Sustainable Renovation: How To Turn Old Houses into Smart Homes

Dennis Oz: hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of remodeler success podcast. You know how it works. All the questions that we can answer, we’ll be here to answer these questions. For the questions that we cannot answer. I have an amazing speaker today. Let me introduce her to you. Katharine is with me, Katharine McPhail. Could you please introduce yourself today?
Katharine MachPhail: Sure. I’m Katharine MacPhail, I’m an architect. I work in Eastern Massachusetts. I do mostly additions and renovations to existing homes and kind of specialize in old, modernizing old houses in a thoughtful way. And I’ve been working as an architect for, well, let’s just say I got outta graduate school around 26 years ago, so, I’ve been doing that for a little while now.
Dennis Oz: Yeah, well, again, welcome to the show. Katherine, let me start with this. How did you start working as an architect? What do you do? Could you please give us a little more detailed information about yourself?
Katharine MachPhail: Oh, sure. When I first got out of graduate school, I was, we came back to the east coast, which is where I’m from. And my husband is from, Canada, but he and I were in graduated school together. So we ended up back here. I was actually pregnant at the time. This is not maybe the story you’re expecting Dennis, but I was, pregnant and it’s hard to get a job when you’re pregnant because, well. Anyway, it’s hard to get a job. So I had to start my own company, to get health insurance actually to have this baby. So that’s my that’s, that’s how I got started on the whole thing. And because I am just working by myself, I was taking small scale projects. So just residential projects and, because that’s more manageable with one person and, but I’ve always loved houses anyway. So that was, it worked out, it worked out fine. It’s working out. It’s not over. So, yeah, so yeah. I just help homeowners with their, with their kind of their puzzles. You know, a lot of people don’t want to move out of their neighborhood and they want to maximize whatever space they can and where I live it’s pretty, densely populated. So you have to get a little bit creative with third floor space and basements and, and, those are my favorite projects, the ones that are, have a good, good amount of, a puzzle to them.
Dennis Oz: You are in architectural home remodeling and your remodeling style is, I really like the way that you look at the projects and, that’s why what I want to talk about these architectural home remodeling, what’s new there, and, how do you see 2022, and what are your expectations for 2023?
Katharine MachPhail: I was just listening to one of your podcasts that you, that came out recently where the woman who was a realtor and interior designer. And she was saying that, that the average house size is 4,400 square feet, which I can’t even, I can’t believe that seems so big. I mean, it depends on where you are in the country, what to expect next. I feel like where, where I am, usually the house, the housing stock is very old and so they start off way smaller than that. So not that many people in my area anyway, have like a 4,000 square foot house. Of course, you know, like the dentist has a 10,000 square foot house and, certain people have really, really huge houses. I feel like the houses are getting smaller though. Because of material costs and building costs right now. And also just because heating maintenance, I have a feeling, this is my feeling though, that things are getting smaller. People are going for smaller rather than larger. So that’s what I’m seeing in here in Massachusetts anyway, but it’s very expensive here. So that may be why people aren’t building as much space.
Dennis Oz: There are different things, this is gonna be my next question. I’m gonna ask you about the inflation, of course, there are different market dynamics going out there and, home builders need to build in a certain pace and then they need to build many, many homes to just keep up with the demand right now, because I believe everyone is saying that is pretty much like a information that you can see everywhere: The supply and demand is pretty much broken in real estate. I’m gonna ask you this one in home remodeling, how inflation affects home remodeling. What do you think?
