It Was Like This When We Bought it | Hour 3

You kind of apologetically are expressing that you know this thing is wrong, but it was somebody else who did it. So what do you do when you inherit somebody else's mistake on your home and specifically how to fix them.

So we're moving through a list. Obviously, I'm not going to be able to cover every imaginable mistake somebody else has made to your home, but we're moving through some of the biggies as we do this morning, helping you out along the way, giving you some insights, and we're going to return to that conversation in just a bit. But right now we're at the top of the hour

and we're going to be going to the phones. However, right before we do that, I want to remind you that coming up in just a couple of weeks the House Whisper Holiday Home Show. I know, there's been an election, there's been all sorts of craziness, there's been fires, there's been you know, it's November. It's time for us all to start looking toward the holidays, to get into that

holiday spirit, that holiday mood. And there is no better way to do it if you're a fan of our show then to come and have a little holiday party with us right down in the iHeart Studios in Burbank Sunday,

November twenty fourth. We are going to be doing this show this Sunday show from nine to noon, live as we do, in front of a live studio audience, and I would love for you to be in that audience with us, because we're gonna be hanging out in between breaks, We'll be talking, we'll be just gonna be a great time. There's gonna be refreshments for you, We're gonna have a few special guests with me and Al dick Holme, who

is sponsoring the entire show. They're gonna be decorating one of their incomparable seven and a half foot Christmas trees right in front of everybody's eyes there during the show. They're going to be talking about home decor during the show, and one of those lucky audience members, maybe you will get to take that tree home with you. That is an unbelievable thing, because these are the best Christmas trees on planet Earth. I kid you not. So anyway, that's

all happening Sunday, November twenty fourth. We're going to be in the helpful Honda Lounge on the fifth floor of iHeart Studios in Burbank. Not a big venue, very cozy, very intimate, a lot of fun, big enough for us to have a nice studio audience. But I can't take everybody. So here's what you do. You go to our social media. You go to Instagram or Facebook. We're on both Home

with Dean Boom. Find us there. If you are not already following us, you should be and share it with all of your friends as well, of course, but you will find attached right to the top of that stream the Holiday Home Show post it's all blinky and lovely and looking all holiday ish. Jump down, leave a comment and leave make it very clear in the comment. Hi, it's me and I want to come to the show.

And we've got this weekend and next weekend and after next Sunday show there will be no more opportunities to enter, and we will be selecting those people who will be with us in the audience on that day. So act now. Go ahead, Instagram or Facebook, leave a comment and and tell us Hey, I want to be in the show, and hopefully, fingers crossed, you'll get selected as we go.

now the water runs through. Now it's got to shed water. There has to be a proper slope built into it. And then you could use a material like a fiberglass, build up waterproofing material on top. And it's really the right decking companies that there are some decking companies that can do some pretty beautiful things in the finished surface of the fiberglass, and we can make it look like stone, we can make it look like wood planking. It's a simulation,

you know, not gonna pull any punches. It's a simulation. But there are some pretty attractive fiberglass decking materials. And because it is both the waterproofing of the deck and the finished surface itself, it's probably the least expensive way to go. Okay, Now from there you would step up to worrying about getting a waterproofing membrane over that room and which you could do with a waterproofing roofing membrane

material not an esthetically pleasing decking material. And then on top of that, you could do something like rebuild the wood deck. You could have a flat wood deck coming out that lets water drop through, hits the sloped roof below it, and it runs off appropriately. Or you could build a waterproofing membrane and put stone or exterior tile or a material like that on that deck that it

becomes the esthetic protecting covering. But all of these things that I'm talking about now the price tag is going up. Now they are more beautiful, ultimately, more natural, and more pleasing, and that's where you're going to have to decide. So I think as you start the design process with it, what you need to do is do a little investigating, Maybe send the plan for that deck out over to a couple of fiberglass decking companies and saying, hey, what

can you do with this? Well, let's see what and what's it going to cost me for you to waterproof this and make it esthetically pleasing at the same time. And similarly, we can talk to your builder. Do you have a builder right now or are you going to be acquiring a.

