design projects, people who are real people who are building their dream home and they come in have a conversation before it starts, They revisit the house as it's going, they talk about it after the fact. You get to see kind of the whole process. But that sometimes can take a year or two for one episode. So they had to have done like a two or three year investment in the show just to get a first season going, and then

continue to do that as the years roll on. Yeah, good luck getting a US network to back you on that kind of a thing, because it's not easy money right up front anyway. Grand designs very artistic, very entertaining. And if you want to hear a real home designer step in and stare a couple in the face and say, and you think you're going to build this for how much six hundred thousand pounds, you'll be lucky if you

get out of this at one point two million. And then we find out at the end that, yeah, he was pretty much right. So instead of giving false expectations about how the building process works, he gets nitty gritty with them, follows it through, and yet at the end, if he finds the project worthwhile, he'll tell you every artistic reason why this house moves you. And I just love all that because that very much lines up with the way we design and the experiences of designing dream

homes in the real world for real people. So Grand Designs, Where can you find it? I think you can find it on Amazon usual. Amazon Prime usually has at least a couple of seasons worth, and you can find all the rest of them on YouTube. Now, so there you go, there you go, all right? I blew a whole segment talking about this. But there you go. There's your answer. Go check out Grand Designs and then tell me about it.

Shoot me an email, make a comment on and maybe we should make a post and just so everybody can find it anyway, let me know what you think. I think it's a ton of fun. Okay, let's get some news and we'll go back to the phones.

So going forward, we got opinions on the kitchen designs and we told him we want to open up the kitchen and the guy told us that that wasn't a low barn wall, that it couldn't be open or it was a low bar or however, but it couldn't be opened up. That he had to do some retro fitting. It costs about an extra seven grand to open.

come down without consequence. A bearing wall can come down, but it has to be replaced by structures that are going to do the work that the wall was doing, and that can be obviously a more expensive process. So in a one story house where you've got an attic space above, the attic space is almost inevitably the place

where you make these discoveries. Up in the attic, you locate the top of that wall and we find out whether there are ceiling joists number one that are laying on that wall, that are bearing on it, that have come over and are resting on it. So normally, if the ceiling joys are running perpendicular to that wall and they are resting on it, then it is doing a job of bearing up one end of a set of ceiling joys. Another way to look at it is that in the attic, if there are any roof braces we

call them Perlin braces. There may be two by fours or two by six is coming down at an angle from the roofing rafters or from a brace system that may be loaded onto that wall, or any posts that are coming down onto the top of the wall. So the point is the easiest way to figure out what a wall is actually doing is to get on a single story house, is to get in the attic and find the wall and find out the relationship of floor

joys and posts and braces to it. Generally speaking, if floor joyce are running in the ceiling joyst sorry are running in the direction same direction of the wall, then it's not a baring wall because it may have a ceiling joist on top of it, but that doesn't mean that it's holding up the whole room. It just so happens that the ceiling joist ended up lining up with the top of the wall, but it's not doing a

job holding anything else up. So that's the first place that we would check to give you a sense of whether or not you know, we could pull that wall down and do some fancy things with the kitchen at relatively no expense. Sometimes I can see when I walk into a home just by the pattern of the wave of the roof, or even the configuration of the house.

Like if you live in a long kind of California ranch house, it's usually the walls that run down the hallway, one or maybe two walls that run down that long hallway that stretches the lengthwise of the house about in the middle of the house, about halfway between the back wall in the front wall of the house. That's usually inevitably a bearing wall of some sort. But different houses, different configurations. But I'll tell you that the secret is finding the top plate of that wall in the attic

space and seeing its relationship to everything else. Now that isn't that, that's not where it stopped. I will pop my head into an attic and give an owner a you know, ninety nine percent sure that this is not a bearing wall, and that we're cool with that. But we don't just rush ahead and start tearing walls down. I recommend that you call a local structural engineer. Okay, they've got no skin in the game. They're not trying to win the job. They're not trying to build out

a bid for you or anything. Call out a structural engineer and you simply say, hey, i've got a house I'm thinking about removing a wall. I'd like to pay you to come out to do a consult for me. And they'll come out for you know, a couple three hundred bucks, spend forty five minutes looking around the house, looking up in the attic, and give you their strong opinion as to whether or not that's a wall that can afford to come down or not. And there's some

