Big Tract Home Remodel Wins, Part 2 | Hour 2

with Dean is the handle for them all. And a reminder if your home is in need of some personal house Whisper attention, if you say to yourself, you know what, we'd love to get that guy in my kitchen staring at that problem so we can just get that dealt with. Then you can book an in home design console with me and the t just go to house Whisperer dot design. All right, thank you for joining us on the program.

We are doing part two of a two part series this weekend about big moves for or a tracked home remodel that pay off in spades. I mean disproportionate amount of good for the money that they cost because of understanding the unique properties of a and we could say unique weaknesses of a tract home. We're taking advantage of those weaknesses. We're dressing them head on, we're fixing them where we can, and as a result, we're getting big changes disproportionate to the cost. And we're going to get

back to that list in just a bit. But it's the top of the hour right here, just a few minutes after ten, which means it's time to go to the phones, and I want to talk to you. What's going on with your house? And I'm gonna ask let's talk to Nichee. Hey, Nische, welcome.

and fill her back up again. Okay, whether or not, it's a good idea too. And I know you just

emptied it. And so now like the idea of like, oh, you want to pay all that amount of money to fill up the water again for a couple more months, That's where it gets tricky and a gray area because it had that has everything to do with ground conditions in your area, the water table in your area, how high is the water table, Because the problem is this, if the water table, you know, unexpectedly rises up in your area because we get a strong spring rain in

the next eight weeks or so, uh, then we have seen pools and spas literally been forced from the water pressure underneath them out of the ground because they're empty and they're you know, relatively light at that point, and boom they actually pop up out of the ground some and then the whole thing is. You know, all bets are off. The whole thing is messed up. So what would your statments bet be to refill it or at least get it filled half or three quarters of the

way to get some more weight in there. Now am I saying that that structure? That's my only concern. By the way, that's my only concern. Okay, I'm not concerned about it cracking.

the foundation that your house is sitting on. All right, So I'm never personally worried about, oh, if we empty out this pool, because sometimes pool remodels can take the better part of a month or so to do, so if we empty out this pool for a month, I'm never worried about, Oh, the shell might crack or just I've never seen it happen. I've heard stories, but I've never seen that happen, and if we're working on it,

we got to empty it to work on it. My concern has always been that if we're doing this during the rainy season, if the water table rises then, or if ground pressures are just right, that we may end up popping that shell out.

know right now? The best way to read design this house before we move in. And we walk into the backyard and we're like, oh, there's an empty pool in the backyard, and the realtor is like, yep, it's been empty for the last six and a half years and it's perfectly fine, perfectly fine. I mean an empty pool. By the way, your plaster you're stuck though. The plaster on the pool will crack. Okay, that doesn't mean that the pool shell will crack. But pool plaster is designed

to stay submerged in water. But so anybody who just drains their pool and thinks, you know, that's gonna be fine, I'll just fill it up next year again. Nor your pool plaster is gonna crack because that's a particular kind of plaster that's designed to stay submerged, and you expose it to air too long and then it cracks. That's, by the way, why there's tile at the water line

of your pool. Okay, the tile line of your pool is so that pool plaster doesn't just come up out of the water and there's a portion of exposed to the air and a portion of it underwater. Because because if we expose a portion of it to the air, it will crack and fail. That's why there's tile there instead. So the plaster's going to fail if you leave a pool empty for an extended amount of time. But the whole reason you've got it empty is to refinish it,

so you're not worried about that. We're talking about the shell failing. I don't think the shell is going to fail. I think the odds are unbelievably low that the shell will fail. But whether it gets popped out of the ground by pressures unseen.

in terms of renovation and remodel. And if we understand some things about our tracked home, then we can find the best places to invest our remodeling money to get the biggest bang for the buck. But right now, as is our custom, I am here in the middle of the show taking calls, and that can be and is about anything and everything. So I want to go back to the phones. Let's see where we're at here. Bump bump, bump bum. Let's talk to Jim. Jim, welcome home.

it can be changed, it can be customized. In so many ways because it's basically a very simple rectangular structure with rectangular rooms, and we hadn't ride, we hadn't arrived at the nineteen eighties and nineties, where my term for this is faux sophistication built into tract homes in the eighties and nineties. We're kind of tired of the ranch house builders were like, look at this, and you end

up with a home like weird angles, strange softs. And because of all of that jumble of what looks oh very different and sophisticated, we find ourselves really limited in a lot of ways. And one of the classics of a nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties tracked home are what you called them plant shelves, but basically, up above your eight foot wall, all of a sudden there's an indentation and an alcove and it runs all the way up to the vaulted ceiling. And you know, what do you

put up there? Plants? I mean, there's a shelf up there. Now are you talking about that where it's you know, like up above running up to the ceiling, or if you've got something down at eye level.

