Holiday Gift Guide Part Two| Hour 3

you want. About an hour after we go off the air, actually, this episode will be up in podcast form along with all the others, hundreds of episodes, all searchable by topic. It is literally a home improvement reference library for you that is there for you any time, wherever, wherever you want it. Also on our socials today, the Gift Guide itself can be so you can see the items that I'm talking about on Instagram and Facebook Home with Dean.

You just go there. Why don't you follow us while you're there, and you know, hit like leave a comment, but leave a nice comment. But the Gift Guide is there. And also the KFI website, you can find our little corner of the KFI website, and you will find the gift Guide downloadable there. And the advantage of the downloadable gift Guide on the KFI website is that all of its links are active, so you can just literally click on those links and be taken right to the purchasing

sources for all of this gear that we're talking about today. Okay, so I promised I was going to do two things. One, I'm going to go to the phones in just a couple of seconds, but first I wanted to take a couple of minutes to talk about the balance of safety and functionality when it comes to construction in general or

building in general. And this is on the heels of a strongly recommending the last item on the gift guide that I just talked about, which is for a table saw, a featherboard attachment, and a push block so that people can keep their hands away from that dangerous, dangerous blade. But not just that. The reason I was touting it so strongly is that this is one of those rare instances where not only does a safety device keep you safer, but it also improves the actual cutting process for your

end results. And when you can get both of those happening together at the same time, it is a win win times one hundred. Otherwise, generally speaking, safety equipment can sometimes get in the way of the job that you want to do. And so is that me saying that you should just ignore safety equipment. No, not at all. You got to protect yourself. But I'm just letting you know from an experienced pro and all of you pros

out there, you guys know exactly what I'm talking about. UH. There's a balance that has to be found between keeping ourselves safe and UH and keeping the job flowing properly because some gear can get in the way. The metaphor that I like to use or the analogy, I don't know what it is, UH is, UH is athletics. Just think of a football player, professional football. Okay, we wrap our football players in pads, in protective gear. There are

thigh pads, there are hip pads, their shoulder pads. You know, face, there's a helmet, there's face masks, all all of this to protect them from what's going on out there. Okay, we could protect them more than we do. We could, literally, we could. We could build a an armored coating for a football player that would guarantee that they never get injured ever. But guess what, by the time we do that, they would also not be able to move or run

down down the field, or catch or kick footballs. And so every source of safety device has to have a limit where it protects and doesn't actually hinder range of movement and visibility and all of these kinds of things. So you get it right, We want the gear as safe as possible, and we also want to be able to move and function and get the job done. And every bit of safety equipment is somewhere riding on that line.

So whether it's a set of gloves that i'll talk about in just a little bit, or any kind of safety gear that you add to your equipment set, just be aware you can over insulate yourself from risk to the point where you now you're not even doing the

work well. And sometimes I make the argue you can so overinsulate yourself that now you're working with a tool that all this stuff is supposed to protect you from, but you're fumbling with it awkwardly and you're probably increasing the risk of getting into trouble with that tool and getting injured in the first place. So there you go. That's my spiel on safety gear. There has to be

a balance. Think of it like an athletic competition. We want all the protection that is critical and probably not a single ounce more beyond that in order to stay functional along the way. And it's always a balancing act. Okay, shall we go to the phones. Let's at least start a call if we can. Let's talk to Laurna. Hey, Lorna, welcome home.

our bedroom windows, they're in the living room. We also have a patio outside that seems to be cracking.

on Instagram and Facebook. Right at the top of our posts, you will find the gift guide. Also on the KFI website, a downloadable version that you can utilize the links to actually get to directly to the sources of this gear. It's a good gift guide this year, all tools and gear this year, and we're gonna get back to that in just a bit. But also taking calls right now.

