Makeover Magic | Hour 3

It is literally a home improvement reference library that we have built for you year after year, week after week, and it's there for you on demand. And if you're thinking, hey, that's all great, but what we really need is Dean and Tina in our house, well guess what you can do that too. You can book an inhoume design, consult with me and the tea. Just go to house Whisperer

Design house Whisper Dot designed to get more information. All right, we are talking home makeovers today, but we've still got a couple of calls left, and it's the top of the hour, so I never want to ignore our callers. Let me go to the phones. See what we can do for Ron. Hey, Ron, welcome home.

now the question is we're under a time crunch. We've been doing it at the speed of cash, which has been slow, but uh, we've gotten to a point where now we're trying to get everything done.

The family's going kind of nuts, saying, so we got to get this thing done, and I think we could do it relatively quick and inexpensively, and I'm kind of reaching out for a suggestion from you.

So kiln dried lumber, but yeah, you should be able to put that together with the hardware intact and hold it together a good old style plank door, give it the look that you want, and also have a very very solid, very nicely sound insulated interior, very sexy door. And you'll be able to do it if you're willing. And sounds like you're willing for far less than you would buy anything close to that equivalent look for that door. Okay,

so sure, absolutely, Kiln dride lumber. Take your time. There are a thousand probably YouTube videos online offering suggestions on how you would build a plank door, and I would refer you in that direction and just do your homework and research. But I'm just going to tell you kill and dride and I would do this, make this deal.

And I've I've had to do this before, and so not with my family, but I've had to do it with clients before, where a client has said where I've suggested something kind of out of the box to a client and they're like, I don't know, Dean, I know, And so I said, Okay, here's the thing. Can we

do this? Give me give me the opportunity to build a prototype okay, and show you the prototype and then hand you the receipt from the prototype, and if the prototype fails to meet your expectations and the cost misses the target, then will go conventional and we'll just do the rest of the stuff through out. And you know,

still you're not going to ignore the period. All right, you got an eighteen eighty three house, you could you could pick a two three four panel shaker style paint gray door and nobody would think twice about it, and it would look great. But still those are not going to be, you know, super cheap. So I would say this, cut a deal with your family, say let me build

one door. Let me build a door, and you guys tell me that you hate it or you love it, and I'll show you the price tag and then you you go beat that price for this kind of thing for the rest of the house, and we'll all decide together. That's the best advice I can give you, because I think that's fair. That's fair to everybody.

so much for putting so much confidence in me. I hope everything thus far has paid off in spades. For you do a prototype of the door, do it as quickly and efficiently as possible, and you see where the family sits with that. And I'm guessing sounds like you're making all the right moves so far. I'm guessing you know you're gonna get your plank doors in there, and everybody's going to be happy for decades to come.

gray area between renovation and decorating. And what it does is it yields up if we do it right, we pick just the right things, it yields up big, big progress, big changes for relatively small amounts of cash. And that's kind of where a lot of people are at right now. Right now, a lot of remodeling dreams on pause because we don't know what material prices are going to go

with tariffs. We don't there's just a lot of uncertainty out there right now, and so you can still move forward with your home by embracing some of the most efficient and effective modalities when it comes to makeovers, which by the way, could and should be a part of the Big Green Model plans anyway. And so just something to consider as we move along. So we're out of the bathroom, I want to get into other rooms in

the house. Let's talk about the house in general. One of the things that you can do to radically change the interior vibe of your home if you happen to live and then this is if these are all you know, if they apply to you kind of situations. So many folks live in homes where their windows are very plain. And I don't mean the window itself, not the glass, not the frame. I'm not commenting on that. What I'm

commenting on is the window opening. If you live in a home built in the seventies, built in the eighties, you know, you may find that it's dry wall, and then the drywall approaches the window and it simply turns a corner at a ninety degree angle and just runs into the window. And that's it. That's all that's going on there. It's a glass opening in the middle of a dry wall wall. And if your home motif leans towards something a little bit more traditional, something a little

bit more refined. Then one of the things you can do to change now without changing the window itself, not talking about buying a new window, is to finish the trim of the interior of the window, to trim out

the window. So what that means. It starts with small pieces of wood that would run around the inside of that opening up against the window, run around the inside of that opening to create essentially kind of a jam, a window jam, and that wood would come out and it would come all the way out and flush to

