It Was Like This When We Bought It Part 2 | Hour 1

The frustrating phrase that I often hear from design clients as they tour us through their home and kind of embarrassingly admit that, yeah, this is a thing that is a problem with my home, but it wasn't my fault, and it doesn't really matter whose fault it is. By the way, no judgment here, no judgment just no judgment of you, just judgment of the home and solutions how

to fix it, how to get beyond it. Really really popular topic with y'all, and so we did part one last Sunday, and we're gonna do part two today, part three tomorrow. Look at that, Look at that. It's a full weekend of it, and of course we're going to take your calls as well. Here's the number to reach me. The board is open, Yeah, it's open. Eight three three two Ask Dean. Eight three three the numeral to ask Dean. Let me introduce you to our awesome team. Sam is

on the board. Good name Dean. How you doing good?

our buddy Eileen Gonzalez at the news desk. Good morning, Eileen, good morning.

it to the next level. It's just that simple. We're gonna be taking calls and just a bit, and if you're interested in calling in, I'm interested in talking to you about whatever has got you scratching your head about your home. Eight three three two Ask Dean eight three three. The numeral two ask Dean is our number. Richie's standing by. He is ready to tell you everything you need to know. Poppy into the queue. You can listen to the show while you wait eight three three to ask Dean. That's

coming up in just a bit. All right, Part two today of it was this way when we bought it. Inheriting somebody else's mistakes with your home and how to fix them. It's a long list, and so I'm just kinda I'm just gonna throw a dart at the at the list on the wall here, and that's what we'll talk about next. Oh, skylights, How about skylights? Skylights are an interesting subject because they can be great, they can be terrible, and so there are a number of different

ways to evaluate skylights. Let's talk about the simplest and most straightforward one, and that is from the building perspective. Skylights are windows in your roof. And this is maybe the number one problem that a lot of homeowners have when they make a decision about a skylight, is they don't treat it as such. Yeah, I know you're thinking, what do you what are you talking about? I mean, you chints out on the skylight? Or somebody did somebody

chintzed out on the skylight. You went and went to the big box store and you saw a pile of skylights sitting there over just beyond the window department. And there they're those acrylic domed skylights. I don't mean the little domes. I've got a whole set of opinions about those, but I mean that it's an acrylic skylight, and it's it's it's bubbled up right. In other words, it arcs

up because it's acrylic. You've got to do it that way because acrylic is just a weak material, so they have to use that curvature in order to give it some and you know, uh such some strength. Right, So acrylic the other problem is easy to crack, not a weather insulated skylight, and also starts to yellow and age as poorly. This is about as cheap as cheap can

get when it comes to a skylight. And the reason I underscore the fact that a skylight is a window for your roof is that you would never never buy something like that and put it on the wall in your house sticking out from your room from a room, right, You would never consider taking one of those bode out acrylic skylights and having it as a window for your home, all right, because it's cheap and because it's problematic from day one. And so that's why I draw this point

of emphasis. Skylight is a window for your roof. Treat it like you're buying yourself a window. Get a decent one. It should be glass, It should be flat so it doesn't screw with your roofline appearance from outside. It should be dual glazed, just like windows are. Because there's an insulating factor to be taken into consideration. It should have low E coatings on them so that they filter out lots of dangerous material, damaging UV sunlight, floors and furniture

and all of that. That is the basic, basic, basic truth about a skylight. And then of course it needs to be professionally or at least skillfully installed, because when people say to me, oh, don't do skylights, don't do it. Skylights. No, I don't want to do a skylight because they're gonna leak, Like why why are they going to leak? Well, because skylights leak. No, they don't. Skylights only leak when they're installed improperly. And so the key is a good curb.

The curb is the wood platform that we build for the edge of the skylight up on the roof, and then that curb is properly flashed with proper metal flashings, either by the contractor by you if you know what you're doing, or by the roofer who ties in that skylight curb to the roof so that it's seamless. And by the way, that kind of flashing, that's not the only place that kind of flashing shows up on your roof.