Other times, even on the second floor, we can make a room look like concrete on the surface and glaze it so that it all feels like concrete, but it's up on the second floor, and it's essentially a specialized kind of covering treatment that pours in and that we travel into place. That's a little bit more intensive because we've got to make sure that the giving of the floor underneath it doesn't cause it to crack or anything like that. But it can be done. All of these

things can be done pretty much these days, Sharon. If you can dream it, it can be achieved. It's just a question of how big the check is that gets written to.

right now. Don't rush to construction. Consider all of these things and all these possibilities, and continue to educate yourself because you don't want to be slapping your head later saying, oh, why didn't even think about doing that? Consider them, even the things that seem out of reach, and in the end you'll make your budgetary decisions and you'll know, Okay,

we didn't do that for these four reasons. That's why we're doing this, and you're going to be content with it and you're going to be pleased with the results overall. Just don't miss out on something that's out there that you've settled for something else and you didn't bother to educate yourself on Sharon, I got to go. Thank you for your call. Good luck on that ADU and the deck. I'm sure it's going to be beautiful when you're done.

Just keep your eyes open and remember design matters most all, Right, y'all when we come back, more of your call, Yeah, I think I'm going to take at least one more call as we go. You're home with Dean Sharp the house Whisper.

If you look at from a bird's eye, view. I have a longside and a shorter side like an L, and I installed a little recirculating little pump to have the hot water instantly the long side of the L. At the end of it, I installed the lost faucett, but I still have cold water is coming on the short side. So my question is is it okay to install another little pump on the short side. I won't have a kind of cross plumbing problem with it.

draw hot water down those lines. And what it's doing is while the water is still cold, it's pushing that water into the cold water line, which means it's still your water ready to be used as cold water. And of course the research pump will turn off when the hot water actually gets there. Because it'll sense it, the bridge valve will shut off. It's a brilliant little device, inexpensive way to getting hot water much much closer to the faucets that are most importan to you. And also,

by the way, not just a gimmick. It is literally required on major remodels and new builds here in California. Now that we do exactly that. But you've got an L shaped house, and if you think of your plumbing system like a like the branches on a tree, You've got all the main trunk and branches heading off down the big side of the L, but you have a few branches heading off down the short side, and you can do the exact same thing. It's not going to

adversely affect your plumbing. You don't have to replumb the whole house. You can just pick again the FURTHEST branch down the FURTHEST sink down the short side, install another research pump and another bridge valve right there, and you'll have the same effect. And for those of you who are listening and thinking, Okay, I get that for that sink,

but how does this help everything else? Well, because because when we do it on the furthest sink it's drawing that hot water down past all the other sinks and fixtures on the way getting there, so everybody benefits. All of the other sinks and fixtures benefit on the way to the furthest thing. You do that on each extreme, on both ends of the L and Joseph, Yeah, you'll end up with hot water. It's not gonna be instant

hot water. You already know that it's not instantaneous. Like the second you turn the faucet on, boom, there's the hot water. But we're talking about hot water showing up in a couple of seconds versus a couple of minutes, and that is a massive, massive difference and also a huge savings in water. Joseph, thank you so much for your question. Thank you for your very very kind words about just what we're doing here. Keep listening. I promise

more good stuff coming as we go. All right, y'all, we are going to get back to our conversation on the stuff you've inherited, the mistakes from previous owners of your home. It was this way when we bought it. Right after Eileen Gonzalez gives us the news.

You never use it, and it is taking up some serious real estate in your bathroom. That was a mistake in my opinion, by the builders themselves. But hey, what can we say? It was an era that happily in that regard has passed us.

