Designing the Bedroom |Hour 2

talking about bedroom specifically bedroom design today. We're going to get back to that in just a bit. We're going to be right now at top of the hour. We're taking calls. But can I say something? Of course I can, because I'm it's my microphone right here. Let me get on my soapbox. When are you not on your soapbox? All right? I get it, I get it. I just

want to say something about design in general. You know, when we were in Vermont, I had a converse sation started up with some folks that we call vacation friends, which Tina and Robin just absolutely drives them crazy. When Don and I make vacation friends because they don't want to talk to anybody when we're on vacation. But Don

and I like making vacation friends. Anyway, we're making some vacation friends and the subject of what we do came up and so on, and somebody asked me, you know what, what's your what's the what's your real heart when it comes to doing the radio show that you do as a home designer? And here is the thing, here is the thing I love. I mean, I'm about to go back to the phones answer some design and some construction questions.

I've been a builder for years and year, I mean decades now, uh, and I love all of that and I absolutely love it. But if you were to ask me what lies at the at the root of what my secret agenda is for home? If I could have my ultimate wish come true, it would be changing the national story about design. Design okay, because it's just that one phrase that you hear me say all the time, design matters. Most billions of dollars are spent every year

on home improvement. And you would think that that means that most homes would you know, actually improve, and yet they don't really because there's a missing piece. Design, design matters most. And the thing is that most of us mainstream homeowners have never been taught this truth, the importance of it, the priority of it. The wealthy have always had great design at their disposal. I know this because I do some of those designs for them, and they're

great designs. But the rest of us, whose homes mean more to us because we have been the ones who've scraped and sacrificed more to have them and to keep them, we are far more likely to accept that when it comes to your home, Yeah, you know, you get what you get. You know, we this is the home you got. And the fact of the matter is I want to change that story, and I want to change it so badly because your home, there's nothing more important to it.

It's not going to be the design that ends up in the fancy magazine somewhere right some big celebrity home, some big layout and rooms that they've never even walked into or ever use. But your home. It's the center of your life. And that is what brings me to this microphone every weekend, helping you change it, and not just change it by fixing the leaky toilet, by change it in terms of applying really really great design to the average home to make the ordinary extraordinary. All right,

that was my thing. All right, well, let's squeeze a call in. We're going to take a couple of more or calls at least before we get back to the subject of the bedroom. Let's see here, I want to talk to Arthur. Hey, Arthur, welcome home.

And generally, how to protect against damage to the house and the foundation.

for sure, but right about four feet or so. I don't know if anybody, by the way, heard about this controversy in and that's for swimming efficiency. And now you're talking to a guy who's not only built several indoor pools but also swims just like every other day in

an indoor pool, and so not at my house. But did you hear the controversy that happened in Paris with all the swimmers, the fact that that no world records were set in Paris, even though we've got some of the best swimmers ever in history there, and the criticism was that the that the Paris Olympic pools that they they they built it too shallow and they were getting too much wave reverberation back off the bottom of the pool to make their swimmers most efficient. So anyway, that's

something to worth looking into. Anyway, the depth is not the critical element here as far as the space itself the key to indoor pool. And I wouldn't worry so much about the heating because the with an indoor pool, the space of the room and the pool worked together to enable a balance of atmospheric heat control in the pool. But the key is this, with an indoor pool, there are three things you want to be looking at. Number one,

you want to be looking at the lowest possible chlorine situation. Okay, so you want to you know, you want to look into all of the non you know, like the the the saline options to every pool, by the way, has chlorine in. It's just a question of how the chlorine comes about, whether you're pouring chlorine directly in or whether your systems are creating chlorine gas in the midst of it,

which uh saline and ultraviolet and so on. Douce so you want to look at that because the air inside it in closed space, you don't want chlorine gas building up inside that space, so you want the best possible, lowest possible chlorine situation for the pool. Secondly, uh you

want ventilation. Ventilation is critical, and you need to talk to an experienced indoor pool designer who is in builder, who is who can tell you the specs on how many air changes of that air space need to happen per hour in order to keep the space, the breathable air inside the space as absolutely fresh and clean as possible.

