This or That| Hour 2

a little bit of everything, plus your calls. I'm right in the middle of taking calls right now. I'm on a roll, as I do, and so I want to go back to the phones. Let's see here but the bump. Let's just pick one. I want to talk to Nancy. Hey, Nancy, welcome home.

the crate. Oh yeah, yes, So I went out there and yelled at him, and he kind of gave me a glaring look and begrudgingly flew off. I thought, you snark.

with the exact same thing. We've got chickens, and we've got hawk roosts all around us, right, hawks are always flying overhead, And at first we were concerned maybe we should just when we were young chicken owners, naive chicken owner, We're like, just let's cover over, let's net over the entire yard. Of course, you know that works if you can do it. But at the same time, uh, you know,

we've also seen a little bit of interaction. We've actually had a juvenile hawk land in the yard with the chickens. And uh, strangely enough, though, once a hawk and a chicken, now you've got pullets and everybody, for who's non chicken language, that's a it's a smaller chicken, okay. Uh. And they're they're younger, they're smaller, but strangely enough, full grown chickens. You know, they're little dinosaurs. And uh, once a hawk

is actually sitting standing on the ground with a chicken. Yes, their talons are sharper and their beak is a little bit more sharp than a chicken, but uh, it's not that uneven of a fight, especially if there's more than one chicken around when it comes to that. And so the real danger, uh is uh the hawks swooping down

like they like to, grabbing and going okay. And so the thing that I tell chicken owners all the time is you don't necessarily have to cover over the entire chicken area to protect them, because you know, a hawk sitting on the ground is a relatively harmless thing. I'm not saying that they couldn't cause some damage, but it's just once they're grounded, they're not that kind of a threat anymore. And in fact, you know, we have a rooster in our yard who's about four times the size

of your average hawk. And so once a hawk is sitting on the ground, believe me, they are intimidy. Now this guy is towering over them, so, which I guess is one benefit of having a rooster. But my point is, you see hawks, birds of prey. What they do, Hawks and eagles and falcons. They love to swoop in, grab and go right. And so the key is disrupt their flight path. Okay, if a hawk, a hawk could fly over your you know now right now the chickens are created.

So now he's like at the zoo where he just comes down and like is observing them, right, but for really grabbing them and going a hawk is going to want to spy out a really good angle that they can swoop down uninterruptedly, grab a chicken out of the yard and keep on going. And in our case, we've got trees around. We have larger trees outside the yard. We've got a couple of trees inside the chicken yard, and there's just no clear flight path for a hawk. So if a hawk wants to get at our chickens,

and we have nothing else covering the yard. But if a hawk wants to get at our chickens, you've got to come down and land in the yard. And to this day, and this is with tens of hawks flying over us just about every day, after years and years and years and years, we've only had a young, inexperienced hawk land in the yard one time and they regretted it.

So my advice from my own experience, and maybe there's some keener chicken out advice from more experienced you know, chicken owners out there, but my advice is cut off the flight the glide path. Okay. Uh So as long as you disrupted the glide path, you shouldn't. They'll be around, but they shouldn't be a threat. Does that make sense?

but but you were a little late this morning. I was very late, a little sleepy. I was dreaming. All right, you're dreaming of maple syrup now and apples. Yeah, okay, yeah, I get it. Tina's here, by the way, and she'll be here tomorrow too, on time, or she'll have her pay doct all the money, with all the money we give her to be here in studio with me zero money. We will dock that pay. We will take away your

zero money. All right, you know what. I want to take another call, and then I've got some other things to share with you. So let's talk to Raina. Hey, Reina, welcome home.

really dead and terrible. And I wondered if there's something we could do, like di y simple that would allow him to still pull the car up but clean up the yard.

house because they love green space. And that is have you considered uh, from the driveway, you know, and marking the path that that he takes, the arc that is necessary for him to pull in that from the driveway over that you put in the you know, a form of grass paver protection that is partial grass and partial pavers to support the weight of the car.

and or grass to grow in between them. Okay, And that way it's a it's like it's like a hybrid space, okay, because once you've leveled it out and supported this, you can keep that area green, you can water it. And yet it's actually designed to support the weight of a vehicle being pulled up onto it, so it is both lawn and driveway. You can do this in a couple of different ways. You can use the nodules. I call them pavers. They're not exactly pavers, but they're these little

semi hybrid pavers that allow grass to grow in between them. Also, there are and if you look online you can find these. There are very very high strength like black plastic interlocking grids that allow a lot of either gravel or grass to grow in between them. But the grid again sits there and supports the weight of the vehicle. So the very first the point of my suggestion is this, I think sight unseen that I want to embrace the situation.

