Best of international Builder’s Show, Part 2 | Hour 1

Builders Show twenty twenty five. The International Builders Show, the largest construction and design show presentation on the planet, just wrapped up its annual convention this week in Las Vegas,

and we are reporting to you. I am reporting to you everything that I can think of that I can fit into the show that is of significance to you as a homeowner, as somebody who's living in a home home and just wanting to know what's the latest and greatest, whether you're planning a remodel or just new decor, or whatever the case may maybe a brand new house build, who knows, whatever the case may be. I want to

bring you some of the highlights of that show. And I say highlights because we're talking about a show that fills the entire Las Vegas Convention Center, all the new wings at everything corner to corner, a million square feet of exhibit space. There were nearly two thousand exhibitors there, well over one hundred thousand industry professionals in attendance.

your favorite podcasts are found. You can find all of our episodes, and the previous episode to today, part one has the beginning of that list, and there was some choice nuggets of goodness shared with you yesterday. So if you missed it, make sure you go back and listen to that and subscribe to the podcast while you're at it. What's stopping you. It's free, it's on demand, all right. That's where we're going today, and of course, of course we're going to be taking your calls. Producer Richie is

standing by. He has opened up the phone lines. The number to reach me, and this is about anything you want to talk about, not just about builder show stuff, anything that's got you scratching your head about your home. This is what we always do with calls. Anything, design, construction, diy inside, outside, corner to corner i'd walk to, backfence, does not matter, architecture, high and lofty, artistic ideas, or how to fix that leaky toilet and everything in between.

The number to reach me eight three three two. Ask Dean A three three the numeral two. Ask Dean A three three two Ask Dan. The phone lines are open.

Dean is the handle for the mall. And finally, you know, if you're listening to the show and you're like, Wow, what I really need is that guy standing in my living room telling me what I need to do with this problem, Well that can happen too if you need some personal Housewhisp pretension, you can book an in home design consult with me and the t right here. Just go to house Whisper dot Design. Okay, let me introduce you to our awesome team. This morning, Tony Sorrentino talkative

Tony is on the board. Good morning, Tony Born. That's exactly why we call him. I love Tony. Tony is is. Tony is just one of those guys. He's great, he's interesting, he's fun. We love each other. He has helped me out on so many occasions. He is the he is the uh, the all things media and electronics whisperer. By the way, exactly exactly Whisper. You are hearing me the way you are today in large part because of Tony Trentino. That's just the truth of it. So Tony, it's always

a pleasure to always today. Like I said, Producer Richie is standing by, not near Mike, but he is getting ready to screen calls as you call in.

And it's one of the tricks of walking the floors at the International Builder Show because there's just so much to see and there's so many large format, you know, things going on that sometimes it's not easy to catch belittle things. But here is one that is a long time coming, well long overdue. So there's a company called Revent. Revent is a great exhaust vent company, the kind of

company that puts like, you know, exhaust fans in bathrooms. Okay, beautiful fans, beautiful venting fans, really really kind of cutting edge stuff. And so I'm always happy to spec Revent because they're attractive, they take design into consideration, but they are super functional.

lot of humidity, it's heat, and it's moisture. It's like your bathroom is being subjected to exterior weather forces on a regular basis. Now, how do I deal with that when I'm designing out and we're building out a bathroom. Well, first of all, I want to use as much tile as possible everywhere to protect the walls and surfaces. Number two, I tile or stone, hard surface materials is what I mean. And number two, the dry wall that I put in a bathroom is always what we call green board dry wall.

I don't bother just putting it over the shower because the steam goes everywhere. Green board is it's not waterproof, but it is moisture resistant dry wall. It's better drywall from moist areas than standard drywall. So we always use green board. And then of course we use the best kind of paints like Benjamin Moore or a bathroom Spa, which is a beautiful paint and just an amazingly heat and moisture resists, and so on and so forth. But here is the thing. The switch for the bath fan.

I know you got a switch. Uh, and so let me talk about how it normally happens. You jump out of the shower, maybe you're gonna stay in there for a while, or maybe your boom out of the bathroom, which means as you leave the bathroom, you turn off the fan, you turn off the light, and there's still humidity in there. So here's the point. This switch from Revent has a humidity sensor on it and it simply

does this. Once humidity starts developing the bathroom, whether you've turned the fan on or not, it automatically turns on the exhaust fan and it keeps it on even if you turn the lights out and leave. It keeps it on, not for a timer setting, but until it senses that the humidity level has dropped to an acceptable level. Finally, a smart switch that actually runs the fan until the fan actually doesn't need to run anymore, instead of you turning it off prematurely or maybe never turning it on

at all. It's brilliant. It's just a switch, but it makes a huge difference in long term life of a small bathroom, especially and I would say every bathroom in general. So that is a humidity sensing switch from revent.