There's anytime we've got a vertical surface intersecting with your roof, like a fireplace, chimney or the like, we've got the same kind of vertical flashing needs and it can be done. It's done all the time. So let me just put it this way without any additional cost or crazy sort of Oh well, used spent ten times as much on that as anybody else. No, no, no, just regular proper

workman like skylight installation. Over the last what thirty five almost forty years now of installing and skylights never had a single one leak ever. O. All right, So that's the basic right there, that you don't need to fear a skylight because it's going to be something that leaks, and if it does leak, it was installed improperly. And

if you're having trouble with a skylight, good chance. And if you hate it, I mean, if you just hate it, then there's a good chance it's one of those acrylic ones. It could get cracked, it could start to yellow, which is never a good thing. All right, that's the skylight

up on the roof itself. Now we need to transition our discussion to what happened then, what happens below the skylight as it enters the room or as it passes through the attic, because this is almost an entirely different subject that and is probably the source of where most people who install skylights get it wrong. They get it wrong, or they simply don't know how to get it right. We'll talk about all of this and more.

reach me. Eight three three two. Ask Dean anything that's got you scratching your head about your home. I am ready to help you with it. All right, let's get back to skylights. We're talking about stuff that was that way when you bought it. Problems with your home that you inherited from somebody else. Bad skylights. Bad skylights can be really bad because they are such a presence in a room once they're there. So we've discussed how a

skylight needs to get up on the roof. It needs to be glass, It needs to be treated like a window, like a window, like any other window in your house. You pay the money, invest the money. By the way, does Dean hate skylights?

direct access to the sun. So one of the things that we have to be aware of when we've got a skylight on the roof is how the sun travels across the sky and whether that skylight is going to be receiving i mean direct light beaming through it at some point during the day, or whether it's on the side of the roof that's facing away from the sun, and it's sinse ambient light coming through. Both are okay,

they just have to be treated differently. So there's the skylight up on the roof, all installed, all flashed, all sealed in very nicely. The biggest oversight or a stake or whatever you want to call it that happens at this point now is not the skylight up on the roof, but where the skylight enters the room. Okay, Now, yeah, if you've got a vaulted ceiling, then the skylight on the roof is in fact the hole that is going to be in the ceiling, because the bottom side of

the roof is essentially the ceiling for the room. So there you go. But in most cases, we've added a skylight to the roof, and we're bringing a shaft down through the attic space to the surface of the ceiling of the room, which is a flat ceiling, or at least lower and separated from the roof. Okay, the shaft, the skylight shaft is where unfortunately, most design errors occur in dealing with skylights. And I say unfortunately because it's the easiest thing to get right. I mean and it's

not a super technical element. A skylight shaft is just some framing and some dry wall put on it. Now, do we have to open up the roof? I'm sorry, they open up the ceiling? Yes, we do. And do we need to take into considerations some structural elements there if we're opening up the ceiling, if we're what we call heading out certain ceiling joists in order to make a larger hole or a hole the size of the skylight in the ceiling. Sure, but here's my thing. Here's

what I want you to understand. I want you to loosen up. Just just shrug your shoulders and relax them, drug and relax. Now, roll your head around, just loosen up. Loosen up the way that you think about bringing a skylight into the room. The biggest mistake that I see all the time is that there's the skylight up on the roof and there's a straight shaft coming down boom, and there's a hole in the ceiling the size of the skylight up on the roof, and it's right under it.

You're saying, WHOA, isn't that the way it's supposed to be. No, it doesn't have to be that way. It doesn't have to be that way because in the room itself, now we have a light fixture, a feature in the room, and a shaft can be built straight down, it can be built at an angle. It can be delivering light, you know, at a forty five degree angle somewhere else in the room, several feet away from the skylight itself.

It can come down and be considerably larger than the skylight itself as it enters and makes a penetration through the ceiling of the room. And these are all the things that everybody needs to loosen up about and figure out because in a room, once a skylight hole is down in that ceiling, is it balanced, is it centered? Is it sending the light exactly where you need it?

Have you got all that skylight up there and you're just delivering one tight shaft of light, like a beam of light down in one spot on the room, and everything else is still kind of dark around it, You see what I'm saying. So we really need to think about the shaft, and we need to think about how we can you know, manipulate it and or create it in the ceiling. I like to think of it this way. You're gonna put the skylight on the roof wherever you can put it as close as possible to where you

want the light entering the room. Okay, I don't want you to put it on the other side of the house, just for the heck of it, but as close as possible. And then you deliver that light into the ceiling by making a decision about, Okay, well, what's the hole in the ceiling going to look like and where's it going

to be. Quite often, whenever possible, I will widen the skylight shaft from the skylight down so if you were to look at it in the attic, it looks a little bit more like a pyramid than just a rectangle of shaft, because I want that light to spread out. I want it to be not an intense laser beam down on the floor. I want it to be a diffused ambient light all the way across the space. If

we're using a skylight for that purpose. The other reason that we don't hesitate to angle the shaft on a skylight is that I'm very, very often don't want to see a skylight on the front elevation of the house. You're like, well, the living room is on the front

of the house. In other words, you know, my roofline goes up and then there's a ridge, and then it goes down, and the front half of the roof that faces the street, which is all lovely and part of your curb appeal, I'd prefer not to put a skylight on that section, even if it's a really nice, attractive one,