I've been talking to Laura about her house. She's got a sixty four year old house out in Santa Clarita, and all of a sudden, well, I should say, in the last few months, uh cracks, cracks starting to occur on windows, on the ceiling, and the you know, a reasonable question, which is what is going on? How serious? Is how do we fix this? And and so on? So, Laura,

are you still with me? I am, yes, Okay, all right, So you said it's kind of an Ekler sort of style home, which is kind of story, yeah, single story, kind of a modernist ranch home, low profile modernist ranch home at sixty four years. So I'm going to try and I want to do diligence to help you out so that you feel safe. But I also want to, you know, calm your nerves a little bit in regards

to this stuff and warn you about a couple. Okay, you got a nice, big open ceiling, and you've got a crack that I'm guessing has formed near the center of the ceiling.

a modernist kind of minimalist profile. Sixty years later, for those ceiling joys to begin to sag just a little bit, maybe not perceptibly, but enough that it actually pops the seam on the dry wall that's up there. Totally common, not unusual at all, and nor is it a sign of structural failure. It's just a little bit of sagging. The same around cracks that appear around windows and doors.

And when we say around windows and doors, I am again you didn't say this, but I'm guessing these are angular cracks heading out of the corners of the windows, out against exactly this is from the house just standing there for sixty plus years. It shifts a little bit, It shifts a little left, it shifts a little right

in imperceptible ways. And the corners of windows and doors, where those jams come together with the framing is what we call a knee a knee joint in the structure of the house, and it's the most likely place for a little hairline crack to appear. And so when it comes to hairline cracks in stucco and dry wall in plaster, I am rarely, if ever concerned. And what I mean by hairline, I don't care how long they are. They could be four inches long, they could be twelve inches long.

But when they're not separating and coming apart and there's no gap in them, then it's what we would call a settlement or a shifting crack. Okay, there's no hair line, yeah, okay, so these are opening up hairline exactly. So that's why the right person to call at this point, okay, just to alleviate your fears and to address the whole issue, because I'm guessing that could be a number of things.

It could simply be the house, which in nineteen sixty built very differently in terms of seismic and lateral shift resistance than we build houses today. So that house simply could be age. And maybe it's just that, maybe just a little bit of reinforcement here there maybe something about the slab and the subfloor maybe shifting. That's a little bit greater concern. But here's what you don't do. Don't call a contractor out yet. Okay, not a contractor. I

want you to find in Santa Clarita. There are plenty of them. A reputable structural engineer that does residential work, and I want you to call them and engage them and say we would like you to come out and do a consult for us out our home and look around our home and evaluate these cracks and give us your best view of why they're occurring and what's going on. The structural engineer. Console's going to cost you a couple three hundred dollars for them to come out for a

bit and to look around. And it's worth its weight in gold because and not that there there there are plenty of honest contractors in your area, but there are also not honest contractors in your area. Contractors who will come in and say, oh my, yeah, well you know, we're gonna have to rebuild this ceiling and we're going to have to do this and do you know, and start actually giving you a picture of damage repair way beyond potentially the scope of what really needs to happen.

So what you want is a non vested professional expert opinion. The structural engineer is going to get paid what they're going to get paid. They are not looking to turn it into a bigger job. They're not the ones going to do the repair work, so they have no vested interest of telling you, yeah, you got to do some serious work here or no, this is fine. They're simply going to give you their honest, professional opinion, and it's an expert opinion about the bones of the house, and

that's what you want. That's what you want right now, And not to say that there probably aren't a few little things that could be done before you patch these drywall cracks to help ensure that they don't reoccur, especially when it comes to the one out in the middle of the ceiling doors and windows. I'm not half as concerned about, honestly, but I want it to get a

serious look at. When it comes to the mid span of ceiling joys, there may be something we can do up above them to stiffen them or to keep them from sagging anymore, so that when you spend the money to patch the drywall, we don't actually have that crack come back six months later, which is something that obviously we want to avoid doing. Okay, so we want whatever settlement and shifting has happened, we want to ideally make sure it doesn't go any further and then do the

patch work. That's when you call a contractor or a drywaller or whoever to come out and actually get the work done. But the professional opinion that I want ahead of time is actually just from an engineer to give you some peace of mind that the house is in the shape that it's.

it up in about five minutes. It'll be there, and you can check this one out visually, and I give you a little little history lesson on why certain actss look a certain way. Anyway, all right, back to the gift guide. We are just just skimming the surface. There are thirty really really great items on the Gift Guide this year, all worth checking out. You can check them out on social media at Instagram and Facebook and downloadable on the KFI website, our little corner of the KFI website.