other factors that they play into it as well. But generally speaking, that, my friend, is how you figure it out. So you can go up to the attic look around yourself. But even if you conclude, oh yeah, everything that Dean said is true, there's nothing even sitting on top of these plates up here. It's just in between a set of ceiling. Joy it looks like this wall could come down. That's all well and good, be encouraged, but don't make a move without talking to a structural engineer to make

sure that you're safe to do exactly that. So there you go, John, thanks for the question, my friend, A really, really good question. And this is why we take calls, because we end up talking about things that lots of people, lots and lots of people. For every call that we take, there's tens of thousands of people who are have the same question back of their head, who didn't fall? And that's what makes it so much fun. All Right, when we come back, we'll take more of your calls. Your

home with Dean Sharp, the house whisper. Okayf Dean Sharp, the house whisper. Welcome home. Thanks for joining us on the program today. Here we are approaching the end of another two hours together that we get to spend with each other every Saturday morning. We're taking calls as always. I don't want to waste any more time. Get right back to the phones. Let's see if we can get at least one more question in today. Let's talk to Scott. Hey, Scott, welcome home.

have about a thousand gallon plastic tank there. It drops down to a two inch run that runs about twelve hundred feet. This applies three houses and two trailers out there in a little shack too. We're on the end of the run, and when we were doing some grading work, we discovered a riser that came up, and it's a one inch riser that feeds off of that two inch PBC run. At the very end of the twelve hundred feet is a metal riser that comes up with a two and a half stiket coming off of it. Looks

like maybe for fire suppression. So here's the question I have for you. We opened up the valve and found that we had water there after twelve years being out here in the middle of nowhere, and we decided we wanted to run that water up to our fifth wheeld that we have. So every time we kick on the water, we've got over one hundred psi down there. And what happens is it creates some form of it moves the water column and creates some kind of air bubble way

up at the top where the houses are. We're you know, down at over eight percent grade, which is the last half of that twelve hundred foot run. So we get we don't have water pressure problems other than we need to regulate it down and I'm trying to figure out where I need to regulate that too. We've got a Zernwatkin's double check backflow valve and we're putting in Zernwokin six hundred XL water pressure regulator and that runs from

twenty five to seventy psi. But it seems like, you know, we pull anything above sixty psi, all the other houses lose their water on this run. And so I'm working with the neighbors to try to solve this problem so we can have water too, right, So I'm kind of looking for a solution here, and I've actually consulted with somebody at North County Backflow and he said, I'm barking up the right tree with the backflow and with the regulator.

But this problem keeps happening even when we're not using the water, and somebody has to go up to the well and shut off a cert breakers and turn them back on. Well is twenty plus years old. So I was thinking that maybe the pumpy is to be rebuilt at some point, but of course, being on this reservation, there's no resources to do it right right. And there is a water master out there and he's looked at it and says, huh, and he believes the valve at

the end now that he discovered it. There's no as B planks for this, and we're kind of out on a wind in a prayer here trying to figure this out, all.

It's a it's a a valve that only allows liquids or to move in one direction and not the other. Not hooking and rehooking the water supply down where you are will keep the bubble, the water bubbles out, and the back flow valve should hopefully keep the air bubbles from making it all the way back up to the pump and stalling the pump. That's one of the things

that may be a case. Since we're on a gravity feed such a severe gravity feed situation, air intrusion into that line that finds its way all the way back up to the to the to the main pump might actually be drying out the pump literally like air. If the pump is the highest point of that whole line draw to you, then that air bubble of size could in fact be finding its way up there and causing the pump to grind against non liquid just air in it.

So one of the things that could be done. In theory, all the way at the top of the well is not have the pump be the very very top of the airline potential, and that is to build a branch off of the water that's coming out of the pump higher up, so that if there is an air bubble that forms, it'll go there and bypass the pump, and the pump can keep functioning for all the water needs that it's also supplying. But it sounds like it could be even a little bit more complex because you've got

multiple old lines running through there. I'm gonna with the water guy and tell you I think you're barking up the right tree with that. You've got a pressure regulator that you should try not to run up over sixty too far, and that keeps the pressure from dropping out for everybody else up above you and the backflow valve. But maybe up where the pump is, maybe the pump needs replacing, or maybe what we need to do is we need to run a tee off of the pump so that any air it gets into the line.