And you know, you guys obviously don't want to pour a driveway over there, obviously, but a temporary situation that will last for years, okay, would be to kind of hybridize that follow the path that the car has to make, make a comfortable actual temporary driveway there, and then outside of that zone, clear everything else out and go like crazy to uh to you know, replant, rebuild and uh and beautify the rest of the lawn in in landscaping

and all the normal landscaping rules lawn shrubs, flower color and anything in front of height. And when I say height, I don't mean, you know, five or six feet, but uh, but the shrubs growing up in front of that pull in driveway area that that obscures the view of it, so that from the street it's not like, oh, look, you can see all of that driveway. It's still it's usable and can be pulled in, but it's behind a backdrop, as it were. Does that make sense not it?

and walkable, or the grids. The pea gravel would be the least expensive of all, incredibly incredibly inexpensive and drains really well, maybe with some stiff yes, absolutely absolutely. Now, if she has a little trouble navigating and walking getting out of the car, then maybe just a few stepstones in the pea gravel to just stabilize that area until

she gets onto the front porch. But otherwise a pea gravel path so that the car isn't destroying lawn, isolated off as a temporary driveway, and then landscape the heck out of everything else that's around it. Yeah, I love it.

up in big, open spread magazines. Practical normal life issues like mom needs to be dropped off right at the porch, and nobody has the budget to repour a driveway, and how do you make a home a home beautiful and functional and accommodate for those kinds of things. That never makes it into Architectural Digest, by the way, but it is design, nonetheless, and really really good design is the solution at the end of the day to problems like that.

This is why I always tell you that design matters most, and this is why I love sitting here talking to you about real world problems in real world homes. And we will do more of it when we return.

I was answering her question is this. You know when I was first recruited to do this show years and years ago, Now, what has it been like over eight years ago when Robin Bertolucci approached me and said, Hey, I think you should do this show on the weekends on KFI, and she said, don't say no. Because I was about to like, why, why are you disrupting my beautifully planned out life. She's like, I know that you're

gonna love it. It's going to be an adventure. But I also know that that there's this part of you, this part of your heart that just kind of longs to help, you know, normal people, mainstream homeowners. And it's true because most of my career has been wrapped around a state level. I say a state level because I you know, I don't like saying the word mansion, but that's basically what it comes down to, big, big, big, beautiful custom homes, and and I don't regret that at all.

I love that. I love that that level of creativity that you get to pour into that because you know, people write the checks for it, honestly. But I have always lived, as you know, if you're a fan of the show, very very simply, and you know, I just live a suburban existence, in a regular old suburban neighborhood and in a smaller than average by far suburban home. And because I come from a blue collar family, a lower lower middle class, blue collar family growing up. And

don't regret any of that either. So the point is, this is where I come from. This is the life that I'm most comfortable with, even though during the day I design mansions for the wealthy and it's all good, it's all great. I love, love, love helping mainstream homeowners

with real issues. And I alluded in my answer to Raina's call because she's got aging parents now, and her dad has to drive up onto the lawn in order to get near the front porch in order to help mom get directly out of the car and into the house. That's real world stuff, real life stuff. And you are never ever ever going to see a front yard like

that displayed in Architectural Digest. You know, those are just real world situations that you know, hote couture design magazines have no concern about because it's just not jougie enough. But design is still the answer to that problem. And that's what I love about talking to you about your home every weekend, not just solving the little nuts and bolts issues, but also encouraging you that design matters most

on every single level. You know, I wrote this last week for a different reason, but I want you to hear this. Billions are spent every year on home improvement. You would think that means most homes would you know, improve, but they don't. Why because there's a missing piece design Design matters most Most of us have never been taught

this truth. The wealthy have always had great design at their disposal, but the rest of us, whose homes, by the way, mean more to us because we've scraped and sacrificed more to have them, we are far more likely to accept that, Yeah, we get what we get right in the mainstream home. I don't want you to ever accept that, because design is not about good design is not about having a massive budget. Good design is just

good design. And when we approach our problems from that perspective, there's almost always a solution, and it always helps, and it always makes things beautiful. So in talking to Raina about here, you know, turf pavers pea, gravel decomposed, granted, accepting the reality of the situation, Let's make a driveway right up to even if it's a temporary one. Let's make a driveway right up to the front porch. And then let's landscape the heck out of the rest of

the yard to incorporate it, to disguise it somewhat. There's always a solution. No, it's not going to get in the spread of a big, fancy magazine, but yes, it's going to improve the lives of the people who live in that home. And that is what makes all the difference. Right, that's why we're here. All right, I've yacked enough. We're going to get some news from Jackie Ray and then we come back. I've got a couple of little new things that i want to share with you. We will

do that right on the other side. Can if I in chart the house whisper Welcome home, Welcome to home. Here we are at the end of another Saturday morning show. By the two hours just fly by, don't they. A couple of things I want to share with you before we're done today. First of all, if we left you on hold today, which we did, This is the case all the time. By the way, that whenever we don't get to your call, you get to priority status for

the next show. So if you guys call back tomorrow, then you get to go right to the front of the line. It's like a lightning lane pass at Disneyland, except it doesn't cost you anything extra. So it's a good thing. Tomorrow on the show, again, just to remind you that we're going to be talking about bedrooms. Bedrooms are a tricky thing to design, mostly because people don't take the right angled perspective in designing. Then we're going to talk in depth on bedrooms tomorrow on the program.

