Tool and Tie

Seeding vs. Sodding, the decision that most home owners face when spring kicks around. It’s one of those decisions that tests your budget and patience. We recently took on our own backyard project and chose one over the other, which one? read on…

The decision of whether to seed or sod can be a confusion and frustrating one. Typically seeding your backyard requires some prep, seeding, some kind of top coat to keep the birds away and a lot of watering. The time for the seeds to germinate and grow can take anywhere from 2-6 weeks depending on your sold condition and location. Sodding on the hand is instant turf. You can lay it down in one afternoon and keep the benefits the next day (although you should be jumping on it right away). Installing sod can be quite tricky sometimes. If your backyard isn’t perfectly level, you may need to lay down some soil to help bring it to level. You need to install you sod tightly with one another otherwise you will see some dry spots which doesn’t look too appealing.

Other than the process, the cost is a big factor for some on whether you seed or sod. A roll of sod costs about $3-$5 depending on where you purchase it. The same area provided by one role of sod would cost about $1 in seed to cover. So if your lawn is very big, the costs can add up. The costs above are assuming you do it yourself. If you get someone to install it for you, the costs will only go up from there.

Here is the video I used to lay down sod in my backyard

 

Whether you choose to seed or sod you need to provide you lawn with water daily at first. I don’t know about you but I do work and it gets challenging to water my lawn everyday. So to help me out, I installed a railbird DIY irrigation system with a timer that will water my lawn unto two times daily at the times and days that I specify. Installation was fairly straight forward and it takes the worry away from me for having to remember to water the lawn every time. For those interested in the Rainbird here is the link to it on amazon.

Checkout the podcast for more details and don’t forget to subscribe to get some of our awesome freebies.

Taking a vacation? Did you know some of the biggest disasters in your home could occur when you’re away. From water damage to theft, home owners that left for a beautiful vacation would be coming home a disaster. There are however a few things a homeowner can do to minimize their chances of walking home to a disaster. Here are some tips:

1) Turn off your main water valve. You would be surprised at the number of homeowners that have commented on their pipes bursting while on vacation (google it). When a water pipe bursts, it can be a very unsettling feeling if it happens in front of you. Imagine nobody there to turn your water off. All those hardwood floors, furniture and other valuables getting soaked and damaged. The cost for water repair could be as small as a few hundred dollars to replacement of your entire structure. The other benefit of doing this is, if you are the unlikely victim of a burst pipe, your insurance premiums would likely skyrocket and your water damage coverage could be limited or removed all together.

2) We also turn off our gas valves for our fireplace and stove. This is again a small precaution we take in case there are any gas leaks. In addition to gas leaks we also unplug any electrical devices, again for precautions.

3) It’s always a good idea to let neighbors, friends, family and your alarm company know you’re going away on vacation. Have someone check in with your house just to make sure everything is ok. The garage is actually a very common place thief’s break into to get access to your home. Check out this video on the 6 second break in and how to prevent this from happening to you.

4) Last, if you’re into some technology, consider getting a home automation system that you can use to point cameras, put your lights on vacation mode and add door and window sensors. Here is a cool video to help you understand how the Belkin Wemo works.

To find out more details about some of the tips stated above, click below to listen to the full podcast. Hopefully this will help you better manage your vacation plans and increase the odds to come back to your home just the way you left it.

 

Important Links

Belkin Wemo Plug

Belkin Wemo Light Switch

Wink Home Automation

Smartthings Home Automation

In this episode I talk about flipping properties and reflect back on our experience. When you are looking to flip properies for families as opposed to investors (covered in the last podcast), you always want to try to make an emotional connection with future purchasers. When you look to invest for investors to purchase your property, they look at maximizing rental revenue and are less focussed on the detailed asthetics. Unlike homeowners, they are less emotionally invested as a result over investing can be a sunk cost,

When looking to build an emotional connection with your purchasers, there are three key areas that have worked well for us when looking at where to put those investment dollars.

First is the heart of the house which happens to be your kitchen. You want to stay on a budget of course but dont be afriad to invest a little more in this area. When a new homeowner purchases a home, they want it to be move in ready. So if you go the extra mile, homeowners will reward you for this investment.

The next area in the home you want to consider is the bathroom. This is sometimes a make or break for homeowner seekers. Again, they want to minimize any work when purchasing a home. If you have the work done in advance, they will reward you for the work.

