New Stuff | Hour 2

in my yard. But I live up in Lompoke, if you know where that is, absolutely and yeah, just the soil that we have up here makes it a little harder to garden when you don't know what you're doing and keeping the weeds down and all that. I'm just not too sure how to look at everything. My house is paid for, my ex and I built it in the eighties and it's in good shape and all that. It's just it's just a lot of work.

What money is available without selling the house? And if we sell, do we sell, do we rent? Do we stay? Do you have specific health or mobility concerns at eighty that you're you know, other than just it's a lot to handle. All of these are questions that should be

asked and should be answered. But at the heart of it, my friend, is one one central question, okay, and it's the question that as a home designer, as a custom home designer, because I only design custom homes, that I have to ask every single client that we have, and that is, what do you really really want. Okay, now you may have conflicting wants or desire. It's like, you know, you probably don't have any desire to leave this house behind.

But the question of what do you really really really want for your life may may you know, tip the scale. So what what are you really really looking for? What's the most important thing for you for the years ahead?

some big decision here. And what I've heard of people building on their property a smaller house than just renting the big house out. But I don't know that i'd be happy doing that. Hard to say, what are.

There you said, I think I need I think I need to change the way I think about about how I pay help and just even the idea of getting help to begin with. So, and here's why I think, Like, if I was a concerned family member sitting at the kitchen table with you, I think this would be my

first approach, because you can always sell. Okay, It's doesn't change the fact that you know, three years from now, two years from now, five years from now, if if plan A doesn't work the way you hope it will, then you can always turn around and sell and downsize.

But if there's a way to not have to do that in the home that you love, then the first step would be, Okay, you're going to have to do the work of finding a decent regular weekly you know, landscape maintenance service, and then maybe weekly, by weekly or bi monthly. I always get confused what that means, but you know, every couple of weeks, maybe you know, have the housekeeper come in or maybe increase that. In other words, who can you pay to reduce the workload for you?

Can you afford to have that happen? And do you like the results? It seems to me, given your desire and your hesitation about selling. It seems to me that that would be the first course to pursue and to see if that can work. And if it does, then boom, there you are. You have found a new way to stay where you are, without the stress and without all the work, and you've essentially gotten your arms around it.

And if it doesn't work, then what have you lost other than the experiment has proven that maybe it's time to sell and to downsize. But I think if it were me that situation, I love my home very much like it sounds like you love your home. I think I would be finding every imaginable way to stay here without letting go. And and so that's my advice to you, my friend.

of doing that goes down, not up. Elevators. That's good here, Yeah, residential elevators are only getting more common and less expensive, and including elevators that are just like like my little favorite, the little retrofit elevator, which is a vacuum tube elevator that literally lead needs about four by four area of space. It can be located just about anywhere in the house where we can get from the downstairs to the upstairs.

And but it's still an expense, okay, And you know right now they're running about, you know, just going to people will be like, that's not inexpensive being but you know,

somewhere between forty and sixty thousand dollars. Okay. But when you think about that, you think about the home that is your home for the cost of you know, which at home is paid off, and so if you were to get another little loan or have a way of payment, but basically for the cost of financing a car payment to stay in your home, uh, that is a relatively small cost. And but my point is that cost is

also going down every single year. So my advice to anybody who's thinking about the future in that regard is you know, if you see yourself realistically getting to the point where yeah, I'm not getting up and down those stairs as well anymore, then then do it. I don't think everybody, just because of their age should automatically get an elevator in their house. In fact, I would make the argument against it that if it's keeping you healthy getting up and down the stairs, it may be the

best thing not to do an elevator. Just you know, keep doing the StairMaster every day and it's improving your health and your longevity through that instead of just taking the easy way, only do that if it's simply going to become an impossibility, and at that point it will be at its lowest point of cost and the most effective ease of installation. So you would just I would just say, have that in mind, press pause on that, don't act too soon on that, and just wait wait

for the time to come. Lee, I've got to go. I would love to talk to you for the rest of the morning, but it's time to go, so good luck. Get your arms around, try and rethink the way that you are living in the house so that you can pay others to take care of the hard stuff, to do the heavy lifting. For you, and if all else fails, you can always sell and downsize and hold off on that elevator until you absolutely, really really need it. Good luck,

my friend. All right, everybody, when we come back, more of your calls. Your Home with Dean Sharp, the House Whisper.