Builders Show for twenty twenty five. Just wrapped up in Las Vegas this last week here and a lot of good things, A lot of good things came out of it. Also, I just want to remind you yesterday's broadcast, the previous podcast episode is part one of this A lot of juicy nuggets shared then, and today is part two. Okay, here is a This is this is significant. I mean it really is in terms of kitchen design, and I predict this is going to become a game changer. I'm

already looking at ways to apply this. Plasma made. That's a brand, plasma made, all one word plasma made in Capital m. You can check this out yourself. Plasma Made is a company that has been developing filters for you know, recirculating filters for kitchen vent hoods for a number of years. Really good company, really good filters. And when I say filters, I mean the kind that circulate air back into the

room as opposed to ducting it completely out of the room. Now, right now, in the residential kitchen world, the only kind of filtration system that aescension that most homeowners are aware of that to vent the air from you know, smoke or air coming through the vent back into the room. Are simple, very very simple, charcoal based filters and they do a little bit of good. And those are usually built into like a microwave hood combe unit that is

designed to sit over the cook top. And you guys know of what I speak the microwave that is also the hood. It's a good microwave, it's not a good hood just I don't care what brand it is, just they're just they can't do both of those things the

best possible. The fans aren't very powerful, and those microwave hoods can either be hooked up and ducted out of the house, which is better in that case if there is existing ducting, or if there's no ducting available, they can be redirected through a charcoal filter that is cleanable and accessible and just blow the air back into the kitchen space. Okay, that sounds that has for long, for the longest time, been kind of the low end version

of how you do kitchen hood venting. Then along comes Plasma Made and.

filtering out particulates as small as even the coronavirus. Okay, that's how filter strong this filter is. And yet there is massive airflow going through it all right, So why is that so exciting? Is it's just that your new microwave hood combo, you know, it has a better filter out no, no, no, they aren't made for that. What these are designed to do is solve one of the biggest headaches that designers and builders have in regards to your new kitchen design, and that is where do we put

the cook top? And once we put the cook top where we want to put it, can we get it effectively vented? Because we've got to get a vent pipe up and out. We've got to get it into the rafters, into the attic. If there's a second floor above us, that gives us even more limitations. We've got to find an open joist bay to carry us to the out the nearest outside wall of the house. There are so

many limitations. This is one of the reasons why Soffitts bulkheads appear inside kitchen designs sometimes because we can't get the cook top event where we want it to go without going below the ceiling line, which means we've got to build out a special chase for it below the ceiling line. And ugh, it's just a it's a frustration because of these limitations. Now, if we're lucky enough to put a cook top on an outside wall, then it gets a lot easier. But the point is there are

always limitations when it comes to this. Plasma made though has created these high capacity, high cfm flow filters that sly do such a good job of cleaning the air in a recirculation manner that we don't have to duct the air outside. I don't need a duct going outside anymore to give you the highest quality venting off your

cook top, ventless ventless, high quality ducting. That is exciting and I hope that I'm conveying you know, the usefulness of that, the amount of flexibility that that enhances us with. I mean, that's just like handing me, as your kitchen designer and builder, that a gigantic present wrapped in a bow that we can really work on the design that you want. We can put the cook top anywhere you

want it to be. And if we incorporate one of these plasma made filters into the vent hood system, then we don't have to worry about venting that thing outside.

We're going to be going to phones, by the way, right after the next news break, as is our custom, at the top of the hour. So I'll give you the number one more time, eight three three two ask Dean A three three the numeral to ask Dean anything you want to talk about regarding your home. We've got some lovely calls on the board, but there is room for you as well. So eight three three two as Dan.

That's coming up right after the next news break. Okay, here's another small item which I believe is worthy of your notice. Not a major thing. I've got plenty of those two, But this is an item that is just a brilliant little design. Screen doors, you know, on your sliding glass doors, not a hinged screen door. We've had closers for hinge screen doors since pretty much the beginning of time, right, I mean for a long time, because you can just use a normal door closer for a

hinged screen door, and it does just fine. But sliding screens, what do we do with the sliding screens. We've got some sliding screen doors around here, and we've got some children around here, Olivia my eight year old granddaughter who's always running around, and of course it is the way of things right to just plow open a screen door and run outside, and you're so excited, and then of course you hear the adult voice somewhere in the background, shut the screen door. We would all love that to

just not even be a thing. And you know, and we've all done it as well.

screen door. It is a little cartridge And when I say little, I mean it is a cartridge that will mount uh and not stick into the screen area. It'll mount the top of the metal of your screen frame. And it's a di y install You don't need a professional to install this. You all all you have to do is mark out two little screw holes, uh and

get these screws started. Then screw this cartridge on, and then that this this little cartridge mounts on the screen itself, top corner of the screen, and then across from it onto the frame, a small retainer stud mounts a little stainless steel stud. And then what happens is a cable is pulled out of this cartridge and hooks onto that retainer stud. So yeah, it is a tensioned cable like a little recoiling cable winch system. Okay, but what I love about it is that you can this coiling winch.

It's it's the genius of the thing is its simplicity. But the the other genius of the thing is that it is fully adjustable. So it's not just you know, because I've turned down these ideas before, where you know, like a recoiling tape and a tape measure like you had a spring loaded wheel in there, and it's like, yeah, but if I throw the screen open and then all of a sudden swam boom, you know, it just slams in and nobody likes that. This is a soft closing

screen door sliding screen door closer. So you hook up this cable and then you've got a dial to adjust whether the screen closes slowly or whether it closes more quickly. But always right at the end it eases off and it gently just silently glides in to make final contact. Soft closing screen door closing mechanism for a sliding screen door retrofit. It's brilliant. It works. Finally something that really actually works. It is inobtrusive, it's out of everybody's way.

You may not even you'll get to the point where you won't even notice it. And it's well worth a serious look. Latch line soft close sliding screen door closing mechanism. You can put them in pairs as well, yeah you can. And so yeah, for to finally have a screen door that you can slide open and then it just slowly glides back over and softly closes itself. That is brilliant.

Will screen door Companies actually start mounting these into their hardware at some point, probably probably, But right now you don't have to wait for that, and you don't have to go buy a new door. You can just get yourself one of these latch line closers and you will be in summer entertaining.