Last is ensure your property is decently landscaped. Sometimes homeowners wont even step inside your home if it doesnt look decent on the outside. Often times the perception is if you take care of the outside of your home, there is a good chance you will take care of the inside.

Also when looking to sell your home, dont forget the option of hiring a staging a company. Sometimes they can decorate the room in a way that would open options for homeowner, who may be willing to pay a bit more in light of what the staging shows them. I have found that staging services have worked well for us in the past.

Well that’s about for this episode folks. Be sure to listen to the podcast or send me a note at [email protected]

Flipping properties can sometimes be a daunting task. Without the proper background on understanding your audience, homeowners can sometimes make unnecessary investments that can spiral their investment down the toilet.

Homeowners can spend a ton of money on kitchen renovations or bathrooms to spruce them up. Most of the time they consider what others buyers would like if they were to purchase this home down the road to justify their renovation costs. However, majority of homeowners often exclude a core subset of buyers: the investors. There are investors out there that will purchase home with the intent of never living in it, but rather renting it only. If you live in a popular neighborhood with little options for income suits in your neighborhood, then your home may be the diamond in the rough to these investors.

I’ve had some personal experience with income suites in an older home that we renovated. We spent about $23k in a basement renovation, which afforded us the ability to charge rent of $1500/month (what would have been $1050 before the reno) and a local realtor appraised the home to be valued at $30,000 more than before the renovation. We didn’t do anything fancy nor did we splurge on expensive décor. We simply made the unit code compliant, safe and habitable, which simply paid off.

We invested 23,000 and the payback was $30,000 (in 3 months) plus an incremental $450/month in rent (1500-1050) for 9 months.

The total profit in 12 months was $34050.

ROI = 34050/23000 = 148%. We assume your expenses would remain unchanged before or after the reno. If they do change you can simply subtract them from the investment gain (numerator) to calculate your ROI.

IRR = 12%, no bank is going to give you 12% in a year.

So overall we agree that income suites are one of the most profitable home renovations least in our experience.

When selecting flooring options for your home, home owners are typically faced with the dilemma of flooring style and the various options. In this episode, I talk about the various flooring options, where to use them and where not to use them. I don’t cover installation options because I prefer that be covered in a future episode. In this episode, I want to strictly focus on the various options and give you my perspective on selecting the best options for various rooms in your home.

Home automation has come a long way over the last 3-5 years. The term Internet of things (IoT) has become a buzz word as of late. There are many home automation systems out there including Wink, Smart things, staples connect, Revolv etc. However I have been exclusively using the Wink platform and I’m about to give you the skinny on whether your should buy or not

When looking at a product, I base it on five main criteria which include:

1) Ease of Use

2) Assortment of Products

3) Performance

4) Security

5) Customer Service

1) The Wink hub is quite easy to use when you get it to connect. They have an iOS and android platform that can be used to help pair devices to the wink hub. They have a great graphic interface however pairing devices isn’t always a walk in the park. Sometimes you have to call into their customer service who will walk you through issues and help you pair but even that could be a half a days of effort. For example my lutron light switches connected fine, but getting my schlage lock and GE bulbs were a task. Overall I would rate their ease of use a 3/5.

2) The wink hub has an impressive number of devices that it can pair to out of the box. It has several antennas built in including lutron, Leviton, Bali, schlage, and Nest to name a few. When comparing to other products on the market it has one of the best assortment of products that it supports. The one big bummer is that it does not support Wemo. I spoke to the CEO, Ben Kaufman who confirmed in an email that Wemo wasn’t coming to the Wink platform. The other thing that wink lacks is offline support. It requires you to go through their cloud which can slow down that process and in the event your internet goes down, render the hub useless. Having said all of this, I would rate their assortment a 4/5.

3) Performance over the past few months started to deteriorate in my option. Every new hub update requires some kind of compromise on performance. Sometimes my locks don’t work and other times my lights are not responsive. I’ve emailed and called Wink several times and although their best intention is to help, I often walk away a little frustrated with the time commitment to get it to work. Performance for me is a 2/5

4) Security is quite obviously important to me. I would certainly say the wink hub is fairly secure. So secure that a few months ago, Wink had an embarrassing occurrence where they pushed out a firmware update that prevented the hub from communicating with the wink server. This really irritated thousands of wink hub users who had to ship their device back to wink to “unbrick” or use a DNS solution to repair it. When the manufacturer gets locked out of the hub, you know it’s maybe too secure. To their credit they did give out $50 gift cards to their online store but that still didn’t go to well with others given their already inflated store costs and ridiculously high shipping costs. I would give security a 5, but their boob move a few months ago earn them a strong 4/5