the dry wall surface of the wall. And then once that box, that four sided window jam box has been created in there, then you can use the front edge of that box to put casing around that window, and maybe the bottom piece of that box, depending on the style. And you can see these styles online. You can just

look up apron and sill. Maybe the lower portion of that box is actually a sill which extends out a little bit and maybe even has ears that go out to the left and the right beyond the window opening itself. And then you put casey on three sides and maybe a nice molding underneath, and you have essentially what is a fully cased sill and apron detailed interior window that you then paint in accordance with whatever paint directives you've

decided to go with for the room. It's a piece of trim and molding and detailing that completely changes the character of a room, any room, maybe every room in your house. And what are we talking about in terms of cost? We're talking about small pieces of molding wood, I mean per window. We're talking about tens of dollars. That's it, not one hundreds tens of dollars per window

to get this overall perspective and effect. Tens of dollars in materials and you know, little effort on your part and elbow grease, but it can make such such a huge difference. Now, should every house have trimmed out cased interior windows. Now, it's just but I will tell you well over half of you who are listening right now have a house that qualifies for that kind of thing, that where it would work well. And so this is

why I'm handing out this advice. This is not for the five percent of homes or ten percent of homes. It's well over sixty percent of homes would improve the interior vibe of a room by finishing them out. You think about it, the door into your room has casing around it, baseboard at the bottom, it has a wood jam and all of that. But then you look to the window and it's just dry wall and glass and it kind of loses it loses that energy of detail.

You could supply that detail with a little bit of education, a little bit of elbow grease, and a little patience and very very little minimal material cost to make a huge difference. Also in the same keeping new closet doors. You know, now, maybe you have a small enough room where you really want glass mirror because the mirror kind of, you know, enhances the visual vibe of the size of the room. That's all well and good. But a lot of you have just inherited sliding closet doors that's just

it's all mirror, it's a bunch of metal. It's all just kind of some new closet doors. And if you don't need the mirror space, why not replace those doors with doors that have paneling to them, doors that have detail, architectural interesting detail, maybe take you back a little bit, maybe more traditionalize the room. A new closet door change

out with sliding tracks can make a big difference. And in the big scheme of things not expensive, not expensive at all, Okay, And of course in any given room, a feature wall, a feature wall, paint wise, now I want to talk about that. On the other side of the break.

your home, design absolutely matters most. We got to approach it creatively because creativity, creativity overcomes limitations, creativity versus cost, creativity wins every time. And that's where we want to spend our energies today, because we're talking about makeover solutions today for those of you who are like feeling not so confident to just dive headfirst in today's economic environment.

Into the full on remodel or renovation. Maybe we can make some changes to the house and wait this out, but changes that really matter, and these are changes that very very likely you would integrate into your remodel anyway, but you can get them done now, make some big, big differences. All right, So we are before the break. I had touched on the feature wall. The feature wall is a concept in a bedroom, in any room, in any room at all, what is the feature wall? What

is this idea? The feature wall, as the general concept is something that I embrace quite regularly from a design perspective because it allows you to really go all out in a room without overdoing it and making the mistake of wrapping one particular concept all the way around the room to the point where we find that we're in that kind of a cave. Okay, a feature wall means, you know what I've always wanted to put. You know, I've always wanted to have a room with a library

kind of vibe to it. And unless you absolutely know for certain that you could lose an entire foot off of each dimensionality of that room all the way around on all four walls, and unless you're absolutely certain that putting bookshelves on all four walls of a room is not going to create a small kind of book cave environment. Maybe that's what you love, maybe that's the idea you're

going for. It can be overwhelming. Details can be overwhelming when there's too many of them, and so as a result, a lot of people they're unsure and they just back away, and then the room lacks any detail whatsoever. And this is where the concept of feature wall or feature walls, because it could be a couple of walls, just not all four. But let's just stick with the idea of the one wall, the one wall in which you are going to do something bold and bold is so very

awesome in a house. Bold is such a wonderful expression in a house. And there are very very few circumstances where I have walked into a home and seen something bold on a single wall and thought to myself, WHOA, that's just too much or bad taste or mistake. Nope, No. Bold feature wall gives you the freedom to really go for it, because by definition, if it's only one quarter of the wall space in a room, you're not going