Katharine MachPhail: Obviously in the last couple of years, prices have been going through the roof and there it’s very hard to pin down everything from when you might be getting products like windows are, I think now they’re 20 weeks out for certain, manufacturers and they were as much as 28 weeks within the last year. And so everything’s kind of up in the air. Quotes from the lumber company are only good for seven days, for example. And so one, one big thing that I’ve seen is that the contractors, because of the volatile prices they are, a lot of the people I work with are doing time and materials, I guess, it’s, is it time and materials? Is that what they call it? They don’t give a fixed price. They say, this is, it’s like an open book. You see how much the plumber’s going to charge or how much the electrician’s gonna charge or, and then they add their percentage on top of that. I mean, things like, I was on a project where there was some vinyl siding involved and the client decided to change that halfway through the project. And the increase was so much because the price had gone up so much in the meantime, since he’d gotten the fixed price. And people aren’t, anyway, people are pretty, shocked by that. I’ve been hearing about clients, not my clients so far, but actually that’s not true, I do have one project that has gone completely, it was a really cute project and now it’s been value engineered so much that it’s not even, it’s pretty disappointing, but, people just deciding not to do the project, starting off with, thinking they had a $300,000 budget and then it comes in like 500 or plus, so it’s really, it’s hard to figure out for me how much a project. I used to know how much a project might cost and now I’m not a hundred percent sure. And people are really disappointed not to be able to get what they want as they always are, but, they’re even less likely to be able to get what they want now.
Dennis Oz: Do you believe there will be a recession or it’s already started? What do you think.
Katharine MachPhail: I have friends all over the country who are architects and so we talk about this a lot of course, and people, not that many people have seen projects fall off yet. We’re all expecting it, but we haven’t really seen it. It’s been so, so busy since about may of 2020, everything kind of came to a standstill on April. And then after that, it’s just been a flood. A flood of people trying to do things to their houses. And of course, right away, I just got a call today from someone who wants a permit set by next week, end of next week, Usually it’s about a six month timeframe that I allow for that. And he wants next week. I can’t even do it cause I’m just too busy right now, but, and so are most people that I know. It’s just been a, it’s just been a boom, like a lot of work recently, which is great, but it’s also easy to get burned out.
Dennis Oz: That’s exactly what it is. Since I’m in North Jersey and I was seeing people are just running away from the city and trying to buy their houses in North Jersey area, skyrocketed prices. Buying a home with mortgage was not even possible during that time, because it was all cash offers everywhere, and, but with the interest rates right now, I think this kind of madness is just cooled down a little bit, because I was looking at the amount of the mortgages that have been applied by the Americans. It was little less than the previous months. This is pretty much like market related questions, but I would like to take you to your comfort zone, and, just wanted to talk about the environment, and I would like to ask your environmental considerations when you’re remodeling a place. What’s your considerations when you are doing the remodeling?
Katharine MachPhail: There, there are several different aspects to sustainability building an environmentally sensitive way. So there’s one thing that I try to bring up a lot and that isn’t really that popular is this idea of deconstruction instead of demolition. So when you deconstruct a part of a building that you’re not gonna be using anymore, or even a kitchen that somebody’s decided to switch out. Let’s say they bought a new house. They don’t like the kitchen and they’re usable cabinets and everything. You can actually get a tax credit for donating all of those things. So there are people you can call for reuse centers and they can come take away. The cabinets, sometimes the windows and the doors, if they’re new enough it’s really worth looking into, because people do actually, get like 4,000 or six $60,000 tax credits for all this lumber and some people that I interviewed in Vermont, they really disassemble the entire thing. So including even the studs, they’ll sell, resell that as lumber that people can use and garden structures or, something like that. It benefits the people who are renovating because they get a tax credit that someone who can’t afford to get new whatever it may be benefits from that. And then, it stays out of the, it stays out of the landfill, the whole thing. I mean, it’s like a win-win situation all around. So that’s one of the things that I would really like to see more of. And to me, it seems like the contractors might be a little bit of the problem with that. Also, first of all, homeowners don’t know about it. And then contractors don’t really, I feel comfortable with that adds time, but in this time, in this period of time, when people are like, contractors are booking like a year out or whatever. And homeowners can contract the deconstruction people themselves, and they could have that done before the contractor shows up, it would work in that way. So I just recommend that people look into that. Well, that was a very long answer for the first part of it. Second part of it I just get, I get excited about that aspect of it, because I really feel like we have a huge refuse problem in this country, the more we can just reuse what we already have and help the people who, with building materials, being so expensive and everything, like when my husband and I redesigned the house that I’m in right now, like 14 years ago, we had to go to the reuse center, we had a really, really low budget. So we went there and we got windows and doors and other building like trim, paint, tiles, other stuff that other people didn’t want. And then we got for a very discounted price. And so anyway, I think we can all help each other that way. Second way is, thinking about the carbon footprint of whatever it is that you are installing in your house. So one of my friends loves to talk about the, one of my architect friends loves to talk about the glass shower enclosure versus a vinyl curtain. If you think about like a glass and again, we debate about that, these are the kind of things we talk about, but a vinyl curtain is vinyl, so that’s not great for the whole manufacturing process of that. But, and you might have to buy a new one, but it’s, again, it’s only $30 versus like this glass enclosure that has a huge carbon footprint because of the energy that was required to make it. But you won’t have to replace it until someone just redos the bathroom. There’s no one clear cut answer when it comes to materials. But just having people think about that, like where does your countertop stone come from, how far did it have to come? Can you buy a stone that would be qued closer to where you live. Then, of course there’s energy efficiency of all the different appliances and lighting fixtures and things like that.