What if you did just finish that off and dry walllet in, And how would you feel about the room at that point? And most, you know, a good third of the time, the real honest answer is we wouldn't care. It would be we just wouldn't care. The room would feel better, it would look better, just to ignore the weird, funky shelf. H So to just let it go. So that is always an option. And I say that even though you said you didn't want to do that. But I say it because you know, we've got a lot

of people listening, and they're in that situation. Now you've got them staring at their shelves. Jim, thanks a lot.

that you'll need to maintain regularly. And again you're getting

up there. So so I actually I take off the construct the the the contractor hat, and I take off the designer hat, and I actually put on a decorator hat at this point and say, if we can put on that shelf right where the indent goes in, because of today's you know technology, if we can put a really nice strip of led lights there that will shine up onto that wall, then put above it the right size, the right proportion, the right volume of you know, a piece of art a tapestry, a poster, a you know,

whatever the case may be. In other words, we can turn it into a a lit recessed gallery.

That's a very luxury tracked home, okay, but still a tract home nonetheless, And what we discussed in one of the children's bedrooms, they had exactly what you're talking about. But it just so happens. And I was actually going to get to this a little later in the show, so I'm showing my hand ahead at that. Maybe I'll

move this up front after our call, Jim. But what we had talked about was the fact that also it just so happens on that side of the house, there were all sorts of funky ac ducting chases that were taking up rooms and other houses. And I realized because this house. This room was located close to the garage that I said, Hey, guys, you know that funky shelf

area in your son's room. If we filled that in, we could redirect the ac ducting back behind there and get it out of this gigantic thing that's taken up half the room in his closet. And so that is another just you know, I have no idea if your alcove that you're talking about is has any other practical function, But just think all of those options through before you commit, you know, one to the other, because maybe there's a

duck that can run through there. Maybe you can fill it in and not feeling bad about it because now you're actually using it to help another room. But if all else fails and you're going to keep it, then let's try and make it something other than a plant shelf. Let's try and make it something with a little bit of lighting that sets off a beautiful piece of art.

of awesome. We're going to get back to that list in a bit, but right now I'm taking calls and I'm going to get back to the phones. I want to talk to Roe. Hey, Roe, welcome home.

with them Life Source. Their their complete system that they do for most homes is two cartridges, two big canisters. One is the filter and the other is a descaling canister that specializes in pulling hard water minerals. Actually doesn't pull them out, it changes them so that they're not sticky. So it is a it's it's an often misunderstood thing. Ro a water filter does zero. It in no way, shape or form changes the hardness of your water. Okay, Hardness in water is not a toxin or a nasty

that needs needs to be filtered out of the water. Okay, hardness and water, it's mineral build up inside the water. It's minerals like calcium and magnesium and things like that. Those are minerals that our bodies need. It's minerals that

go into our water. And yeah, there are places in it, you know, depending on whether you're well water is part of a reservoir system or if it's well water coming out of the ground, there are places where the hardness of water, and we're talking about mineral content is intense. But a water filter is designed to take out things that aren't usually in water, not minerals. Okay, scale all of that that's mineral content, and so this is people

have water softeners. A water softener system is also gets misunderstood because people are like, and I found that there's still chlorine in my water, and it's like, well, okay. A water softener is not a water filter. It doesn't take out anything out of the water other than the minerals. But a water filter is not a water softener system,

and it doesn't remove actual minerals from the system. So that's why, like a life source system has a filtration element and a descaling element that reduces massively the amount of scale build up that happens in the house, a water softener also reduces scale build up because it uses salt ions that it passes through. That's why you have

to keep feeding it salt. It uses salt ions to capture to grab on to calcium and magnesium and potassium in these things that these minerals that cause scale, and it pulls it out of the water completely, and so you're drinking water at that point in bathing it. It's why your water feels a little weird. It felt like silky, some people say slimy. Some people love it, some people hate it. But the water feels weird because it lacks any mineralization of substance in it. So in your situation,

this is the big question. You may have a whole house filter and that's keeping things like chlorine and chloramines and other nasties from coming in. But if the real issue with your water is heavy mineral content, the filter isn't filtering out dissolved minerals. It's letting them through because it's supposed to. And that's where your scale build up

is coming from. So you could either a contact the company that gave you the whole house filter and see if they have an additional component, or you could talk to a company like life Source and they can evaluate your system and get you set up with a filter and descaler, and that's when things will start to change for you.

