Kf I am six forty. You're listening to Dean Sharp The house Whisper on demand on the iHeartRadio app. You know this very program, also the house Whisper podcast that you can listen to anytime, anywhere on demand, hundreds of episodes, all searchable by topic. Your home improvement reference library. That's what we've built for you here. And if you're thinking to yourself, you know what, I love everything that you
talk about on the show. But you know what I really need is for you and Tina to show up at my house.
Actually that might work.
If you need some personal house Whisper attention, you can book a three hour in home design consult with me and t the one and only t Just go to house Whisperer dot design and you will find all the details there. If that's something that you are interested in. All right, let's get back to our conversation about well, actually we're going to get back to our conversation about eclectic design. But right now, top of the hour, it's time to go to the phones. I want to talk
to Gene. Hey, Gene, welcome home.
Hello, Hello, how can I help you?
I came home from Thanksgiving to find a pinhole leak into my garage and called my plumber out, and we've decided that since my house is like thirty seven years old, it's time for a total repipe, because I've had pinhole leaks in several other places too over the years. So I've got a quote from one person who's using pecks, and I had a second one come in that was kind of not confident with the type of pecks he's using.
Is the best?
Should I insist on just upidoor or is there other manufacturers that are just as good as pecks.
It's it's really okay, okay, so PEX piping. Just to set the stage here, Jean's got a house thirty five years old copper piping, and it's begun to pit from the inside, which means it's not been busted by anybody. It's just literally starting to seep leak out of these tiny pits. Because especially when it comes to copper in the ground, copper is not a lifelong.
Thing that we used to think that it was.
It's got about a twenty twenty five year lifespan to it before trouble starts occurring, So time to repipe. Can a repipe overhead using pex pes cross stranded polyethylene tubing and PEX as a concept. I love it. I love it.
I love it. I love it.
And it's not so much the manufacturer gene that I am primarily concerned about. It's the type okay, up and or Is, I think is the manufacturer that we use out here more than any other when it comes to PEX work in a house, because they make it, and they make it well. But what you're after is type A type A PEX, okay, because there is a type B PEX. A type B PEX has its limitations. Number one,
it's not as flexible. Number two, because it's not as flexible, it cannot be attached and built into a system using expansion joints. And that is the only fitting that I use when it comes to PEX is expansion couplings, not not rings, not bans, and not clamps. We use the expands, which means there's a tool that goes into the end of the pipe and literally spreads the pipe open from
the inside out temporarily. That allows you to insert a barbed fitting into that end, and then over the next literally sixty seconds, the pipe contracts around that barbed fitting and it just gets tighter and tighter. And tighter. Literally, it is the only plumbing fitting on the planet that gets better the older it becomes. Okay, I personally don't trust PEX systems that use the crimped bands on the
top or hose clamps or anything like that. I've seen too many of them end up with leaks or failures, and so we only use expansion fittings and to do that you need PEX type A.
Okay, great. Do you also not like the epoxy coated thing that they shoot through your pipes? I can't imagine how that would possibly work, but do you have an opinion on that process?
Okay?
So yeah, to avoid repiping sometimes, you know what, I've seen it work. I've seen it work and I've seen it work well at times, so you should if you're interested in it, you should get a quote for it as well. And that is but it's got to be
not from your run of the rip mill plumber. You really need to get this from a quote from a company that does this as their specialty, because it's it's about putting epoxy on the inside of your copper lines, and it's got to be blown through at high pressure, and it's got to be a there's an art and a science to doing this, and and the problem is if the pressure isn't high enough, and if the process isn't done by an experienced epoxy installer, then it can
actually clog up your pipes, you know, and reduce the interior diameter of those copper pipes so significantly that it just causes a whole world of problems unto itself. But it is a viable way of renewing a copper ground system for water, and that is blowing epoxy. And essentially, when it's blown in high pressure in just the right way, it forms an epoxy inner lining. It's like sliding a pipe inside a pipe, and it can get you years and years and years more. Now, the question is doing
that with the whole house. Will that actually be more or less expensive than just abandoning the copper and running pecks overhead to locations. I can't answer that question for you because it could change based on the house, the style,
the configuration, the accessibility and so on. But if you're interested in it, I always encourage everybody why not make the call windows Shopping is free, dreaming is free, and especially when it comes to a big dollar item that you're about to spend money on Why not know that you know for sure that what you have picked is the best financial and long term option for your home. So if there is this alternative treatment or therapy, just like going to the doctor and like both typically we
handle your problem this way. There is this alternative treatment, I want to hear all about it, if for no other reason, so that I look at it and say, yeah, okay, no, let's go with the main therapy for this. You never know, so look at the costs, get quotes, but go with somebody. If you're thinking about the epoxy, go with a company that does it, that guarantees the results, and that has a lot of experience doing it. All right, Gene, thank
you for your question and for the call. When we come back, more of your calls.
