Home Trends and Predictions for 2025, Part 1 | Hour 2

for all of them, easy to remember. And while you're there checking out our stuff, how about to follow us and click like, even share some of the things that you find. And of course we've got a whole slat of new social media stuff coming to you in twenty twenty five, so you can look forward to that as well. And of course this very program right now that you are listening to is also the House Whisper podcast that you can listen to anytime, anywhere on demand, hundreds of episodes,

all searchable by topic. It is literally your home improvement reference library waiting for you on the free iHeartRadio app or wherever your favorite podcasts are found. We are everywhere, Apple, Podcasts, Spotify, you name it. Wherever you go for podcasts, you can find me there. You can search House Whisper or Home with Dean or Dean Sharp Boom. You'll find me there.

And if your home is in need of more personal house Whisper attention in twenty twenty five, if you're thinking, you know what we really need, we just really I know it's crazy, it's a fantasy, but we just need Dean and Tina standing in our home telling us what we need to know. Well, you can do that too. You can book an in home design console with us at house Whisper dot Design, house Whisper Dot Design. All right, the time has come to go to the phones. Always

something I look forward to every show. Let's talk to Suzanne. Hey Suzanne, welcome home.

or a Spanish tile roof. That those roofing situations, I would always encourage you know whether or not you're going to do solar, because in those situations we may actually remove roofing tile and replace it with asphalt composition tile underneath where the solar panels are going, so it's a different kind of that way. Instead of your panels sticking way way up above your roofline. They can kind of

be they appear embedded into those thicker roofing materials. But if it's asphalt composition shingles, it really doesn't matter whether you know, we do that now or we do it after the roof. But it's good to think it through. It really is good to think it through. As far as solar itself goes, you've got to evaluate well, I shouldn't say you have to evaluate it. What you should do is you call a reputable solar company and they all work the same way. In this regard. All the

reputable companies work the same way. They should be able to do a quick solar analysis of your home via Google Earth and their satellite systems. They'll zero in on your address. They've got software that enables them to guestimate and track exposure to sun, how much, how big your energy bill is, and the cost of a system to bring you to net zero. That's your goal with a solar system is to go net zero at the end

of the year. It means that some months you're going to be paying a little bit more of your power bill when there's not as much sun out other months, you're going to to be like way over producing, which is awesome and scoring that up. But by the end of the year, your bills and your credits balance out to like I didn't pay any electricity this year. That's the solar that to Tina and I have on our home. It's a net zero system. We have just enough panels that at the end of the year we don't pay

for any of our electricity. And because of that, Okay, that's always a good idea. Now there is a threshold, and I couldn't tell you right now, Susan, in all honesty, exactly where the threshold is for southern California. But there is always an energy threshold where you know, I mean, if you're only paying fifty I'll put it this way,

I'll set a ridiculous number. If you're only paying fifty dollars a month for your electricity bill, then then then solar is not going to pay for itself very quickly.

or one hundred and seventy five dollars more. You know, they'll tell you where the threshold is, where it would really make sense that if you got your solar, it would pay itself off quickly and or you know, change your energy profile pretty quickly. That's all free upfront information and conversation that you can have with a reputable solar company.

And that's what So that's you go ahead and pull the trigger and have a conversation with somebody about it so you know exactly where you stand in the long run. This is the second part and the last bit of my answer. In the long run, of course, solo is a great idea. It's a great idea whether you buy

or lease a system in general. And why is that Well, because it's a great idea because solar keeps producing during a natural disaster, and so you've got the ability to access energy for your home even when the power company has shut everything down. That's a good idea. It's also a good idea because and this is a this is an unbroken trend. Since we're talking trends today, power costs

are rising on average about four percent every year. So if you take a look at that, and you look at your power costs over the next twenty to thirty years, and the fact that a solar system brings you to zero while everybody else's energy costs are going up, a really well installed system is going to save you money long term. Long term, it's going to save over two or three decades, it's going to save you tens of

thousands of dollars. But short term, if you have very low energy consumption, it's not necessarily a game changer tomorrow.

because I'm not leaving anybody out. Okay. So here's the thing.

human beings. Okay. And when mold really is allowed to grow and thrive and colonize and develop, the biggest concern that most people have with mold is when a mold is doing so well that it's now starting to throw off spores into the air to reproduce itself and to grow even more mold sports. So say, mold one, oh one, let's understand mold. Mold loves warm, dark, moist places. Okay.

So as a result of that, okay, when a mold is allowed to thrive in a home environment and it starts throwing spores into the air, those mold spores cause for a lot of people respiratory issues because you breathe them in and once a spore is in your lungs, guess what it has found? A warm, moist, dark place. Not a great thing to have in your lungs, mold spores and so. But to be clear about this, okay, and this is from the CDC, this is from that.