I'm going to go back to the phones. We're going to be taking a couple more calls before we get back to new stuff, which is the theme of today's show. Got some new stuff to share with you, good stuff already, more new stuff to come, But first I want to talk to Gabe. He Gabe, welcome home.

the garage, and I've always thought that was weird. The fires have have made me rethink that a little bit. But I'm just wondering if you have recommendations about how to optimize thermal efficiency given that situation.

In those eves we put vents or in the eve blocking and the rafter blocking we put small vents enough to you know, half the venting requirement of the attic space, which, by the way, if it's if you have high and low vents, is you know, one square foot of venting for every one every three hundred square feet of flat attic space. And if you don't have high and low then there should be a square foot of venting for every one hundred and fifty square feet of attict venting space.

But you're right, just the presence of vents, just kind of centrally located like a dormer vent is not the most efficient way thermally to get hot air out of

the attic. The ideal way is to have the vents upper vents as high near the ridge as possible and then as low as possible fifty to fifty so that you get this convection current happening the eves, sucking in cooler or cooler air down below and replacing the hot air that rises up out of the attic, which can get you know, in the summertime easily up to one hundred and thirty plus degrees. Get that stuff out of the attic because it affects the cooling properties of the

rest of the house. So ideally that's the thing. Every roof is different. You've got nothing. You're saying, it's a hip roof, which for everybody else to understand, there's no big, flat triangular gables on the end of this house or roof anywhere that would be. And I'm glad you said that,

because that would have been my first suggestion. If you've got an end gable on your roof, then that's an opportunity to put very low vents and very high vents in place on both ends or everywhere you've got a flat gable end, and that could go a long way. And it's an expensive way of getting your attic vented without having to disrupt roofing materials. So, my friend, you

are left with essentially two options. If you have no eve overhang, then you've either got to if you want to improve the the thermal conditions in the attic, there are two approaches. One is to find a way to put low profile vents very low on as many sections of the low roof as possible, and a low profile vent uh might be like an O'Hagan vent that is

really relatively low profile. There are some low profile vents out there, but it's going to mean disrupting some roofing materials, and the labor cost of installing that both low and then high. You know it's not going to be insignificant. Okay, the other direction, and you know, I don't want to bust your budget or spend money. But you've already mentioned the idea, like you're concerned about wildfires, and maybe it's not such a bad idea that you've got, you know,

minimal venting coming into your attic. Of course, like my friends at brand guard vent, any vent into any roof and attic area can be protected against wildfire embers with an ember resistant vent. Okay, but but there's also an option of building an attic that is completely ventless. And Gabe, what I've got to do here so I stay on track with time, is I got a popy on hold and have everybody just hanging there. What in the world is this idea of a ventless attic and what will

it require? Because in your case, it might actually prove most cost efficient initially and long term way more cost efficient to at least consider or investigate the idea of a ventless attic. Are those even allowed? Yes, they are. How do you achieve them. We'll talk about that right after.

and I've got Gabe on the line. I'm going to get back to Gabe here. Gabe's still with me, yes, sir, all right. So Gabe's got a house, He's got a relatively high pitched roof with no eve overhang to speak of, and he's concerned that he has a gross lack of attic ventilation. And the question is how do how does he get it or how does he deal with it? Or in the bigger question that I love that he asked was how does he make his attic space more

thermally efficient for the house. And I've already explained in the last segment what high and low attic do in the traditional way of doing that, and then I left you all hanging with the idea that there is such a thing as a ventless addic. Is it code approved? Yes it is? Is it cutting edge, yes it is. Is it the kind of attic that Dean would tries to design for all of his clients these days. Yes. Is it the kind of attic that if I built myself a new house, that I would have for myself,