You're listening to Home with Dean Sharp on demand and from KFI AM six forty.
Dean Sharp, the House Whisper at your service. We're talking eclectic decor today, but right now we are taking calls. I want to go back to the phones and not waste another second. Let's talk to hey, Deborah, Deborah, welcome home.
Thank you. My question is I want to convert my shower tub into a walk and shower. However, the tile that I currently three walls, I really like it, so I don't want to I prefer not to rip that out. So then what do I do about the area where the bathtub was?
Hmmm, that's a good question. All right. I got a couple of questions for you.
How long ago was the tile above the bathroom done? Do you have more of it? Or can you get more of it?
I don't have more of it, and it would be very very hard to to try to. I can't even remember where I got that current tile.
Yeah, all right, I'm only asking because from a from a technical contracting point of view, Uh, it's not the it's not. It's not a very difficult thing to preserve. To you choose a line and the tile there, and very carefully demo what goes below it, and then if we have more of the same tile to be able to extend that down so that at the end of the whole process it doesn't look like anything was done except just tiling a shower. But that's only if that
exact kind of tile is available. In the case that it's not, then you have to make a decision.
If you're really.
Set on saving the tile above the tub line. The question then, is you gotta make your thinking a little bit more flexible from a design point of view. Here, the question is what kind of tile can we find that compliments.
Doesn't try to match it? Don't try to match it.
Okay, if you don't know exactly what that tile is, don't try and get something that is almost that because very much in keeping with the principles that I've been talking about today, this principle everybody should always remember in design and decor. Uh, you've got two choices. You hit the nail directly on the head, you match it exactly, or or the alternative, miss it by a mile, go
with something very complimentary but very very different. We don't want to try and get kind of close, because in the design and architectural world, a near miss is a total failure. I mean, it just looks like a mistake. Okay, So the question will be for you to h to come up with a design, a tile, a tone, a texture, a color. This is a great question in keeping with the eclectic theme of the day, that works with the tile that's up there. Okay, and then you're gonna have
to pick. You may have to sacrifice, well, you're gonna have to sacrifice a couple of courses of your tile in order to effectively remove the tub. Okay, there's no guarantee that we can keep every single bit of tile there to get that tub out of there. Maybe a course or two up needs to be removed to safely get the tub out and then to rewater proof behind it. But then you had to pick a point where the
old tile's gonna stop. Maybe we put a detail band around, even like a wainscot, you know you would find on a house, and then drop new tile down into the pan below.
That's the idea, yeah, okay.
And then right now the baptub spout is within the tile. Can that bathtub spout be I don't know what cut.
Off, not.
Stopped off or nodded off or whatever however you would say it.
The bathtub spout can be completely unscrewed and removed, and you're just going to be left with a hole in the tile.
Okay. And then so that that that piece of tile I need to put like maybe a medallion or of some sort in there.
Something or or or you work above that line for the new tile down.
Got it? Okay? Okay, Okay, all right, all right, that kind of clears my mind about how to approach it. I don't feel so intimidated. That helps, yes, all right.
Well, thank you, thanks Deborah, thank you so much for your call. You can just see, you know, I love it. You can see the wheels, you can hear the wheels turn. She's like, okay, okay, I'm working it out. I'm working it out, and just give her a little bit more direction as to which way tohead. Do we have time for another And we're going to make time for another call. I'll tell you that right now. Who I want to talk to, Let's talk to Janet.
Janet, welcome home, Hi, Hi, thanks for taking my call. I looked into a house and the kitchen sink is a double and it's not useful at all because the facet overhangs the rent area and I have about an inch and a half that it overhangs the dirty area
and the disposal. So I want to replace it. It's an under the sink under the counter fawcet and I was going to do it myself, but I realized that the disposal and things may need to be moved and pipes cut and you know this and that, so then I thought, well, I'll just go to home depun look and I found some nice sinks. But how do I know that's the right measurement? How do I know when I get it home? And then do I call a plumber first? Do I call it contractor So I look
that up and apparently I call a plumber first. But I'm just you know, I think, and the sinks are deeper now, now they're deeper. So now I'm gonna have definitely some things rearranged underneath. And so I kind of like want a plumber to go depot and say, here, measure my sink and then come with me and help me pick a sink and then put it in. Is that what do I do?
I hear it.
I hear the distress and the confusion in your voice. All right, So here's the thing. This is actually pretty good news. Okay, that you have an undermount sink. An undermount sink means that the countertop is doing its own thing on top. What kind of counter do you have, by the.