So follow along with us as I discuss this gift guide with you. Okay, here's a solid tool, a great tool, one of those tools again where I'm usually hesitant to recommend the does everything tool because you know, okay, if it does everything, it probably does everything, so so this one would be one of those exceptions. Number sixteen on the Gift Guide is the arrow cart wheelbarrow. It's a wheelbarrow ish or is it a dolly and a hand truck or is it yeah, exactly all of those. Is

it a wagon. This is a brilliant little uh a little, it's a it's a brilliant tool. It is a combination hand truck, dolly wagon and wheelbarrow. Now, the only place that it falls short in my opinion and out of necessity, is that as a wheelbarrow, it's not a gigantic wheelbarrow, and it doesn't hold you know, like you know, three cubic yards of stuff. But for most homeowner applications, you just don't need that much of a wheelbarrow. This is

for most applications plenty enough. And it's a two wheeled wheelbarrow, so it's super stable and it can be treated more like a wagon that you move through the yard because the handles are adjustable and adaptable, and it makes a great hand truck. All of these are are items that I would say, and this is why I love this one. It's one hundred and seventy dollars item. It's well made, it's well reviewed. I've seen them in action. But all of these items, a handtruck, a wheelbarrow, these kinds of

gardening carts. They're not things that you know, you go to every day, every day, every day and because of that, you know, having all three or four sitting around in your garage or in your tool shed takes up a lot of space. This guy right here combines three relatively infrequently used tools into one that does it all really, really well and saves you a bunch of space at the same time. So that's why it made it to our list this year. That's the Arrow cart Wheelbarrow one

hundred and seventy dollars. Check it out, look it up online, or see it on the Gift Guide as well. Where else are we going here? Okay? Always I'm a looking for ways of turning a garage which is otherwise used as a garage into a really effective workshop space for those DII wires and woodworkers and hobbyists that you love. Talk about a brilliant way to get a work table a workbench going on in the garage on project day

that otherwise totally gets out of your way. I've recommended this on the Gift Guide before it is back by popular demand. Number twenty one on the Gift Guide is the Bora. The company's name is Bora b O r A, the Bora Centipede portable workbench platform. It's about one hundred bucks for the large format one. This essentially think of the way that at like an easy up you know, canopy expands with all the little you know, like the

cross scissoring expansion. This guy is a is one of those kinds of things, not a canopy, though it stands only like kind of like a collapsible camping. It stands about thirty thirty six inches tall, and it collapses down into you know, probably a ten by ten square and literally can just be sitting off in the corner of the garage or hung or put in a cabinet somewhere. But you pull this thing out, it expands out and it becomes a platform for a four x eight sheet

of plywood. And the combination of that sheet of plywood and this base underneath it, you now have a massive, well stabilized temporary workbench for as long as you want to work it. And then off comes the plywood, collapse these legs down and just store them in the corner of the garage. It is brilliant. It's super strong. I think it has an over two thousand pounds weight capacity on it. You can put your table saw up there, you can put your microsaw up there you can load

lumber up. I mean, it is a real, really brilliant device made out of relatively lightweight reinforced fiberglass legs and braces, and you got to check it out. The Bora Centipede portable workbench platform for about one hundred dollars. It's brilliant and it's going to make somebody a di wire's eyes sparkle. Gloves. Let's talk about gloves real quick. I'm not going to repeat what I said earlier in the show about safety

and the balance of safety and dexterity. You already heard me say that if you hadn't go back and listen to that in the podcast, but this is a perfect example of that. My favorite overall work gloves for woodworkers and anybody who's doing a di wire or just general around the house work is by Ironclad and it's the framer glove. Now, what's different about it is a beautiful reinforced cloth framing glove, protective glove, protection on your palm,

protection on your fingers, pre articulated fingers. That means that the glove was created with the fingers in the slightly bent condition, because that's the natural form of your relaxed hand, not straight out. A straight glove actually causes fatigue on your fingers when you're not doing anything because your fingers are naturally bent, pre articulated fingers. But here's the key.