Plus a little bit more news from Vermont from our recent two week vacation there, got it, share some things with you. I know, it's a funny thing with our show. Some people are like, get to the information and other people are like, please spend more time talking about your personal life. And you know what, You're never gonna make everybody happy, but we try and find a balance there. So a little bit more of the love of autumn from our trip to Vermont, plus a few other things.

We've got some great things coming up too. By the way, can I just hint at this, Yes, we have secured the date the Sunday before Thanksgiving we are going to be doing another House Whisper holiday home show live at the KFI Studios in Burbank, and we will be telling you when you can apply to you know, put it, you know, for the contest of who's going to be with us there live audience on that day plus early December. I think maybe the first Sunday, the Sunday after Thanksgiving.

Tina and I I don't exactly know what, but Smart and Final we're going to be broadcasting from but a Smart and Final down in Orange County. We're going to be doing the show live from there, so you can come out. And that's kind of a prepastathon thing. We got so much stuff coming up that's really fun and good that we'll keep you posted on one new thing now.

This literally came as a result of one of the inns that we stayed at in Vermont, actually in Essex, New York, when I was visiting my friends on their farm there. We stayed at the Essex Inn and a beautiful room and when I walked in, I'm like, look at that painting over there. It's a nice cool image of painting hanging on the wall about twenty four by twenty four inches square. But I noticed it was coming

off the wall a little bit. I walked over and it's a few inches off the wall, and I'm like, ah, look at that. This is the first one I've actually seen installed the art cool art cool, okay, And you can look this up. It's by LG. Right. And why is there a beautiful painting here hanging on the wall, And why is there like three or four inches of build up behind it hanging it off the wall? You know why? Because that is the room's many split air

conditioner cassette, Yes, many split air conditioners. As you know, they're all the rave. They have revolutionized the way that we can get too hard to heat and air conditioned spaces, and many split just means that instead of a big old compressor outside the building, it's a small, little, very quiet compressor, and instead of duct work, they're ducked less. You put a cartridge or what we call a cassette

somewhere in the room. Typically the first ones that came out and still the most popular ones, you know, they're about three feet long and about ten inches tall, and they go high up on a wall somewhere and they handle the whole room. But since those came out, there are now cassettes that fit in the ceiling right like a ceiling, but they're not a duct connected to them.

And now things like this. LG has put together this wall mount cassette and it's about twenty four by twenty four by I think maybe five inches deep, And because it sits on the wall a big flat square, it already has a matte picture frame and frame around it, and you can slide your favorite artwork into it. Now, it's not like it's going to fool anybody who walks up to it. They're like, oh, this is just a painting on the wall. No, you can see that there's

something behind it there. But as opposed to just a big old utility device hanging on your wall, why not put a piece of art hanging off the front of it. It was actually lovely. It only added to the overall feel and motif of the room, and so you should check it out. If you've been thinking about like using a mini split system to cool or heat a room,

and they can do both, then you should check this out. LG. You know that appliance manufacturer art Cool the all new Mini Split cassette from l G. There you go, all right, one more reminder before we're out of here. It's fall. It's time to prune your trees. Now. Now is when we prune trees for two really important reasons. Okay. Number one,

major pruning. Now, if you live in southern California, of course, you can do maintenance pruning all year round, all right, But the big pruning, the big pruning, is not not springtime pruning. Okay, you do it in the fall. And here are the two reasons why. Number One, you're in a shock a tree when you prune it big time. You want to do that right as it's going into its dormant state. For the winter, so fall is the

time to do the big prune. And secondly, you know in springtime birds have already started to nest up in your tree in secret way. If you do a major pruning there anybody who's ever done that before has bemoaned the fact that you look down on the ground and now here's a bird's nest that's been disrupted and destroyed. We don't want it. We let the birds do their thing in the spring. Don't touch the trees in the springtime.

If you've got big pruning ahead of you, do it now before the holidays, and let that tree think about it all winter long and spring. I guarantee you man, it will bust out in a health level that you've never seen before. There you go, all right, y'all. We will see you right back here tomorrow morning, nine to noon for the big show talking about bedroom and bedroom design. Until then, get out into this beautiful day and get busy building yourself a beautiful life. We'll see tomorrow. 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.