Way, it's probably courts or granted I'm not sure.
Solid yeah, solid stone countertop, whether it's synthetic or natural stone. That thing and the sink doesn't have its own edging. It mounts underneath that. So here's what I'm meant.
There's some brackets and I've measured it, but I am assuming my sink needs to be thirty three inches wide based on the thirty one inches I have on top.
So here's the thing under mount sinks. The good news is you got a little bit of play. Okay, you don't have to hit that one right on the head because it's under mount, which means that the countertop hangs over the edge of you know, the edge of the sink a little bit. Now, you don't have a ton of play. In other words, let's say you have I'm just going to use some arbitrary numbers here. Let's say you have a thirty inch wide hole in the countertop. Okay,
thirty inches wide. It would see, it would look silly if you mounted undermounted a thirty six inch wide sink underneath it, because the countertop would be hanging over you know, three inches on each side. Okay, that wouldn't look good at all. Okay, but that thirty inch hole. Uh, if you measure the insides of sinks that you're looking at and you're like, well, this one's thirty one. That one's thirty two, and I don't know which one will work, but they'll both work fine.
Okay.
The difference of a quarter inch half an inch of overhang, they're not a big deal for the right sink. And the way that you find out what the best sink size is, you don't think about the outside with the sink at all. You want to look at on an undermount sink where it actually where the walls actually come up.
So you're just going to take an interior measurement. If you got a thirty inch hole, then you know you're gonna need at least a thirty and a half or slightly larger inch wide sync so that it goes up underneath and it hides its edge underneath. The think dimension again, though, if you find something you're absolutely in love with and it's a tiny bit larger than that, it's probably no
big deal at all. So you pick that and you know, and whatever depth you want, and then you let the plumber work out the rest, let the plumber work out the garbagees bols on this, and that you know you got your new big single base and sinc. You call the plumber out and you're like I want this mounted under there, go for it and get me all hooked up.
All right, So I buy a sink that I think is the appropriate measurements, and then I call the plumber.
Yep, okay, yeah, yeah, I would.
You know, I'm not saying I'm not saying that it's a terrible idea to shop with a plumber, although you know, I just don't think it's necessary in your situation at all. And and you know, if you just follow that simple advice that I just gave you there, as far as the sizing, just as long as you're just slightly over the size of the hole that's in your countertop in
width and depth, you're gonna be fine. You can't go so wide as to run into the edges of the cabinet body below, So that's too big and too small is obviously too small. But you know you've got a little play there, so find the sync that you love.
The reason I don't.
Suggest a bad mouth plumbers, they're contractors in general, of which I am one. The reason I don't usually shut encourage clients to shop with their contractor is that the contractor they've got other interests, like how easy is it going to be for me to install this thing, and so here they are here, they are nudging you towards something that's like your second or third choice. I don't want you to do that, okay. The fact is, if
it's possible, it's possible. If it fits, it fits, And you know, I'm paying you to take care of the rest of it and get that thing installed for me. That's it the end, and you get the sink that you want.
Great, thank you. I'm so good. I don't have to do it myself, all right, thank you so much.
All right, dan it You're welcome. You take care, all right, y'all.
When we come back, let's talk about some more eclectic design, shall we.
You're listening to Home with Dean Sharp on demand from KFI AM sixty.
You like that little tune right there, Tina was like doing doing a little h I was gonna say, a table dance. That's not the right thing. That's not the that's not the right way to describe it. Sitting here, she was starting to shimmy a little bit with that one.
You're Home with Dean Sharp, the house whisper. We are talking about the secrets of ish and that being by what I mean by that is eclectic decre pulling off eclectic decor, which everybody he has to learn to do if you're going to make your home beautiful, because no matter how pure you think you're going to achieve a design theme in a room, real life has a way of just sneaking right in and introducing elements that aren't in accordance with that theme, but things that are important
to you, and so you have to deal with them. They can be integrated into a theme. And that's why I talk about ish because it's farmhouse ish, it's cottage ish, it's colonial ish. It's not utterly pure. Okay, when has that? You know, did I mention Nazi Germany yesterday on the show? It's that the right thing to say on a decor show. You know, just this whole idea of the pure races. Oh, come on, come on, it's the twenty first century. Take a twenty three and meters and find out what a
mutt you are. I mean, honestly, genetically speaking, every human being is an Ish. And uh, you know, you may be I wish Ish, right, but it's an Ish. There's a there's an Ish factor to all of us and to our lives. And to our homes. And that doesn't mean that it's not beautiful. It's just a question of how are we going to treat these, uh, these diverse elements in a way that they communicate with each other. So there you have it, all right, back to our
list of rules and suggestions. Oh my goodness, that was a That was a droid that just went off here in the studio. Okay, back to the list of suggestions. Here is one of the most important things that I can tell you, uh, and that is finding ish the ishness, okay, the the common ground in between two elements by seeing if you can't get them to share one significant characteristic. Okay, I'll give you this is not the only kind of example, but I'm going to give you a perfect example of this.