The your index finger, your ring finger, not your ring finger, your index finger in your middle finger and your thumb. The tips are exposed. Okay, so here's the thing. Now, could they be covered over like a regular glove and better protected. Yes, But you think about all the work that you do when you're when you're reaching into tool bags and you're reaching for tools and feeling around for a screw or a nail or whatever the case may be. It is this little tripod of your thumb, your index finger,

and your middle finger, those three digits right there. If the tips are exposed so you can feel everything with those guys, then you know what you have the maximum situation where you have maximum dexterity. And then everything else is completely covered and protected. And even those fingers are three quarters protected. It's just the tips of your fingers,

the last knuckle out that is exposed. So does it expose them, sure, but your whole hand is protected and you've got the dexterity of those three exposed surfaces different than a mechanics glove in which all of the fingers

are exposed. That's more than you need for construction. But these three this is literally, in my opinion, the world's most brilliant and useful protective glove for a woodworker, a carpenter, or anybody just doing heavy work around because of the combination again of enough safety and enough dexterity for both to be great. And these gloves are I think a pair which will last you a long time. About twenty

seven dollars a great gift. And again, the reason I'm explaining all these things to you is when these gifts get opened up on Chris Morris morning to that loved one who you gave them to. Now you've got the story behind it, and you can sizzle these gifts for them so that they get excited about why you purchased this particular thing for them and all the good reasons behind it. All Right, when we come back more of the twenty twenty four House Whisper Holiday Gift Guide.

with Dean that's our handle. You can go there. While you're there, why don't you follow us and like and leave a comment and say Merry Christmas and enjoy the gift guide. You can view them both there and also on the KFI website, our little corner of the KFI website. Find the house Whisper page there and you will find

the gift guide downloadable. And the advantage there is that the links are live, so you can just click on them and go right to the purchase sources that we found, although you can find these things in many other places, so there you go. Also just did a little video that's going to be uploaded soon on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok about one of the items on the gift guide, a little axe, a little woodworking ax that was just it's one of those things that if you've got a

woodcutter in your family. This will just blow them away. It's just one of those very very special things because it's great and also I get to explain to you a little bit about what happens with the head of an ax as it does its job. All right, Laying all that aside, I've got just enough time to get a couple of more items in. Here's something I mention

it every year, and I probably always will. There's such a temptation this time of year to buy toolboxes for loved ones who are di wires, and I just want to remind you. I mean, I got nothing against it, but I just want to remind you that tool boxes with the locking lids and the handles and all of that, those are really designed initially for professionals who load up their tools, throw their tools in the back of a

pickup truck and head off to other places. For the average homeowner work in your project at home, a toolbox with the lid and the latches and all of that stuff and it's limited storage capacity is not actually the best way of handling your tools at your project at home. This is what I love, way way better, and that is a five gallon bucket literally Yep, no better. I don't care where you get at your local hardware store,

the big box store. Buy that three dollars and seventy five cents five gallon bucket, and then get them a bucket boss bucket tool organizer. It's heavy duty Cordura insert that laps over the outside of a bucket and basically becomes a set of tool bags for your project at home. And the reason why I love it is that you don't have to This is not for transporting off to some off site job site. This is for the drill

gun to go in the bits few tools. You can put nails down in the bottom, all of the supply, all of it there, and then you carry it around. You can even have a seat top for it so that when they're sitting there working on their project, they've got a place to sit as opposed to kneeling or getting on their knees. A bucket boss for home projects is I'm gonna say ten times better and more efficient. And I know this for a fact because I would never use one of our toolboxes here at the house.

I always just grab the five gallon bucket, throw my stuff in there. If I'm not wearing my tool bags. It's going in the bucket boss, and it's getting carried around the house or to wherever I'm my project because I keep everything with me. It doesn't hold just the tools. It's the screws, it's the trash, it's the everything. It is just literally one of the best construction and building inventions ever, and I mean the fanciest, nicest, craziest, long lasting.

