Episode SummaryThis week on Home In Progress, Dan opens with something a little different -- a look at the animal kingdom's most surprising builders and tool users, and what any of us can take from that. Then he gets into the main topic: the growing number of homeowners who've decided they're staying put, and what that shift in thinking should mean for how you spend renovation dollars. Dan walks through five can't-lose projects for the forever home, including some smaller-scale, paint-friendly versions of each one for when the budget isn't there yet. He closes with four questions that can help you figure out which project is actually the right first move for your specific house.In This Episode

• [00:00] -- Welcome and Teaser
• [00:34] -- Animals Using Tools (and What That Has to Do With You)
• [05:35] -- The Forever Home Mindset
• [09:59] -- Project 1: Outdoor Living Space
• [13:21] -- Project 2: Kitchen Refresh
• [19:25] -- Project 3: Windows, Insulation, and Air Sealing
• [24:36] -- Project 4: Basement Upgrade
• [30:50] -- Project 5: Primary Bathroom
• [33:46] -- Four Questions to Find Your Best First Project
• [38:53] -- Paint, Final Thoughts, and Wrap-Up

Segment 1: Animals Using Tools [00:34]Dan opens with a fun detour into the animal kingdom. Turns out humans aren't the only ones who build things, use tools, and pass down traditions.Termites [01:09] -- Termite mounds can rise more than 20 feet in the air with walls 18 inches thick. Inside, they're honeycombed with tunnels, chambers, and air channels that regulate temperature and humidity like a built-in HVAC system. Architects have actually copied the design. The Eastgate Centre in Zimbabwe, designed by Mike Pearce, uses passive cooling modeled directly on termite mounds and consumes about 90% less energy for ventilation than a comparable conventional building.Sea Otters and Chimps [02:07] -- Otters float on their backs, rest a stone on their belly, and smash open clams and mussels against it. Some otters even have a favorite rock they carry tucked in a pouch of loose skin under their arm so it's always handy. Chimpanzees strip leaves off twigs and use them to fish termites out of mounds. The more interesting part: different chimp communities in the same forest have entirely different tool traditions, passed down like family recipes. In Tanzania, two neighboring groups both fish for termites with sticks, but one group consistently makes their tools wider and longer than the other. In Senegal, one community has invented something no other chimps on earth do -- they make actual spears, sharpening the tips with their teeth and using them to hunt.Crows and Elephants [03:55] -- In a famous Oxford experiment, a crow named Betty was given two pieces of wire, one bent into a hook and one straight. Her cage mate stole the hook. Betty took the straight wire, jammed it into a crack, bent it into a hook on her own, and used it to fish meat out of a tube. She did it nine out of ten times when the scenario was repeated. Asian elephants snap branches off trees, strip them down, and shorten them to just the right length for swatting flies. They're not using whatever's lying around -- they're modifying the tool to fit the job.The Takeaway [04:51] -- If termites with brains the size of a grain of salt can engineer a skyscraper, and crows can fabricate hooks on the fly, and otters are basically one step away from a tool belt, whatever you're telling yourself you can't learn probably isn't as true as you think.Segment 2: The Forever Home Mindset and 5 Can't-Lose Projects [05:35]Why People Are Staying Put [06:10]Dan poses a question to start: if you knew without a doubt you were never moving from the house you're in right now, what would you change first?That question is reshaping how a lot of homeowners think about renovation right now. Homeowner spending on home improvements is projected to hit $518 billion in 2026, and it's not being driven by the luxury market or house flippers. It's regular homeowners who've decided they're staying. According to the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies and a 2026 survey from Great Day Improvements, nearly two-thirds of homeowners expect to be in their current home for 11 years or more. And 44% of homeowners now describe where they live as their forever home.If you bought or refinanced around 2020 or 2021 at 3% or lower, you already know why nobody's moving. A 7% mortgage waiting on the other side of a sale has a way of making your current house look a lot better.When that's the context, the renovation calculus changes. You stop asking what a future buyer will want and start asking what will actually make your family's life better for the next decade or more. That shift changes everything about