This or That| Hour 1

and most importantly your calls. I am so so in the mood to take your calls today. I've been away. We've been away for a couple of weeks. We've been off. Well, I'll tell you about our trip in just a bit, uh snippets of it at least. Uh. But we're back. We're rested.

eight three three two ask dean. Producer Richie is standing by. The phone lines are open. He's ready to take your call. He'll tell you everything you need to know. Poppy into the queue and then we'll put our heads together. We'll figure out what's going on with your home. No worries, no worries, all right. And if we do this all right, we're gonna bring some light into the morning. Even though these these are my favorite mornings, are they not. I mean,

you're a morning person, obviously. Here you are, here, you are, we're talking, you and me together, hanging out. How awesome is it to be a morning person? To be up in the morning before the sun. I just love this time of year when the sun gets a little lazy and and we actually, you know, beat him up, well I don't, you know, not like a salt, but get up before the sun. And I just love this time of year. What can I tell you the team is here for you. Sam is on the board. Good morning, Sam,

Good morning Dane. How you doing. I am great, actually and rested. I'm we kind of you know, we got back on last weekend late last weekend, and so I took this week of work to just kind of roll, you know how you kind of ran been and you're hoping that you don't come up against everything crazy on day one, and we didn't, and so it was a really nice ramp up as far as design work and construction work and radio work. And I'm just I'm in a good place. I'm really happy to hear that sounds

like you got your feet under you this morning. I do, I do, which is rare, right. No, Hey, I'm happy for you. I wish I could be there right now. Uh. Producer Richie is standing by to take your calls. He's nowhere near a microphone, but he's doing his work like he always does every week, and we appreciate him. Jackie Ray is at the news desk. Good morning, Jackie, Good morning. How are you. I am great? Did you hear I'm great?

I can tell just by the look on his face that he's like, move on, dad, move on, and we will. Let's get to it this morning, shall we. We've got your calls. Let me give the number out one more time, eight three three two, ask Dean eight three three the numeral to ask Dean. I'm ready for them. I'm going to talk a little bit when we come back about permission, permission to go a little bit further with your home than you normally expect to the kind of attitude that

you have around the holidays. We'll talk about that. I've got a couple of cool new items to introduce to you today, and I want to remind you, and if you've never heard this before, tell you for the first time, that it's time to trim to prune your trees and exactly how we're going to go about doing that. All of that and your calls can't fine Jean Chart the

house whisper at your therapists. Whether you live in a cottage or a condo or a castle, you know what, it doesn't matter if that is the place that you call home. I'm here to help you take it to the next level. We're back from Bakay. We are having fun this morning, just rested and ready to go and hope you can pick up on that energy too. It is a beautiful, beautiful weekend ahead of us here in

southern California. And it's cool. Dare I say cold? No, not cold cool, cool, definitely cool outside right now and dark? And here are you here? We are you and I just hanging out on an early Saturday morning morning. People that we are. I'm glad that you are here. We are on that note, going to be taking calls. I'm going to be going to the phones in just a smidge. The phone lines are open. It's definitely a caller morning. I just want to reconnect with you, talk with you

about your house. Eight three three two, ask Dean. Is the number to reach me? A three three the numeral two beep, ask Dean A three three to ask Dean anything you want to talk about regarding your home. Construction issues, design issues, DIY stuff, whatever the case. Maybe whatever is bugging you, whatever you're scratching your head about, give me a call and we will figure it out. I promise. Okay, and we've got some we've got some calls on the board,

but we've got room for you. All right. This is something that always seems to come upon my mind this time of year, and that is permission. Now what do I mean by that, Well, around the holidays, people tend to change their thinking in regards to their home. You take it up a notch obviously, because you're thinking about decorating the holidays. Beckon people to decorate and to create

a certain kind of emotional environment in your home. Of course, you know, like the Christmas tree and that kind of stuff and the twinkly lights and all of that, and that's not that far away, but even around our neighborhood here. We came back from vacation very very pleased to see so many of our neighbors getting into Halloween decorations and such. And it's just that kind of spirit right in the year. So we've got Halloween out in front of us, and