Bucket Boss is like a fifty dollars insert into a three dollars bucket, so worth its weight in gold. And then the last thing is and I want you to check this out. I don't have time to tell you about it in depth, but a new evolution in terms of tool bag designs. Right, you can get a tool bag with a nice padded belt so it doesn't do as much damage to your hips. Or you can add to that classically a pair of suspenders that takes a little weight off your hips and puts it more on

your shoulders. But these days, the guys over at Diamondback Tools, you just got to go to the diamond If you're a toolist, you got to go to the Diamondback tool website and check out the seven Zho one tool vest. This is a vest. It's breedable, it's flexible, it doesn't get in the way, but it provides so much better support than a tool belt or suspenders. This vest integrates tool pouches. Plus it's the best of suspenders, but even better than that. You just got to go check it out.

It's very, very high tech. It's one hundred and seventy dollars item. Okay, it's a life time purchase item, but it is worth its weight in gold. Yet again, I know I say that a lot about everything I'm talking about here, because these are only really good options. All right, enough of that for today. I don't have anything deeply philosophical to tell you here at the end of today's program, but I do have an update on sharp family life.

Excuse me, and I know some of you like to hear that kind of thing, so I will leave you with this thought today. Here is the holiday report from the House that Love built. Here, Tina holding the camera right there, my greatest grit, my greatest Christmas present. She continues to make a strong recovery from her surgery. I could end the good news right there, and that would

be enough. I also have to say thank you for so many amazingly kind cards and flowers and gifts and well wishes, and believe me, she is feeling all of that love. Two of our favorite humans, Christie's mom Jan and our dear friend Angie, are both out from Ohio this week, which is always an absolute joy for our family.

Thanksgiving was lovely. We deviated from the turkey this year, as we are prone to do, and my culinary team, my crack culinary team, which consists of my daughter in law Christy, my dear friend Sarah, usually Tina, but she was on the sidelines this year. We all pulled together a fantastic fenel salad, traditional lamb shepherd pie, lollipop drumsticks of sticky lemon chicken, roasted Brussels sprout and celery root hash and Southern corn bread and top it off with

some German chocolate, pecan pie and roasted apples. Angie contributed to cranberry Daker mix, so Angie and Jan brought her a game with the cheeseball and her unbelievably addictive Chex mix, which I beg her for every year and she always pays off. So a highlight of Thanksgiving was our eight year old granddaughter Olivia. We already talked about this earlier in the show, producing a series of investigative journalist videos called villager News, in which she reported on each of

Tina's violations of the doctory recovery orders. And I have a feeling she has inadvertently started a new family comedy tradition, because we've all been using villager News when we are whistleblowing on each other's mistakes. Now in the family yesterday with small Business Saturday. To celebrate it, me and Tea designed a new sofa for the family room with the

help of our friend John Shoemaker at Arizona Leather. While I'm on the topic of small business, can I just remind you that there is so much more to life than being able to buy twenty four pairs of socks for eight dollars from a multinational corporation. When you shop local, you're doing so much more than helping a small business.

You are investing in your own quality of life. Whether it's the pleasure of collaborating on a sofa with a passionate, trusted expert like John at Arizona Leather, or the way we always feel when we sit down at Maide in Italy and Westlake Village, or at em On High in Moore Park, or being greeted by name by the baristas at five oh seven Coffee, or the folks at Ace Hardware or Bert's Pharmacy or Michael's Bicycles, or countless other

such experiences around our town. Tina and I have intentionally kept our own business small, precisely because for us, it's all about these amazing relationships with our clients, almost all of which become dear friends. This is a quality of life that only relationships and care and passion and pride in craftsmanship and real human contact can create, and it

is irreplaceable. So on that note, in an hour, we're gonna go off to acquire this year's Christmas tree first stop five oh seven Coffee with some kind of wonderful beverage, headed over to Christmas Ranch Tree Farm on Peterson, which is our family owned local Christmas tree farm. After getting the tree set up, we're gonna have some form of warm dinner, probably some fire pit time, and I think we're going to watch another installment of The Lord of

the Rings, which just this week. Olivia has now officially become the third generation of sharps to discover the magic of and which her father and I are extremely excited to offer our guidance through Middle Earth and reliving our own joy of this through her eyes. So anyway, that's it. That's our Villager News report for today. If there's one common denominator in all of this, it's this people.

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.