Yes it is. And so what exactly am I talking about? Well, Gabe, in your case, and you're going to have to weigh the financial upfront cost versus you know, the long term savings, and there is a massive amount of long term savings with it. But here's what you do. You've got, first of all, you've got an attic. If it has a twelve and twelve roof pitch, that's a forty five degree angle, that's a steep roof pitch. That means that you have

a significantly navigable attic space up there. And so that being the case, these are the steps that you take. You move the attic insulation from the attic floor to the rafters, so that the rafters and the roof line itself becomes the edge of the thermal envelope, not the floor of the attic. Okay, everybody who has a traditional attic has insulation on their attic floor, and their attic is essentially as far as the code is concerned, very much like the garage, which is, yeah, it's covered, but

it's technically outside. Okay, it is not a conditioned space. But by moving the attic insulation from the attic floor up into the rafter line, that becomes the edge of the thermal envelope. No vents needed, no vents wanted, because that makes the attic space itself part of the conditioned space of the house. What does that mean. It means

that we also step two. We direct an AC duct or two into the attic and an AC return duct or two into the attic, and yeah, we air condition and heat the attic like we do the rest of the house at that point. Now that at first seems like, well, that's a waste of air conditioning and heating. No it's not. Actually, because if the thermal envelope of the house is the

outside edge of the roofline. If the roofline itself the rafter line, then what happens is during a heat wave, the attic is just and we don't have to keep it absolutely as cool as the rest of the rooms in the house. But let's say the attic that at most gets to the mid seventies. What it means is as the day starts to cool off, the attic then does not sit there and radiate heat down into the rest of the house, forcing you to air condition the house for longer every day. And the same holds true

during the winter. If the attic is as or relatively so as the rest of the home, then we don't have to keep piling in heat into the house to compensate for this thing radiating out during the day or at nighttime. It has been proven that these systems are, in fact, as far as the future is concerned, the most efficient by far thermally efficient homes. So now here's

the trick. You can't just grab the attic insulation. Let's say you had bats up there and throw them up into the rafters, because roof rafters aren't deep enough with standard insulation. Okay, with regular batted insulation, fiberglass rock mineral wool insulation, whatever the case may be, cellulose insulation, there's usually not enough depth in the roof rafter itself in order to create that R thirty barrier that we need.

So that means, and here's the cost. That means that we almost all always have to transition to spray on spray foam insulation, okay, which is amazing stuff, but it's more expensive. So it means clearing out all the yucky, you know, all the gritty itchy insulation out of the attic and then doing solid spray foam insulation in between the rafters. Only a few inches of that stuff, four to six inches at the most, gives you the R thirty.

It cleans up the entire attic, which in your case for a tall attic, means you know, you got like another room up there, okay, and plenty of room for storage or even just fiddling around in. And then you insulate that space and that becomes a ventless attic which no exterior air exchange with the outside. Now, there are some small venting issues for moisture that may have to be taken into consideration, but it's very very very very minor.

The point is this if you were to move to a conditioned attic space, you would be saving on heating and air conditioning bills in a big way for the rest of the life of the house. There are zero vents to invite embers from wildfires. It's the fire safest kind of condition to have a house in. But it is a higher initial upfront cost. Why aren't all homes built this way? Because builders do homes as cheaply as they can and get past the code. Is this a

thing that's happening in California. Yeah, And if you want to see the examples of it the building departments. Every building department accepts this, by the way, and you want to see the ones that deal with it most, they're

ones out in desert areas like Palm Springs. Most new homes being built in Palm Springs now are being built with non vented attic space because in extreme environmental conditions, these are the kinds of addicts that prove most cost effective and efficient long term, and that in and of itself, Gabe should tell you how effective this is. So in your case, my friend, there's some money to be spent one way or the other if you want to maximize

thermal efficiency. You're either going to disrupt some roofing materials and do vents high and low, or you look into doing the a ventless conditioned space attic, which if you can afford to do that upfront, could in the long run be, in my opinion, be the ultimate solution for your attic. You turn your attic into almost essentially a habitable space, a navigable space, a clean space, a storage space, and a thermally efficient space. How'd I do.

Window shopping is free. Education is free when it comes to your home. It's out there. It's just waiting to pile into your brain. Look at every option, price, every option before you make a move, so that you know that you're doing the right thing. Never once, never once, And I'm very proud of this. In over forty years of doing this, never once has a client ever come back to me and said, Dean, why didn't we ever talk about doing that? Because we do. We exhaustively talk

about every option. Every one of our clients knows the decisions they made were fully informed. And that's the way I want it for you guys too. All right, when we come back, we're going to take some more new stuff out of my list. We'll do that right after we get the news. You're listening to Home with Dean Sharp, the House Whisperer on KFI. This has been Home 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