still still a thing poking through your roof. So again, if possible, not always, but if possible, if we can put that skylight on the backside of the roofline, and then we bring a shaft at an angle through the attic into even a room on the front side of the house, you're feeling me now, you're feeling me. Okay, you understand what I'm saying there. This is how we start to handle skylights. Now, I've got two other tips

for you. I understand you got a bad skylight. The very nature of what I'm talking about should bring you some relief because it means, without necessarily getting up and messing with your roof, you can change it. You can improve it. You can fix it. You can fix it by rebuilding the shaft. You can fix it by realigning how it penetrates into a room and There's one more

thing I want to tell you about your skylight. That is probably the reason why most people avoid using them, or and or the reason most people hate them is because you look up and they're dirty, and they're not as easy to clean as regular windows in the house. What do you do with that? We'll talk about that.

Skylight's part of our ongoing series. It was this way when we bought it, inheriting somebody else's mistakes and how to fix them. So the great news about skylights is that you can replace the skylight on the roof if you need to. If it's an old, crappy one, you can replace it. You can fix the roofing problems and the flashing around it relatively easily. It's really not that complex.

It just has to be done right, that's all. Uh. And as far as the way it enters the room, the shaft, you can alter the uh, the shape, the size, the location of how a skylight shaft enters the ceiling below. And now the final point, and the final point is this the thing that annoys people, makes them think, well, I need a skylight for this room. But I hate it. I hate it. I hate it. Why every time I look up there, I can just see the dirt, dust that has collected on it because it's up on the roof.

Who's gonna, you know, I'm not gonna have my son, my kids go up on the roof and clean, Like do kids clean windows? You say, I don't even know what I'm talking about. Uh, whether it's you, whether it's your house keeper, whether it's somebody who normally washes windows at your house, You've got not gonna go up on the roof and wash that maybe once in a blue moon. So it's dirty, you can see it. Well, not when I put one in, because I have a secret, a

secret to keep a skylight clean. The secret is you can't keep a skylight clean, so I don't want to see it. So this is what we do when we rework skylights or put them in brand new. A Dean Sharp a house whisper of skylight has this feature to it. We install the skylight, we build the shaft, and then as usually usually as high up in the shaft as possible, maybe maybe a couple of feet away from the skylight itself, maybe eighteen to twenty four inches down from the skylight,

but still well above the ceiling line. We will put in a piece of molding or a jog in the skylight shaft. A ledge will put in a ledge around the shaft right at that point, and then measure that out. And then I go and get a frame and talk to my glass company and I say, hey, guys, I think I'd like some crackled glass here, safety glass, of course,

and I need it so big by so big. And then we get on the ladder and get up in that skylight shaft after it's all dry walled out, and we will simply lay that piece of glass across the skylight shaft so that when you look up you see skylight shaft and you see glass at the top, and it's diffused. It's some form of attractive glass. It could be frosted, or it could have some kind of diffused

pattern to it. It could be wavy, it could be but you know, but the goal is this not to have the glass transparent so that you can see the skylight beyond it. So you look up and you see the glass and guess what. The glass is always clean because it's not actually the skylight, and it's several inches away from the skylight, and the skylight can just keep on getting dirty up there, and we don't see the details of that. And this thing never gets dirty because

it's sealed inside the house down below. And if you ever did need to clean it, then you know, somebody gets on the ladder and you go up there and you you remove the frame, clean the backside of it, put it back up there. But they just don't. They don't get dirty because they're all sealed in to the room itself. And problem solved and there you go. Oh

and by the way, while you're at it. While you're at it, you throw a little bit of led lighting strip above the ledge where you keep that glass panel and run a switch to it so you can turn your skylight on at night. What is happening now? He is literally messing with the physics of the universe. Yes I am, and that's part of the magic. And no, it's not a big deal. Right, it's a little electricity. It's a switch and led lighting strips are so easy

and inexpensive these days. So there you go. There's hope for your skylight, all right, but it has to start with a good skylight and then we take it from there. Now, this is not everything, Okay, Please don't send me emails. Here's the thing. When I get on a subject, I give you as much as I can before we have to move on to the next one. And then I always get an email from someone saying, well, you know you were discussing skylights and you failed to mention this. Yes,

I failed to mention a lot of stuff. I'm not doing a skylight show. It's just that's what you need to know. I'm giving you hope and vision about this problem that you've been living with for so long. Why because it was that way when you bought it. Look at that die in All right, let's take a little break for the news. When we come back, we'll take some calls. Your Home with Dean Sharp the house Whisper on KFI.