to be doing too much. It's just not going to be too much and then you can go bold or go home, okay, or go bold with your home or in your own Yeah, you get the idea. So that's really the idea. Now, is this dean saying that when it comes to paint colors, for instance, that always, always, always, I should never pick a color other than white and paint an entire room. No, that's not me saying that at all. What I'm saying is I think the key

word here is bold. All right, So if you decide, listen, I've always wanted this very faint pastel canary yellow to kind of be the theme inside a room. You know what a light, bright pastel color in a room, Go for it. You want to paint the kids nursery baby blue or rose pink, or go for it. That's not overwhelming, it's not bold, it's light. It's subtle and subtle. Light things can afford to be on more than one surface.

But if you've always thought, gosh, I love deep purple, I love this deep roy, I love navy blue, I'm gonna tell you go for it. Navy blue a wall. If you navy blue the room, you will be in a tiny dark box. But you navy blue a wall the right wall in the right way, and you're gonna hit it out of the park. It's your room, it's your home. And the other thing I like about a feature wall is that it's a feature. Think about that

word feature. In other words, if you walk into an environment where everything is all the same color, then it's not a feature. It's just the color of the room. But if one wall stands out, it's that room's way of saying, this is what I'm all about. This is what I'm all even though the other walls aren't that color. That's what a feature wall does. It stands in contrast. It stands essentially as a work of art. It stands

as a statement. And you would think, well, if that's a statement, painting all four walls as a statement, actually doesn't work that way. It actually works just the opposite. It's the contrast from the rest of the house. It's the contrast from the rest of the room that actually makes a feature wall the powerful statement that it is.

So whether that's a wall of planked wood or a wall of sighting, or a wall that is a bold color, or if it's a wall of bookshelves or a wall of you know, a full sized photographic mural, which, by the way, these days is a way of installing wallpaper that was not available to us just a few years ago. There are websites you can go to where you can take imagery of nature. You can take just about any

image imaginable and create a wall sized applicue mural. Do that in every wall and you're really gonna get vertigo. But a feature wall, man, it's awesome. It can be really really awesome, and then let other details compliment and coordinate and follow along. I wanted to spend an entire segment talking to you about the concept of a feature wall, because it's not just paint. It could be anything, and it's not just a solid universal rule that you can't

ever do a non white paint in a room. It's about the word bold, and if you are itching to go bold, do it with a feature wall, as opposed to spreading it too far and losing impact along the way. That's I hope you understand. I hope that makes it clear. This is how we do features. Because remember, architecture, as I've said so many times before, great art and architecture is all about what we call hierarchy, meaning when you

take a look at a great piece of art. It is telling you, whether you realize it or not, where you should look first. Because some things in that artwork are more important than other things. They take precedence and priority. There's a hierarchy of attention, and so the idea of a feature wall sets up that hierarchy inside a room in which you look to this wall and you say, this is the most important hit. But it's not overwhelming me.

It's just captivating me. And that's our goal. If you find that balance, then you will have, for very very little money, created a tremendously satisfying space.

We're on all of the usual suspects, Instagram, Facebook, x, TikTok at Home with Dean, same handle for them all. You know that this very broadcast. If you've missed some of the tips from earlier in the show, If you just tuned in, it's all right in about an hour. This will be the House Whisper Podcast and is available every where your favorite podcasts are found, of course, on the free iHeartRadio app you listen on Spotify. You can

find us on Apple Podcasts everywhere. You just search for Home with Dean Sharp, the House Whisper or Dean Sharp, I'll show up. I'll show I promise you put in enough words there, any of those words, you'll find us. And then you'll find hundreds of episodes, all listed by topic, available for you to listen to for free on demand

anytime anywhere on planet Earth that suits you. And if your home is in need of some personal House Whisper attention, if you're thinking, oh, you know, I would really like to just have Dean and Tina here staring at our problem, helping us figure it out, well you can do that too. You can book an in home design console with us. You just go to house Whisperer dot Design House Whisperer dot Design and for more information and to request a console. All right, we are wrapping up just a few makeover

tips and trip. We're just emphasizing the power of makeovers in order to move your home forward in uncertain financial times when you may not be ready to pull the trigger on the big remodel or the big renovation because of financial uncertainty. Makeover ideas always work. They always yield far more effect than they cost. And I'm just giving you some samples and some concepts and some ideas. So let's do a little lightning round here right at the

end of the show. Do not forget the power of plants. Plants in your home. This was a thing that for years and years we just stopped talking about. But now it's back, and rightly so. It's part of what we call biophilic design. It is the love of nature, bringing nature inside your home as much as possible. And if you say to me, Dean, you don't understand I have black thumbs, not green thumbs. You know, I get it,