This is like one hundred year old concept. The water softener uses rock, salt, salt sodium to grab onto minerals that usually cause scale build up and keep them from coming into the house. Okay, so there you've got a demineralized water coming into your house. So far less scale build up. But a water softener does not filter chemicals out all right. If you want both to happen, you need a system that has a filter and some form of descaler. Now, water softeners I never recommend them. They're

one hundred year old technology. They're out moded. A descaler canister that like the one that comes in a life source system, actually doesn't pull the minerals out of the water. It changes them. The best way to explain it in a non scientific way is it makes what would be a sticky scale league stick to your pipes and your shower head mineral turns it into a crystalline structure that still gets into your body where you want it, but doesn't cling to the surfaces of your fixtures and your pipes.

And that is a twenty first century descaling system. And that's the kind of thing you can get from you know, life, soorece. So everybody just understand descaling and filtering are completely different animals, and the best kind of whole house system has both, not just one or the other.

big bucks to live here. But if you're not, and if spring is looking a little different for you, I hope you're in a good spot too, I really do. I hope you just have plans to take full advantage of the day, because you know what, the day that is in our hands, that's the one that we've got.

a couple of other thoughts about this. But but generally speaking, I think what you've already mentioned stan is probably your best tact. It just has to be handled carefully. Number one, you may want to, uh, you got to make sure that if the concrete right now is unevenly glazed, unevenly sealed, that we've got to strip off the remaining sealer right now. Sometimes that means pressure washing and scrubbing. Sometimes it means

a sand blast. But we just have to be careful with a sand blast because we can end up, you know, exposing aggregate in the concrete and changing its look entirely. Okay, but the idea generally, Uh, sometimes through a chemical process, we can strip back the seal, the glaze that's only half there. If we can get yeah, if we can get to the the you know, the open up the porosity of the concrete uniformly and with the right pro

involved a professional concrete staining company. Uh right, I think those are your best odds to restoring color.

They're going to scrape the lot six inches down, but yeah, they're going to leave a crater because that slab is not just four to six inches thick. It has got all of its perimeter. I mean it goes down fourteen sixteen maybe even deeper into the ground, and all of that dirt, all of that soil is going to be disrupted.

And you don't just shovel back in to fill up those holes, because what actually has to happen there in the perimeter of where the foundation was, it's going to once that soil is disturbed like that, you're going to need under a deputy inspector observation, the removal, the scraping back of all of that soil down to its deepest point and then recompaction in four to six inch layers soil is put in and then it's compacted, and then it's tested, and then another four to six inches of

soil is laid on and then it's compacted, and then it's tested all the way back up to the finished level of the rough soil for the property. And so the process that has to happen in order to have proper soil conditions to dig the new footings in is that that has to be kind of restored to essentially sort of virgin soil area to dig into for the

first time. So what's going to be involved here and the individual the professionals who you need to talk to about this when it happens to your property and have this as part of the claim is a soils engineer, a soils engineering company needs to look at the property, needs to evaluate the current compaction the kind of soil you have on the property. The basis of their soils tests will tell you what needs to be done in order to get your lot back to buildable state. But

you can't jump over that. The city's going to require it anyway. Your codes and your permits are going to require it. But that's your next step, and don't let the insurance company kind of skip over that step with you, because it is literally the very beginning. It's the foundation of rebuilding the proper house on that property. So one you have yanked a sixteen inch deep footing that's twelve to fourteen inches wide out of the ground. You have disrupted all of that soil down to that level. All

of that has to be recompacted. Again, I'm not really worried about water accumulating in that crater. I have very, very rarely, unless you're on a hillside and you've got, you know, soil erosion concerns, that's one thing. But if we're just talking about kind of a standard lot, I'm really not worried about water accumulating from rains while you're waiting to have all of this done, And I don't

think the soils company will either. In fact, I would say in general, homeowners spend too much time trying to get water off their property instead of letting it soak in through their soil down into the aquifers below. Very very rarely does an accumulation of water on a piece of property pose a threat to that piece of property

or change your soil's conditions. But the tearing out of the foundation and the disrupting of that previously very stable soil, well, that is going to change the rebuild, and so a soils engineering company is going to be the one to tell you, all right, based on your soil, your situation, here is how we have to return the soil to buildable conditions.