And then thirdly, you need that air not just fresh and clean and air change, but you need a dehumidified because the indoor spaces, you know that water is going to evaporate and it's going to evaporate into the interior spaces on the walls and the ceiling and so on. So we need to take that humidity out of the air so that everything, you know, nothing gets moldy, mildyly

and gross inside being interior space. Those are your three primary concerns because ideally you're going to keep that pool water right at about anywhere between seventy eight and eighty two degrees that's optional, optimal fitness, competitive swimming water temperature and that's warm for a pool. And now it's in an enclosed space, so so dehumidification, airflow and then the lowest amount of a chlorine in order to keep the pool fresh, but not to allow too much chlorine into

the air. Arthur, thanks for your question. I'm up against a break, running a little late, got to go. Good luck on that pool, and if you have any other questions, you can, you know, reach out via email through the station. You know, I'll try and give you any other advice. Is a very very interesting question, and not one I don't think we've ever taken an indoor pool question before.

we're talking about bedroom design. But I'm taking calls and I'm loving it, and we're gonna take one or two more calls just this segment year before we get back to designing your bedroom because we've got so many calls on the board. I want to talk to Shelley. Hey, Shelley, welcome home.

complete roofing job. Next to that, then we've got situations where we can preserve the tile that's there and just repaper, which is the kind of situation you're looking at. In this case, there's no tear off, and there's no additional material, well just a teeny bit of additional material, and you're just paying the labor for removal and replacements. So yes, it is going to be less expensive than if you

just start off with new tiles. So if your tiles are in good shape, and quite often when it comes to Spanish tile, they are because you know, that's the thing about a good Spanish tile, I mean it could last a century or more. You know, spend some time traveling through Europe. You go to Italy, you find terra cotta tiles that are up on roofs that have been there for two or three hundred years. But the main waterproofing element of a modern roof is not the tile,

but the membrane, the sheathing membrane underneath. And so yeah, that is that's where when that starts to go. Now you're inviting the possibility of leaks. So you want to find a roofer who is a willing to take the time to carefully remove the tiles. And I say this because that's where the cost element, the additional cost element

for materials come in. Our expectation is that if a roof, if the tiles are in decent shape, and a roofer is uh doing a quality job taking their time on removal reasonably, you could expect I'm three to five percent breakage of the existing tiles. Now, some homeowners have extra tiles sitting around. I don't know if you do or not, do you.

and weather and all of that. So the key is making sure that your roofer has this design concept in mind, which is that we're going to prioritize which roof planes are most visible, like, for instance, the roof plane that's visible from the street, and possibly the one visible from

the backyard. Depending on the shape and the contours of your roof, there are probably areas of the roof, maybe side yard roof planes, or hidden a little thing here or a little thing there that aren't actually visible or easy to see from the ground. So here's what we're

gonna do. We're gonna steal as we bring. We're going to steal tiles from the areas of the roof that aren't really that visible from the ground, and we're going to use those old tiles to replace the broken ones that happened on the main plane, so that what we get when we're done is all your old tiles, all visible, all clean, no color changes, and if there is a need, which there will be, for a few tiles to be replaced that aren't quite the same color yet we're going

to stick those in places that that don't matter visually from the street or from the backyard. So you're going to just prioritize those views and uh and put those in those other places. But yeah, that's and that's what you're looking at.

a few replacement tiles. You're still paying for the labor for the install, but the material cost is going to be considerably considerably less. And like always, the way to find out who is giving you the right price and what this whole thing should cost is that you can vet two, three, even four really qualified roofers and have them each bid the same way, and you're going to look at those bids and you're going to see just like a Venn diagram. You're going to see like, oh yeah,

look at that. They're all within a certain amount of money. This is what my roof is going to cost.

certaintyed tiles. The roofing manufacturers will sometimes say, hey, if you pass our certification course, then you can call yourself certified for a particular brand of tile installed. Certification not as important as licensing. Licensing is absolutely critical for everybody. Some are certified installers of certain brands. But that's a private business thing that's going on. Does that makes sense? All right? Thank you Shelly for the question.

So when it comes to bedroom design, fundamentally, this has probably been one of the sticking points for a lot of people, and that is you think about, oh, you're going to design this whole thing around the bedroom set. Okay, this is the problem that I have and that I want to warn you about. I want to warn you

about the bedroom set air quotes set. Okay, I want you to break loose from fixed stories at the furniture store about the bedroom set of course, the furniture store has an entire set on sale for you there showing you everything. And rightly, so it's not a crime, right,

nobody's doing anything wrong. It's just the idea that somehow when you go to the furniture store, you need to come home with the whole set, which means the bedroom, the bed, the headboard, the footboard, the night stands, the dress or the armoir, you know, like the next thing. You know. So the thing is, most bedrooms these days, you know, may not have room for the whole bedroom set. And I just don't get yourself wrapped up in that. Right, you decide ahead of time what it is that you're

looking for. There are so many ways to juge up a bedroom that go beyond having to for the set. Okay, now do bet should bedroom furniture correspond? Absolutely? Does it have to match? No, it does not. It just has to correspond. It has to work together, it has to compliment each other. Okay, those of you who are on

a tight budget, I'll tell you this. You can go here's one of the the the rare instances when I actually recommend that you go on to YouTube and look up I built my own headboard and find the hundreds of myriad ways in which you can actually mount a permanent headboard, a DIY headboard, gorgeous diway headboard to your wall, and save yourself tons of money when it comes to purchasing a bedroom set. Look who is walking in right now.