where renovation dollars go.Project 1: Outdoor Living Space [09:59]West Michigan winters get all the complaints, but the springs, summers, and falls are genuinely great. If you're staying in your home, it pays to think about how much of that you're actually using.Dan's honest about his own situation here: his deck has no seating, nobody ever uses it, and they're wasting dozens of evenings out there every year just by not having the space set up. The vision for this project can be as big as a covered pergola, an outdoor kitchen, a hot tub area with weather-safe TV and speakers -- spaces that function as actual rooms. The return on that isn't measured in resale dollars. It's measured in summer evenings with your family.Paint-friendly version: If the bigger build-out isn't in the budget, start smaller. Get the deck cleaned up and restained. Get dedicated seating out there. If you've already got wood or metal chairs that have seen better days, RepcoLite can usually help you get them cleaned up and looking good again. Create a space that actually invites you to sit down.Project 2: Kitchen Refresh [13:21]The kitchen is where most families spend an enormous amount of time, almost all of it either cooking, cleaning, or entertaining. A kitchen that looks good and functions well makes daily life easier in ways that are hard to overstate.Dan talks through what a refresh can include: painting or refacing cabinets, new countertops, updated hardware, a new sink and faucet, new appliances, updated lighting, new floors. Some of those things aren't cheap. But the payoff comes from 300-plus dinners a year in a space that doesn't make you feel bad every time you walk into it.Dan's own kitchen confession [15:33]: '80s oak cabinets he doesn't like, dated hardware, a track light that's a direct import from the same decade with shiny brass everything and two or three working bulbs, Formica counters that have lost most of their original color. He's not proud of it. He knows it drags him down. He also knows it doesn't have to, and that a couple of weeks of work would change most of it.Paint-friendly version: Painting the cabinets and updating the colors is one of the highest-impact, most budget-friendly changes you can make in a kitchen. Pair that with better lighting and some new hardware, and you can dramatically lift the mood of a space without touching the counters or the layout.Project 3: Windows, Insulation, and Air Sealing [19:25]Older homes lose a significant amount of heat through inefficient windows, attics, rim joists, and basement walls. Every year you stay in the house, you're paying for that inefficiency. Replacing outdated windows with modern low-E glass triple-pane units, combined with serious air sealing and insulation in the attic, is one of those projects that starts paying you back the day it's done.The payback isn't just in lower heating bills, though that's real and measurable. It's also in comfort. Eliminating drafts, keeping warm spaces warmer and cool spaces cooler -- that changes how you feel about being inside your own home.Dan is careful not to oversell the financial return. Windows alone don't always pay for themselves quickly in energy savings. Insulation and air sealing tend to give you better bang for your buck on the utility side. But when you're in your forever home and you're not doing the math on resale, the calculation shifts. It becomes less about payback period and more about making the house a more comfortable place to live every single day.Dan also mentions a past show segment on opening painted-shut windows from 2024, and will link to it in the show notes for anyone dealing with that specific problem.Paint-friendly version: You can't make old windows more efficient with paint. But you can improve how they look and feel. Getting painted-shut windows functioning again doesn't cost much and doesn't require much more than some know-how. Dan's got that covered in the 2024 segment linked below.Project 4: Basement Upgrade [24:36]Almost every West Michigan home has a basement. A surprising percentage of them are being used for storage and not much else. A finished basement adds livable square footage without changing the footprint of the house, and it grows with you -- a playroom becomes a teenage hangout space becomes a home gym as the years go by.Dan's current lower level is wall-to-wall paneling, drop ceiling tiles, and carpet, all from the '80s. It works. The kids have used it. It's served its purpose. But there's a lot more potential there.Paint-friendly version: This is one where paint can genuinely transform a space on a fraction of the budget of a full finish-out. Dan tells the story of doing exactly this in his first house -- a dark, dingy Michigan basement that nobody...