You know, it's always got this woman with her hair up in her bubble bath and you know, a glass of wine and she's relaxing with her eyes closed, and it just looks so luxurious and spake. And I'm all for a luxurious, spawlike bathroom, and I'm all for you enjoying a soaking tub as well. But here's the thing, a jetted tub with big steps leading up to it. Okay, that's a massive waste of space in order to get

that experience done. Also, the jetted tub, I've always laughed about this as somebody who has you know, had to work with them in the past. That whole serene scene,

that beautiful. You could imagine soft music playing and maybe all the lights are off except for a couple of candles, and then you press the button to activate the jets, and the bubbles blow all over the place because the water becomes turbulent, and instead of the soft music and the serenity, you hear the sound of the jet blower blowing in the bathroom, and you know what, that's just

enough to end the whole experience. It's different when you're in a spa tub outside, right, you just kind of expect. First of all, you're not in an echo chamber, and secondly, you know.

recirculate the water to keep it hot. It just means having a nice, well insulated tub and bringing that hot water in quickly, which means when you replumb the bathroom, instead of a half inch water line hot water line to that tub like you would run to your faucets, you make sure that that's a three quarter inch hot water line into that tub so that that that tub fills up fast with piping hot water, and as a result, the filling process does not have take so long as

by the time the tub gets full, the water has gone lukewarm on you. All right, So there you go. Little secret about plumbing a luxurious spa bathroom experience. The tub always gets a big soaker tub, meaning the tub always gets a three quarter inch water line a hot water line feeding it, instead of the half inch lines that are running to the shower or the faucets. It

makes a world of difference. Trust me, you can do the math figure out the massive flow of a three quarter inch line radically different than a half inch line. Doesn't sound like it, but it is, it really is. Okay, moving on something a little bit more pedantic. Dipping, sloping or spongy floor never acceptable, never acceptable.

out what's going on there. It could simply be a breaking down of the sheathing, meaning the layer on top the plywood, or the the you know, if you live in a really old home, those one by six slats that are traveling across your floor at a forty five degree angle. It could just be that, but it may indicate that there's something else wrong as well, and we need to get into it, and we need to take a look at it and end the sponginess. Okay, A dipping floor or a sloping floor. Let's talk about a

dipping floor. Well, let's talk about both. Either one could be an indicator of a structural problem that's happening. Okay, so we can't overlook that. We need to take a serious look at it. If a floor is sloped, it may mean that the foundation has sunk somewhat. It may means it may mean it was framed poorly to begin with. If the floor is dipping, it may mean that we've got a joist failure right the structure of the floor underneath.

It may mean that the slab was poured poorly, or just those joists have sagged over the years and now we have a dip. So first step is to make sure that from an engineering point of view, there's nothing systemically wrong. Okay, So let's say we do that. Let's say an engineer comes out and says, Yeah, this corner of the house has sloped, but it's not dipping any further. We don't know why it is sloped, but it's not going any further. We don't see any problems, we don't

see any ongoing issues. We don't think it's going to go anymore. You just have an outer level floor or an engineer has said, yeah, the joicte have sagged, but they're still doing their job and they're just sagging. In those cases, we can come in with some very lightweight self leveling compound. We can strip off all the materials on the floor. This stuff pours out like a kind of like runny pancake batter, and we run it all

over the floor its self levels. You don't trowl it because it literally will find its own level, as liquids do. And you know, within an hour or two it sets up like a resonancy POxy finish. And guess what. Now the floor is not dipping and it's not sagging, and the floor, even if the technically the room has sunk some in one corner, the floor is now not doing it. And that is usually a relatively quick, relatively inexpensive fixed to what is esthetically a major problem. And so there

you go. There's no excuse in a twenty first century home environment for a dipping, a sloping, or a spongy floor. Okay, does that make sense?

bought the house. Or maybe maybe you made the bold move and you're like, we're taking the acoustic popcorn stuff off of our ceilings, only to find.

