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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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
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, 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 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 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. 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 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 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. 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 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. 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 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 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.
You're listening to Home with Dean Sharp on demand from KFI AM six forty.
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 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,
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 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,
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, 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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.
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 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, 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
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 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,
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 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 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
yield such big results, they're so doable. So doable. All right, I got more for you. You hang tight.
You're listening to Home with Dean Sharp on demand from KFI AM six forty.
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
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 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. 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. 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, 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 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
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 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 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, 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 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 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 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. 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
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 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. 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 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, 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
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 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 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 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 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.
You're listening to Home with Dean Sharp on demand from KFI AM six.
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 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 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.
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
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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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.
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 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 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 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 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, 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 Pacific time and every Sunday morning from nine to noon Pacific time, or anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio app.