5) Last but not least is customer service. I’ve compared customer service between that of Wink and its competitors and I have to say wink does have one of the best customer service. You can reach them on Facebook, Twitter or phone and they seem to be responsive. Email on the other hand is very slow. I genuinely felt that they wanted to help you resolve issues with your hub and connected devices and would spend hours to help you resolve the issues. Also it depends on who you talk to over at wink. I have spoken to some folks that are questionable but overall I was content. Relative to their competitors I give wink a 5/5 on customer service.

The overall tally is 18/25. So would I buy it? If you are able to get the wink hub on a deal like buy some lights and get the hub for $0.99 then it’s worth it. However for the $50 price tag,

In this episode we cover off wainscoting and our journey down wainscot lane. Wainscoting adds a beautiful element to any home that brings out a rich look and a pop that leaves visitors in awe of your beautiful home. To give you an idea of the possibilities behind wainscoting, here is a before and after look of our wall. Here is a picture of our wall before wainscoting.

Now here is an image of our wainscoting after

 

Notice in this instance, I’ve added in a thicker door trim and swapped out the baseboards. This covers only but 9 feet of the entire project. So let me show you how to put this together on the opposite walls.

Now in the podcast I mentioned different joinery methods whether you use glue, tongue and groove, or the keg jig system. I mentioned board and batten but that was my mistake. Board and batten is a particular look for the panels (whoops).

We opted to use the Kreg joinery system. Basically drill pocket holes behind the wood, connect them together and nail them to the wall like this:

There are three stiles in the picture above, a rail on the top and the baseboard (some would consider this just a thicker stile). Once you connect those pieces just nail them to a wall. I use a nail gun but you can use a nail and hammer if you have a lot of time. Always ensure the rails and stiles are level and plumb before nailing it in.

Next I chose to prime the wood just to see what it would look like (sometimes I get excited and do silly things). This is not necessary at this stage but I really wanted to get one wall done. Here is what it looks like:

Next, we opted to put in moulding in between the panels. See below for an example:

You can purchase a long strip of moulding (usually 8 feet) for around $5. You would mitre this at a 45 degree angle and then join the ends. Once you have done that for each box, you will now start priming your wainscot. Something like this:

Another tip is to paint the top colour before you stick on the wainscot. We learned this the hard way after the fact: Notice how on the far wall we pre-painted the top so when the wainscot goes on we only need to worry about touch up:

Once that is done, its now time to add on the baseboard and paint

 

Finally, add some decorative art and swap out that ugly light fixture (most people didn’t even notice) and you’ll end up with a beautifully done wainscot wall

 

Now finally my rail and stile calculator has worked for so many people already. I am offering this calculator for free for my subscribers. All you have to do is register on the side bar and you will begin to receive all my freebies including my project plan and my rail and stile calculator.

In this episode, Poonam and I will be talking about accent walls. There are so many options on the market today that picking and choosing the right one can sometimes be a task. So in this podcast we aim to simplify things as much as we can. More specifically, we cover off horizonal, vertical, painted, faux brick, wall paper and removeable wall paper.

Here are some examples of each type of accent wall:

Faux Wall

Vertical Stripes help add height to the room

Horozontal Stripes helps add width to the room

Paintable and removalable wall paper with texture

Accent walls are a great way to add a focal point to the room. You have to pick which wall you want to have as your accent and ensure that wall remains the focal point. Accessorizing the room too much can take away from the focal point and confuse people that walk into the room.

 

What is cooking guys? This week I’m excited to be sharing some technology tips for you home improvement enthusiasts out there. I’m actually going to dedicate this week’s episode to an app that I absolutely love using to help me design and visualize my space. The app is called Interior Design for iPad made by Black Mana Studios. As a note, I get no monetary compensation for promoting this app, I just like it so much that I had to share. The reason why I like this app so much and opted to use it over some of its competitors (all of which I own by the way), is due to its simple design and powerful user interface. In one app you are able to visualize and design with ease.  If you recall in episode 4 I spoke about the before and after of my kitchen with pictures of the before and after. What I didn’t share with you was my design in the app. Below is an image of my first design for my kitchen.