then Thanksgiving and so on. Tina and I ran out and we grabbed a bunch of cornstalks from the local farm and propped them up all around the house and the backyard, and now our yard is full of pumpkins and gourds and not so much Halloween stuff, just autumn stuff. Probably for some of it is well, not even probably. Some of it is definitely bringing Vermont back home with us, no question about it. But the point is this. The point is this, we all give ourselves permission during the

holidays to take things up a notch. We think, how, you know, what can I do to the fireplace? What can I do to this chair in this corner over here? Should we light a candle? Should we put twinkling lights over here? What can we do to these areas of our homes? To bring it up into the holiday spirit, and that I love. I love it, absolutely encourage you to step into that spirit. But here is the part

of permission that I'm talking about. What I really, really really want is for you to take hold of that spirit and give yourself permission to hang on to that attitude towards your house for the rest of the year, throughout the rest of the year. Okay. The permission that we give ourselves during the holidays to make spaces very emotionally special is the permission that great homeowners give themselves

year round to do exactly the same thing. Now, don't get me wrong, all right, let me be very clear. I am not talking about you being the person that person who never takes their Christmas lights down. No, No, that has not the point. We have like two of those people in our neighborhood. Why, that's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that attitude of how do we make this room just emotionally special for every time we

walk into it. See, we tend to give ourselves permission to do that around the holidays, and then you know, come January, it's like, put all that stuff away, let's just get back to our regular boring lives, and I don't want you to do that.

over the entire year, layer after layer. They just little things here, there and everywhere as you continue to make the space that you dwell in a very special space for you every time you walk into the room, not just around Thanksgiving and Christmas, but every time all year long. Just be looking for it. It doesn't cost that much to do why because you do it slowly and easily, layer by layer. You know, a few weeks back, we were talking to you about our firefly experiment. We bought

this new firefly lighting set and it's a hit. It's a hit. People love the fireflies, so we're keeping the fireflies. It was a sixty dollars investment and now it's going to live on in our yard for as long as it lasts, which I'm assuming is going to be several years at least. So it's little layers like that that simply add to the presence of your home and embrace it. Embrace this holiday decorating time that's coming soon, and then hold on to it. That's all I wanted to tell

you this morning. All Right, when we come back, we've got several calls on the board, we're going to go to the phones. Your Home with Dean Sharp, the House Whispered.

as my finger for no reason. I'm not touching it. I'm not. It's just crumbling and falling apart to dust. And I don't know if I should put a ceiler on it. I don't know what's causing it.

there for sixty five years. It may be may be the fact that it is starting to crumble as a result of it not having been perfectly mixed in the and perfectly cured in the best possible situation when the house was first built, that it's just showing its age essentially. That sounds like that is more than likely the thing, because of all the things that concrete can do, Concrete either gives out pretty quickly because it got screwed up to the beginning the beginning, or it doesn't. It just holds.

And most of the things that people say, oh, I'm worried about my concrete is what we call effluorescence, which are salt mineral salts that are being pushed through the wall because of moisture. It sounds like, David, that it simply may be in your case that this concrete is starting to show its age. Now, is that a problem. Probably not, It's probably not a problem. It's probably just settling in there. So what I want you to do is, well,

we can do a couple of things. One, I'm going to tell you to sit still, if you haven't seen any significant cracking crumbling off that edge, that's one thing. But if we haven't seen any cracking, okay, then sit still and just keep an eye on it. Don't lose any sleep over it, but just keep an eye on okay. Secondly, if you want to help stop the crumpling on the inside, then I don't want you to use a sealer, because your friend is right, we don't want to trap moisture

inside the cement there. But you could run down to the hardware store get a little concrete patch kit. And I'm not talking about trying to reform the edge. If you were ambitious, you could try and reform the edge there, but just kind of get a patch kit and mix up a little concrete patch like sidewalk patch, and you know, kind of tral that onto the crumbling area to sort of just hold it and secure it so it doesn't

want to crumble anymore, just to hold it together. And then now I know you can't do it on the side with the sidewalk on it, but on the side that is got planting on the other side, if you wanted to, I would say, why not invest a little bit of time, dig down just a bit, and I mean just a bit, meaning you know, in that planter bed, maybe dig down eight ten inches and just for you know, six inches wide so you have access to the lower part of that concrete footer, and put a little water

proofing treatment on the outside of that concrete so that we don't want to trap moisture inside the concrete stem wall, but we can certainly reduce the amount of moisture that comes into it, okay, So that would slow the absorption

rate of moisture from at least the garden bed. Now the other side, if moisture is the issue, okay, which I suspect it probably is, it doesn't surprise me that both sides are crumbling equally because concrete is just a giant sponge and the concrete of the sidewalk or the cement that's abutting it on the other side is doing the same thing. It's you know, conveying moisture into the cement. But we could slow it down at least on the planter wall side, if that makes sense.