There are all sorts of scientific sources for this. Most molds are not toxic in and of themselves, and yet there are a lot of people that are mold sensitive, especially to mold spores. And by the way, there are mold spores in the air everywhere we go, and so it's also a matter of concentration and continual exposure. Okay, mold grows in our homes simply because those spores are in the air, and you find a dark and moist enough place and something settles there and and it's allowed

to grow. So I just want to give a general understanding that it's true that people get sick from mold exposure, but it doesn't necessarily mean the mold itself is toxic. And people are like, well, black mold is now, that's not true either, some black mold, A few black molds, and know, there is no way for a homeowner to identify a toxic mold versus a non toxic mold, zero ways to visually identified, because they are there's like one hundred thousand of them out there and they almost all

look alike. So any any website or advice telling you, well, here's how you can identify a toxic mold, that's generally a mold remediation company that wants to make a buck by telling you you should probably just get rid of it all. So anyway, black mold, green mold, red mole. Okay, So the point is this, again, I am not trying to downplay that some people are very very mold sensitive. In fact, if you have a mold allergy, right, it's very likely that it will do more health harm to you.

If you are allergic to non toxic molds. Then the average person without a mold allergy has in exposure to a toxic mold. So I hope everybody's understand the nuance to this. So that's all right. When it comes to our home mold that you see growing on a surface somewhere, you should clean it. And you can clean it very easily with soap and water and a little bit of black and it's done. Molds are not, you know, super strong, powerful agents that will fight against exposure to sunlight or

chemicals like bleach. They simply won't survive it. The concern that most people have about mold is usually unfounded in my opinion. When you see a mold growing on a surface somewhere, clean it, throw some bleach on it, so soap and water, get it cleaned up. If there's been a major plumbing leak or a roof leak in which water has made it inside a wall cavity, then we need to expose and open up those cavities, dry them out, and make sure there's no mold growth there so that

they don't thrive. Because once they're thriving in those cavities, that's the kind of mold growth that causes problems not just to human beings who are living in the space, but also problems to the actual structure of the wood and the framing as well. And so, how do you know that you've not got mold behind your walls? Well, if you haven't had a major leak or a major moisture intrusion on the house, you don't have mold inside your walls. Okay, you just see it occasionally on the

surface somewhere. And if you've had a major leak and haven't opened up those walls, that's where you need to address the remediation. Does that make sense.

And so if it's been dry for a long time, I'm assuming that once it's patched up and it's you know, it's been dry for a long time, if that can be resurrected, you know, because it's dark now, and you know, but as long as it's tried, I'm assuming that it can't return and we can safety. We still the walls, because I'm ambarsed to say those walls still have not been catched up. But it's been dried for a long time.

to the show, and for all of your support. It's time for me to move on when we return back to Trends and Predictions for twenty twenty five.

now the question was why today versus any other day. Well, they I'm not exactly sure how they do all of their actual particulate monitoring, but they do monitor pollution particulates in the air. And usually I'll just tell you this, it usually has to do with stagnant weather. Okay, now, that's not a very nice way of describing a beautiful, misty morning. But it's been cloudy and overcast for a

couple of three days here. It is the holiday season, and uh, there's no wind happening out there, not much wind. That's what they mean by stagnant weather. Okay, so we've got cloud cover that holds stuff in. We've got no wind to blow air particulates away. And it's the holiday season. It's the holiday. No, it's a holiday season. And more people are using a wood burning fireplaces right now, so chances are particulate contamination in the air is just higher.

And the AQMD is like no, I just want to draw the line right there. So there you go there, like it or not. That's the Uh. Those are usually the contributing factors, all right. I said I was going to get back to design prediction talk. I want to do that. But also I realize I have neglected a priority caller, so I'm going to take one more call. I want to talk to Bruce. Hey, Bruce, welcome home.

be pretty intensive, pretty violent activity on the inside. Hydrojeting companies that are like, yeah, use it on any pipe because it's not as you know, it's not as intense as a snake or an augur Not true. Hydrojetting can really mess up an old, already fragile drain line, so it has to be evaluated first. And usually the way you evaluate it is by running a camera down in the system so that we can actually identify what the

heck is going on. So before hydrojeting, my suggestion to you would always be, especially if every time you run that snake down you're running into something, you feel like something is like, you know, whether it's a roof invasion that keeps regrowing, whether we've got an actual break or a crack in the pipe or a dislocation in the drain line. So before we take a tool out of the toolbox for something like this, and we think of

it like the human body. Right if you're feeling sick and you come into the emergency room or you're come into the doctor's office, and you know, no doctor worth their salt is going to suggest, well, I've got a treatment, I've got a therapy or a treatment or a surgical procedure that we should perform on you. Well, okay, that comes at a point. But what always happens first testing, diagnostic testing. I want to do a blood panel, I

want to draw some blood. I want to get out of scope and look inside, you know wherever we're looking inside. And the same is true with your home. You got a recurring there, okay, absolutely a recurring problem, which means we need to get eyes on it. And one of the great things about living in the twenty first century is we've got camera technology that can do that. Every plumber with their salt can run a camera down your drain line and we will figure out what the heck

is causing Bruce's ongoing recurring problem. If it's roots, that's one thing. If there's just a bad week pipe there, that's another thing. If there's a break, that's a whole different thing. Whether or not hydrojetting is the answer has to do with what the nature of the problem is. So diagnosis first.