We have a grandfather clock. In In fact, you can see this clock, I think on a video that Tina posted just yesterday. Was it yesterday? When did you do the little pan of our dining room and living room? So this again, I'm going to send you back to social media and you can see this. This was not intended to be this way. We're just sharing kind of like, hey, look we got our Christmas tree up. But there's a there's a video pan on our social media home with Dean.
It's probably the second post down now, and you'll see a little shot of our dining room and we've got this tall wains cutting in our dining room and some wallpaper at the end, and it's got this distinctive blue, just a blue that we love. And then we pan across a big glass door opening across our Christmas tree and over into the living room by the fireplace, and as we're crossing over, you're going to see a grandfather clock standing there. This is a grandfather clock that Tina
inherited from her grandparents. Now, this is not an ancient clock. It's not an antique. Okay, it's vintage. It's it's from it's from it's from the nineteen hundreds, so it's not it's vintage technically, and that when when did they buy it, Like nineteen eighty or something, you know, And it's and it's not the you know, it's it's not the end all of grandfather clocks. But it's a real mechanism grandfather clock and it was done in kind of that classic
nineteen eighties honey oak. You know, the color of everything in the nineteen eighties. And so here's the point. The point is that colored of oak doesn't really work with our home and our decor. But this is a grandfather clock, and it means the world to and me because it meant the world to her grandparents. All right, it reminds us both of them every time we look at it. And so what did we do? Well, we took a
bold move. How do you integrate this thing, this piece which comes from a different era of the rest of our decor, and it comes from and it has a different color tonality than the rest of our decor, and yet we want it and we want to belong. Well, Tina decided, you know what we're gonna do. We're gonna paint the clock. It's more important that we have the clock and that it loses its original nineteen eighties authenticity, which probably, in the case of this clock, is a good thing.
But so what did she do?
Since it sits across the hall, it's not fully in the living room, but it sits across the doorway from the dining room, Tina decided, let's take the blue that we painted in our dining room, and I'm going to paint the clock that blue. And now as you watch this video and pan across, you may not even think about it. Your brain just accepts it. And that's the point. That is the point of the ish ness, that's the point of embracing the eclectic decor. It really does not
belong to the majority of our house theme. And yet what did Tina do. She in this case didn't find a significant characteristics that it was sharing, but she created a characteristic that it shares by painting it the same color as the room that it sets adjacent to. And so, as a result of the color matching this one characteristic of this clock, the color as a result of making
that decision, Boom integrated interestingly into our home decor. And if we ever change the color, guess what, She'll probably repaint the clock. So the clock will forever live with us now and one day it will be truly an antique. But for now, the clock will forever live with us. And you know, it may if the room adjacent changes its character one day, the clock may change its character one day. Again, Tina simply gave it a coat of paint. And we've been doing those kinds of things with various
elements in our home for years and years. We'll take an antique that we find somewhere and simply give one facet of it a corresponding color, and suddenly, boom, it belongs. Okay, so a great rule of thumb, look for one significant characteristic that that odd item has or could be given that integrates it suddenly into the acceptance by the rest of the theme in the room, finding the ish by sharing a significant characteristic. All right, I got more for you.
You hang tight your Home with Dean Sharp the house Whisper.
You're listening to Home with Dean Sharp on demand from KFI AM six.
Forty beingful to you that are worthy of putting on display that reflects your story in your house, and that is the essence of what a custom home is.
All right.
I don't have any closing thought for you today other than that very thing. I'm going to remind you of a couple of things as we go. Number One, Tina has posted what you have?
What have you done? Real quick? We're talking about that clock, and so I actually found a post that I had done about a year ago when you lick and so now if you're interested, I just reported it to Home with Dean so you could take a look at so now it's at the top of the post. Did you can see them before and after.
Of integrating that clock? There you go, There you go. So follow us on social media Instagram, TikTok, Facebook x Home with Dean the same for all of them. There's the house Whisper podcast. It's everywhere your favorite podcasts are found. You just looked for Home with Dean Sharp, and if your home is in need of some personal house Whisper attention, you can book a three hour in home design consult
with us at house Whisper dot Design. It's a beautiful day, get out in it and get busy building yourself a beautiful life, and we will see you right back here next week. 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.