all that kind of stuff. You don't want to call just a regular general contractor because the chances are they'll turn around and call a place like Foundation Repair LA and then add their feet on top of it for making the call. So you could just call these guys directly and they will help you out if you ever see cracking or settling that in any way affects the rest of the wall. But just to you know, hold on to the crumbling for now and just keep an eye on it.

I want to talk to Peter. Hey, Peter, welcome home.

you know. So I had half of my lawn was green with weeds, which I was happy to have, and I was watering and keeping the weeds going, and he cut that down and now I've got a dust bowl back there. And I talked to his son and he said he would come in with a rotokiller this week and rotokiller and then we'll put in a grass. And one of the questions I wanted to ask you is too, I like to keep the grass like at two or three inches for the dogs, you know, because they like to,

you know, wrestle around in it and everything. So that was one question. I wanted to see how long I should keep the length of the grass because they seem to want to cut it real short. And then the other thing is what can I put in there that's really fast growing you know, that will take take so I can green up that backyard pretty quick. It's only about eighty by eighty, you know, Well that's a good

the yard. That's a good sized yard for for a lot of people here, they'd be like only eighty by eighty. What is that the south for there? No, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a nice backyard, but it's a and now it's a dust bowl, and I'm trying to think of the quickest way to get it back into green up. And I don't care if it's weeds. I mean, you know, awful plant whatever grows fast, Well, I just like to give them and find what they're going to bring in the seeds. So I don't know, all.

do a scientific experiment with the backyard. And you know you can, though, look into bermuda grass. Bermuda I think it germinates in as little as ten days. Bermuda grass grows thick, and it has the advantage of being tough, especially for pets and people running around on it. And so I would probably direct you towards bermuda grass first, but the rye and the bluegrass probably grow a little bit faster, maybe just just a hair faster. So yeah, those are the grasses that I would recommend as far

as getting it back and then keeping it tough. And the other thing I like about bermuda grass is because it has a thick matting underneath it, it tends to exclude weeds better than just your typical straight bladed bluegrass or rye when it comes to a lawn. That being said, let me be clear and underscore the fact that you already know real quick here before I have to go,

don't cut your grass too short. Get on, you know, to tell them no more coffees and lunches for you guys if you cut my grass too short, Because grass, I mean, this is the photosynthesis blade of grass is the is the way a lawn photosynthesizes, and so most lawns, almost all lawns, listen to me, everybody, Almost all lawns optimally should be kept at three to four inches, and people are gasping four inches. I would never Yeah, three to four inches, that's lush, and I'm gonna throw another

curveball at you. Have your gardener stop with the sucking up of all of grass blades. The very very optimal situation you could get yourself in is to mow the grass without collecting the grass. Mow it and allow the cuttings to go down and lay down inside the lawn a macerating mower, so that they themselves begin to self

mulch the lawn. Best possible situation, lowest amount of weeds growing through healthiest lawn three to four inches, leaving the cuttings ground up in the lawn instead of bagging them and taking them away, leave it all there. Best possible

lawn situation. And in the meantime, after this rototilling, change your watering schedule so that I don't want you to increase the amount of water that you put back there, Peter, but I want you to break up that amount of water into smaller doses throughout the day, just if you

want it to grow back as fast as possible. Instead of hitting it all at once on your regular watering schedule, break it up so that you distribute it in smaller doses across the period of time to keep the soil as moist as possible, not drowning, but as moist as possible for as long long as possible. Wall those new seeds, Germany, Peter, thank you for your call, buddy, and for your support

of the show. Appreciate you love our early morning Saturday listeners and callers, and we've got more to come right after we go to the news. You are Home Dean Sharp the House Whisper on KFI. You're listening to Home with Dean Sharp on demand from KFI AM six forty