I agree, Yeah, run a camera first. And I've heard from other plumbers exactly what you have just said.

the solution. Maybe the solution is that, you know, we've got a large enough break in the line there that we need to get down there and act just get it fixed.

camera down there and look at it again. And I thank you very much for your time, my friend.

your home. We want to figure out the best of our ability exactly what is going on before we start tearing stuff up. Okay, that's always the right way to go, Bruce. Thanks for your call. All right, when we return, more thoughts on trends and predictions for twenty twenty five.

what is maximalism. Well, it's the opposite of minimalism. Maximalism is a style of decor in which, as you could tell from the name, you put a lot of stuff in the room, a lot of stuff. What does Dean think about maximalism? Well, I guess it's an inevitability as time rolls on that the pendulum swings from one extreme to the other. Right, We've been on a minimalist trend for a long time now, and I personally would like

to see that continue. Because minimalism not stark empty everything out of a room except for a table, a chair, and a potted plant in a white, bare room. Although that can be kind of cool, but that's not a realistic thing. Minimalism engages a lot of longstanding, non trending, always true architectural principles, principles like hierarchy, where you walk into a room and you are directed very clearly to look at kind of what we would call the hero

of the room, the star of the show. Whatever that feature may be, and then you're directed to look at another thing and another thing, and all good art works in that way. And so I have been an advocate for minimalism in its design approach, not in the extreme, but just you know, over the years, I have told you every single year, on multiple occasions, get rid of some of your stuff. You got too much stuff, And that just tends to be the case. So what is

Dean's reaction to maximalism. Well, I will give you two things that concern me. One, I've seen some well done maximalism before. I mean in the sense that we've covered every surface of everything with a lot of stuff and the designer has been able to pull it off. I've seen it. So I'm giving you my nod of acknowledgment. But I got to tell you this, even among professional designers and decorators, pulling off maximalism, in my opinion, very

very rare, pulling it off right, very very rare. And so we're talking about a rare occurrence among professional decorators and designers. And when it comes to the homeowner, I think maximalism is we're encouraging it is a big, big mistake. After years of begging people to declutter their homes. Now we're encouraging them to add more stuff and put it all in the same room. This is not going to

turn out well. So yeah, as you're looking at design trend sites, Pinterest, Instagram, wherever you're looking, and you see maximalism in for twenty twenty five, yeah, you know what, run the other way. Honestly, run the other way. I mean, everybody's willing, everybody's you know, has the right to try. Try it with a room. But I will tell you this, another limit of maximalism is that if it happens throughout the entire house, I guarantee you it's a massive mistake.

If you want to try one room maximalist, Okay, fine, give it a try and just expect that it's you know, odds are against you that you're going to succeed. I'm just I'm sorry. Maximalism. What you know, just because you've given a thing a name does not mean that it's a good idea. And maximalism, for most people is something to steer clear of because it in and of itself is a violation of basic human behavioral design principles. And that's what design and discordant decor is all about it's

all about human beings. So if you walk into a room and there is literally so much stuff in the room that you don't know where to look, then that's a confusing, chaotic room. That's typically what a maximalist room is. And so how do they work? How do they how are they? Why is it even a thing? I will tell you in the world of hierarchy, okay, meaning that

those priority hits right. So everybody, for me to Joanna Gaines, will tell you that a room needs a hero, It needs a it needs a star, it needs one thing that everything else is kind of rotating around.

can focus and it can have its effect. So why does maximalism occasionally work or how could it ever possibly work?

be enjoying yourself. That's my prediction. So yeah, I have an opinion on maximalism, and for almost everybody, it's a thumbs down opinion because I find that it violates human nature too much. All Right, more of my opinions and predictions of twenty twenty five and your design for your home tomorrow in the Big Show. I'm so glad you joined me this morning. I am so appreciative of you

spending time with me. It is always a privilege. Follow us on social media Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, x Home with Dean, Don't Forget the House Whisper podcast, including this very broadcast in about an hour is everywhere your favorite podcasts are found, and if your home is in need of some personal house Whisper attention, you can book an in home design console with me and t by going to house Whisper dot Design. We're right back here tomorrow nine to noon.

Until then, get out there, get into this beautiful, misty day, and get busy building yourself a beautiful life. We'll see you tomorrow. This has been Home with Dean Sharp, the house Whisper. Tune into the live broadcast on KFI A 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