It's Tina and Christy bo Look at you, guys, elephant, Look at you and your fingers are all straight because you've got wet nail polish. You guys have been to the nail salon. Sit down, Christy, get over here. All right, I've got to be faithful to what I'm talking about.

You guys, hang on for a second. Anyway, So the bedroom said, just don't feel obligated to do that whole thing, right, I e. Do you have a big closet, right, there's a really good chance if you really concentrate on proper closet design and organization, meaning a modular system where you can control hanging, and you've got a room for shoes and you've got maybe room for even drawers in the closet,

then you don't need a dresser. Right. If the bedroom is an important waking retreat, like we talked about before, a dresser could be standing in your way of being replaced with an elegant writing desk or work desk or a chair for reading, if that is how you're going to spend time in your bedroom, or if you're more of a minimalist and you want a more classic look, Now you're really gonna think I'm crazy, but I'm only

talking to minimalists here. Then remove the closet, open up a little bit more space in the bedroom, and replace it with a beautiful free standing wardrobe. Oh yeah, and if you have a giant closet okay, and a giant room,

then you can get super creative. Then you do one of the first I would say uber creative designs I ever had a chance to do early on in my career, where I designed a twelve thousand square foot Italian villa in Brentwood Park and we had realtors come in to preview the villa before we opened it up for public, and they walked into these bedrooms, the guest bedrooms, and they all they saw, because you know, are claim to fame with this was a as authentic an Italian villa

as we could find. And they walked into the bedrooms and they all came out saying Dean, Dean, I mean, the house is beautiful, but we got a problem. I'm like, what's the problem. They're like, in each of the guest bedrooms there's just a big wardrobe, a big, like eight foot tall wardrobe. I mean they're gorgeous, they're antique wardrobes, They're absolutely stunning. But I mean a house of this magnitude needs a walking closet. And I said, you know what, I get that, but I wanted to keep the house

as authentic as possible. I said, you really should go check out the wardrobe. Those are roomy wardrobes. And they're like, Dan, we know they're big wardrobes, but this house needs walk in closets in each of the bedrooms. Like you know what,

just you really these are really roomy wardrobes. So anyway, I actually led three of the realtors back upstairs and we opened up the wardrobes for them to discover that I had taken the back off of these antique wardrobes and mounted them against the wall to hide the walk in closet door because I didn't want the I didn't want you to see the walking closet in the room.

I just wanted you to see this free standing, beautiful piece of furniture like it would have shown up in an eighteenth century Italian villa, and the inside it was very Narnia like. So you literally walk through the wardrobe to get into the expansive walking closet. Beyond the point is there are lots of tricks that you can play, a lot of freedom that you've got in the bedroom.

And on the opposite side of what I just described, if you don't if you can utilize any closet space at all to maximize your clothing organization, then you may not need the dresser, or you may not need the armoir or or whatever. So just don't make the mistake of going to the furniture store and buying the set air quotes and then come home and say, Okay, now we got to figure out how to squeeze this all

into this space. No, no, no. You make your design decisions first, and you go looking for specific pieces of furniture to make it work. And they don't have to match, they don't have to all belong together. They just have to work together. Right, So you find the beautiful headboard and then a couple of night stands, and you're like you know what, These aren't part of the same set, but they are beautiful. There you go. Now you're on the right track, all right, more when we return.

figuring out what works for you. But I want you to use good design principles as always with everything. So we've already talked about your perspective in the room, pairing down the stuff in the room to the design essentials, you know, you know, allocating what you can to the closets if that's even possible, not buying too much furniture

for the bedroom. Of course, I already touched on this, but I'm gonna underscore this look at the room from the places where you're gonna spend most of your time. If there is a seating area, then sit and look around and decide what should you be seeing outside the windows? What should you be seeing in the room. Mostly, though, of all the places, right, I want you to prioritize not just the look of the room when you come in the door, but the look of the room when