That's the way it is. So this is the truth. So here's what you do when it comes to ceilings and walls. If a ridge or a bump in a ceiling or a wall is really getting on your nerves, then open up the drywall to the studs on each side of the stud in question. Because it's a stud or a ceiling joist that's dripping down or too high up, arcing too high, that's bent in one direction or another in a weird way, open up the drywall, floor the

ceiling or across the ceiling. And this is a if it's a severe one, and simply I wouldn't say shave it. In terms of a ceiling joist, you could add a sister choice to it and then shave the bottom because we don't want to lose its structural integrity. But if it's just a matter of shaving a stud, then shave the stud down with a planer or have a handy person or a contractor do this to flatten it out. Now, Most of the time we don't have to go to

that extreme. Most of the time you can hire a good quality dry waller to come in and actually float the rest of the walls feather out and float with drywall mud. Drywall mud can cover a multitude of sins. It's not going to be a super cheap fix, but it can be the fix that resolves the craziness of the whole ceiling, if not all of it one hundred percent ninety plus percent and make a huge difference on a ceiling.

how we resolve it. So call a drywaller, have them come out, have them give you a price for smoothing that stuff out, because you know what it's just if it's getting in the way of you enjoying a room. If it's something that you apologize for, at least get a price on what it would take to get it resolved. Now, a lot of you this morning have been commenting, Dan Dean, I love this topic, and I know you have more on your list. Please please give us more. You know what,

all right, we will next weekend. I'm going to do part two of this same series because there are a lot more of these conditions and I know you're hungry to hear about it. So next week Part two of it was this way when we bought it, so you can look forward to that both Saturday and Sunday, because it's a big list and you know what, you deserve to hear about the problem that you're struggling with in

your house. And I'll tell you this in between now and then in between now and the next program, if you want to email me at the station or leave a comment on social media, then go ahead and tell me, hey, how about this problem that I inherited? And I'll do my best to see if we can't address it directly on the next program. How does that sound. That's just a deal between you and me to help all right,

one more reminder social media, Facebook and Instagram. Right at the top of a Home with Dean you will find the holiday home show post. That's where you go leave a comment saying Dean, I want to be part of that studio audience, and boom, you are entered to win a seat there. That's coming up a couple of weeks from now, on November twenty fourth. Okay, here we are.

I'm going to leave you with this thought today, and for those of you who follow us on social media, you're probably gonna want to go and at least see what I'm talking about here, because there's a visual element here that would help out. I have a couple of tattoos every few days, somebody a cashier at a store, a stranger, somebody I'm waiting in line with, somebody sitting at a table next to us at a restaurant, or a new client. Someone every once in a while asked

me about my tattoos. Here they are right there, I see those. I only have two, but they're on my forearms, so they're pretty easy to spot, and it's not like they're weird. But they also aren't what you might call typical, so they occasionally pique somebody's curiosity to the point of saying something. And I never intended to get a tattoo, but my father, who had several of his own, always wanted me to get one, and something in me knew I would eventually want to honor him in that way.

But I resisted for a long time because they knew that it would need to mean, I mean, really mean a lot to me. And that day finally came, sadly long after my father passed away, but I still did that to honor him. My tattoos are unique because I drew them myself, and I've always been fascinated with the simplest, most primal forms of art because of how straightforwardly symbolic it can be. So these are based on images that

I found in a book of ancient Hopie petroglyphs cave carvings. Literally, I fell in love with the idea of the mystery of life being portrayed as a whirlwind. So on one arm is my relationship with life, life with a capital L. And on the other is that same life being shared in relationship with other people. Those are my two great commandments, my guiding principles, my life priorities to love life and

to love people. So with that said, now that you know more about me than you ever asked to know or wanted to know, at the end of yet another week in this always mysterious and often tumultuous whirlwind, I will leave you with a suggestion about what could be your priorities this week. And it is very, very simply this love life, love others, because at the end of the day, there's really not that much more to get done.