 

Now this was my first version. Again if you go to episode 4 you’ll get an idea of what the kitchen looked like before. The kitchen actually looked very similar to the one above except on the left we opted for a desk over more pantry space. I designed this kitchen with the app in just under a few hrs. There is a 2D interface that lets you draw the rooms and then you can zoom in for a 3D view. I liked this app so much that I contacted the CEO of Black Mana Studios to give them a virtual high five. I spoke to Aki who runs the company over there and Aki told me about their newest generation of software called Tap Glance. This is a relatively new tool that helps you create a 3D almost real life render of your design.

The design above was later modified to more accurately reflect what the kitchen looks like today. Below is a picture of the design in Tap Glance. They opted to use Tap Glance over Interior Design app because it has higher detailed models and materials. So here is what my design looks like in Tap Glance.

 

The purpose of Tap Glance is it takes an image like the one above and converts it into a real life looking picture. So Aki helped me render this image and here was the result

 

When I saw this rendered image I was nearly taken a back. I had to look closely to determine if this was really a shot of my kitchen or a high quality 3D render. Now to give you more perspective, here is what my kitchen actually looks like today.

 

The image is almost bang on. You may notice some subtle differences like the vent cap or the crown moulding but otherwise i’ve never seen a more realistic render of any space in my house like I have seen with Tap Glance.

So for those who want to get a real life image of what your vision could look like, Tap Glance is a great solution. For others who are looking for a simple 3D design to visualize space, Interior Design app is  still a great choice.

A big thanks to Aki over at Black Mana Studios for introducing me to Tap Glance and providing some visuals for our audience to see. Also congrats to them for having strong rating for the Interior Design app in the app store.

If you want to find out more about Tap Glance, you can visit them online. For any questions please don’t hesitate to send me a note at [email protected]

Want to Build Your Own Cabinets?

This episode is jam packed with some great details on how to build your own cabinets. You know I spent nearly $25,000 on my kitchen cabinets and counter tops. Had I known what I know today about building cabinet, I could have saved almost half that amount with no big difference to overall quality. How?

By finding the courage to take on this task on my own. Will it extend the timeline? definitely, will it be a lot of work? without a doubt yes it will, can you do this project? With the right tools and the right attitude you absolutely can do this on your own.

My Crack at the Cabinets

When I first got started with cabinet construction, I had no idea what to do and how to start. My biggest concern was quality and since we were looking to do a built in desk, I didn’t really have an option to take it out without destroying the whole thing so my nerves were definately tense. Unfortunately I couldn’t located the before picture but truthfully my process started with a visit to the local home improvement store by looking at the cabinet construction. I also looked at the cabinets that went into my kitchen and thought to myself that this couldn’t be hard. So I checked out some video’s on youtube and had to recommend the ones by Kreg (I don’t get anything from Kreg for endorsing their product, I just believe its a great tool) and took my first crack at it.

 

 

Hopefully those video’s helped you. Some of the tips in the video are somewhat advanced especially adding the veneer around the door. All these are optional. The point of the video is to help you get familiarized with the Kreg tool and cabinet construction.  In terms of the door, I wanted to make a shaker style door. Here is what my door/drawer design looked like for the desk

Now there are a few ways to make shaker style doors. You could 4 pieces of 1×3 popular wood and make a frame out of it using pocket screws and then attach a piece of 1/4 inch plywood to the back or you can use a tongue and groove set to make a tongue and groove joinery (see helpful links again). Again you connect the four using tongue and groove and slot in a 1/4 plywood piece in between. Making these doors was a lot easier than I expected especially if you decide to make the door using the four pieces and the plywood on the back. Whether you are making doors or drawers the concept is the same

Cabinet Construction

Next you want to put together the cabinets. Again this was a little easier than expected and since this was my first time making them I elected to use a Kreg Jig which is an awesome pocket hole jig. You will also need pocket hole screws which you can pick up for a few dollars from your hardware store. I also used my Dewalt cordless circular saw to cut the plywood sheet down but you can always get the plywood pre cut based on your measurements at the hardware store. Once I had everything cut, I drilled some pocket whole screws and then put the cabinets together. Below is a picture of my cabinets in the basement

Notice in this picture I also made some drawers. This was just 1/2 plywood that I screwed together and nailed a 1/4 sheet of plywood on the bottom. If you look at the drawers you will see these rivets on the sides. Thats where the pocket screws go to screw in the sides. They won’t show because they will be covered up by the drawer front as shown below

Now that I had my base cabinets put together I wanted to see...