you're in bed. This is such a key deciding factor for so much bedroom design. What can you see from bed? I have walked into an amazing amount of bedrooms in which there have been some, you know, big mistakes made, even high end stuff like okay, there's a fireplace in the room, and the fireplace is down on the floor. That looks great, great in you know, in a photograph of the room, and like, oh, look at that fireplace, just cozy, you know, I sit down on the floor

like a normal fireplace is. But you're gonna be in bed, you would put You wouldn't put the TV on the floor, would you? When you're in bed you can't see it. Why would you put the fireplace on the floor where you can't see it from your bed? So these are critical perspectives. Also underscoring what I talk to you about all the time. Recess can lighting. Of all the rooms, of all the rooms in your home that should not have too many or any recess can lights, the bedroom

is at the top of the list. Why because can lights are sticking down out of the ceiling and you, of all places in your home, are lying horizontally staring up at the ceiling. Glare, glare from recess can lights. I have seen people make the mistake. They're like, oh, well, you know what I've decided to do. The night light or the reading light that we're going to use. We're just gonna put two recess cans in the ceiling shining down on each side of the bed for our reading lights.

Big mistake, big mistake in most cases. Why glare. You're sitting there in bed and as you kind of slouch down in your pill all of a sudden, your eye starts catching that light. Not a good thing. Not a good thing. Let's draw some pendant lights down out of the ceiling. If we want ceiling mounted reading lights or sconce lights that are reading lights from each side of the bed, or just you know, table lamps on top of the nightstand. You got lots and lots of options.

Let's not go with the recess can light because you're gonna be staring straight up at them. Okay, Now, if you have them already and you're like, oh no, you're right, what do I do? Do I just not? Then let's get some change out the trims. The trims are inexpensive. Change out the trim on that light to get a gimbal that means basically an adjustable directional light and point

them toward the walls. I will say it again. I will say it, you know, day after day, week after week, year after year, until it finally soaks in for everybody. Lighting design in a home is all about this. We do not light a room. We light things in a room. We do not light rooms. We light things in a room. That is the general and all important principal rule. So if you got art on the wall, sure shine a little light against that art. Light it up for you,

but avoid glare. And one of the best ways to evaluate it, even as a novice, it's to lay down in bed, lay there with your head on your pillow and look around the room and ask the question, what do I want to see? And not want to see from this position. Okay, remember that bedrooms are tactile. Of all rooms, this is a unique place where you spend a great amount of time actually still awake, but with your eyes closed, okay, or in the dark, or with

your eyes kind of blurry and half open. Bedrooms are all about tactile feel, all right, The softness of the bed, what the floor feels like when your sleepy, half open eyes, have you flip your legs off the bed and make that first trip to the bathroom in the middle of the night, whatever the case may be. Remember the bedroom rooms are tactile experiences in many ways, more so than other rooms in the house. And then, and we're going to talk about this in a little bit more detail

when we come back to it. The bed. Obviously, the bed is the focal point of a bedroom. The headboard is what we might call if the bed is a book, a hardcover book, then the headboard is the book cover of the bed. Okay. And a lot of you were thinking when I gave the earlier advice, Hey, listen, go on you know, YouTube and find out how to make your own custom DIY headboard. Some of you are thinking, well, the listen I've graduated past apartment dwelling. I don't need

to do that. I can afford to buy a really big, beautiful headboard. That's great, but I wasn't just talking to people on a low budget. One of my favorite headboards of all time, and it's been years and years since I saw it, but absolutely I will never forget it.

I saw headboard custom made by the owner with a sign post on it, and on that headboard were signs pointing to everywhere this couple had been together, and they kept adding to it and adding to it, and you know what, for their vibe, for who these people were,

for that bedroom, it was absolutely perfect. And what they had done is instead of colorizing their whole room, which is always usually a mistake, with a special color, they had also right behind the headboard, decided the wall behind the headboard is a feature wall, and we're gonna put our special favorite color right there and leave the rest of the room bright and white and open, which is

always the best best idea. Otherwise you cover the entire room walls and ceiling in your quote unquote favorite color, it gets cavy and weird really really fast. So I would almost always recommend feature wall over that, and you know, when we come back, I also want to talk about how about this, if you have enough room, just if you do all right, what are the chances of putting a soaker tub out of the bathroom into the bedroom? M all right, yeah, I know, I know. Please, you're like, listen,

are you talking to ritzy people about Nana? Just understand, if there's enough room, it's one of those options. Sitting area, writing desk. How about the soaker tub? Anyway, we'll talk more about that, but when we come back from the top of the hour break here, we're gonna go back to the phones. Answer a couple more calls. How's that sound all right? Your Home with Dean Sharp, the House Whisper on KFI. 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 iHeart Radio app.