I get it. I understand that. But you know what, there are some amazing places to resource silk plants as well, silk flowers or what we call, you know, synthetic flowers that are so like our friends at Aldick Home. Aldick is here in southern California, and if you live anywhere in southern California, you make the trip over there, and you will find pieces of art, stunning pieces of art that you will not know are not fully real, fully living.

And the point is, those are the kinds of things that you invest in, and they last, and they can make massive, massive difference inside a room, inside of space. Don't forget plants, your ugly fireplace in the living room. Fireplaces. You know, I've done whole shows and I will continue to do whole shows on the problem of fireplaces. I love them, but in most homes that are built pre twenty first century, fireplace are in the wrong place in a room, or they just never get used, and so on.

You've heard me talk about this before if you're a fan of the show. But fireplaces are the kinds of things I don't want you to ignore them. That doesn't mean I need you to light a fire in them, just don't ignore them. If you take that ugly stained, sooty firebrick, the dirty fire brick in the back, you spend ten bucks at the hardware store on some matte black high heat barbecue paint, and just paint out that black box, painted out all black, so the soot doesn't

matter anymore. And now it's this beautiful jeweler's cloth backdropped. Whatever you put in there, and then put something in there, like those dried flowers, like those silk flowers, like a living plant, like a whole stack of firewood stacked inside the fireplace so you see this attractive firewood. Make the fireplace a feature because it's not going away, and recognize that it is the elephant in the room that usually gets ignored. Go ahead and take it for all that

it's worth. Put a candelabra set inside, put pillar candles in there, put lanterns in there, whatever the case may be. Make that fireplace everything it possibly can be without tearing it out or moving it, which might be the plan. Ultimately, this is just a little bit of cash right up front to make it ten times as good as it

is right now without doing any major work. If you're saying to yourself in the living room, listen, Dean, I either have money enough to get a new flat screen TV or a piece of art for the living room, but I don't know which one to get. Get both at the same time. Go get a Samsung Frame TV, a Samsung Frame which is a fantastic, fantastic flat screen TV. But also so it's genius is that it disguises itself as a piece of art hanging on the wall when you're not watching the TV, and so you get both.

In fact, with the Samsung Frame, you get an endless amount of art because you can put whatever art up there you want, and it is specially designed to dim and set the image so that it seems like it's non lit non I mean, if you haven't seen a frame and you're pondering that possibility, you got to go see it. You will be impressed. I guarantee it. Uh what else do I have one last thing? Or two last things? Number one? How about those AC registers all

those vents around the house, those cheap old vents. Right, you've poured all this work into your house or you want to juge up your house, and you've still got the cheapest looking stamped HVAC vents and registers. There are companies online where you can find custom registers that just look so much. They do all the work that your ace events do change them all out to some custom looking registers. They make a difference, they really do. It's

the details that matter. And lastly, in any room, get rid of those off the shelf store bought linens and things, bed, bath and beyond curtains that are only cut and designed to go just above your door and your window, and go for floor to ceiling curtains in a room floor to ceiling. In any given room ninety percent of the time, the draperies should the rod should be all the way up at the ceiling line, even though the door is

not that tall. Elongate and elegantize the height of a room by letting the curtains go all the way up to the ceiling line. All right, these are just a few suggestions. There are literally thousands more. I just wanted to inspire you answer some questions today from our listeners and get your point out in the right direction that maybe, if you're holding onto your cash right now, a makeover is the right way to go. And why do they

work so well? Because design matters most And in the end, when you've got the right design idea for a room, you can do it out of paper or platinum and still get ninety percent of the effect. Once the design is right, the cost can be controlled. I guarantee it. We do it every single day around here. It always works.

has been Home with Dean Sharp, the House Whisper. Tune into the Library, 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