Dennis Oz: We’re going to talk about smart homes, but at the same time, I also ask you that the topic that you’re talking about really interesting. How do we achieve that sustainability? Because if we do the renovation in sustainable way, that’s gonna be there for years, and how do you achieve that?
Katharine MachPhail: There’s not really one particular answer. Like I was just talking about, there are different sides to everything people talk about. If you move into a place that has vinyl siding already on it, for example, and you don’t think vinyl’s good for the earth, or if there’s a fire, it would be toxic and all that, but it’s already on the house. So is it better to take it off the house where it’s doing its job perfectly well and to throw it away and then put something else on it ? Or you just keep it until the end of its life. You really have to think about all these little bits, which is kind of frustrating, because there’s no one right answer. And if like personally, I don’t love vinyl siding, so I would probably want to take it off. But is that the right thing to do? Maybe not. But I was talking to someone else who had a great idea, I just like to credit him with this idea, even though I am, going to use it won’t I quite be like stealing it, it’s more like using his idea of creating a kitchen in a house, like in an old house, where it kind of matches the style or the vibe of the house. So that whoever buys this old house next would like the kitchen, because it kind of goes already with the house.
Dennis Oz: So with the team, the house of the team, I mean, you’re talking about like the feeling of the house. Right,
Katharine MachPhail: Right. Like what he likes to use is, art deco fixtures in a house that’s like 1880. Right? And then that would’ve been a house that had a kitchen during the art deco time. So if you choose things that are kind of in that period or reminiscent of that period, then it will kind of go with a house. It’ll have more of, kind of a classic look to it. So in theory then if nobody’s ripping out the kitchen and it’s high quality cabinets and all the rest of it, then that’s more sustainable because the next person’s not just ripping it out.
Dennis Oz: Right. The quality plays an important role over here. That’s what you’re saying.
Katharine MachPhail: Oh yeah, definitely. I mean, unless you’re the type of person who you plan to live there 40 years and you change, you like to change your kitchen every 10 years or something, then you can plan around, around that. Like what does that even mean? Like I got, unfinished cabinet, unfinished wood cabinets, because I thought that I would paint them when I changed my mind about what I wanted the kitchen to look like. But in reality, I only painted them in months.
Dennis Oz: That’s right. I always talk to my clients. What is the average lifetime value of your client? Let’s say, it’s a walk-in business, most of the kitchen remodelers and dealers, it’s pretty much like a walk in business. Homeowners walk in into that store and get a design or talk to these people. But once they purchase their project and start and finish, they’re good for next 15 years, and, we are always talking about repeat business, but it’s really hard to get that repeat business in this industry because, it’s like a decade that we need to wait for. But referral is still good. I mean word of mouth is always the most sweet way to promote your business. The word of mouth is most of my clients’ favorite when you look at the different marketing channels and you know, you’re driving by and look at the different business models. Just for example, it’s another brick and mortar store right there. It’s just like a beauty salon right there. Probably these women, they will be making stops for every month or like every week or maybe every day. But, uh,
Katharine MachPhail: Every day? Who goes every day?
Dennis Oz: I dunno,
Katharine MachPhail: Maybe, you’re in North Jersey. Maybe they go every day.
Dennis Oz: I may take that part out and you doing post production, but yeah.
Katharine MachPhail: Oh, sorry.
Dennis Oz: Yeah, no problem. I mean it’s like almost 10 years and but when we have the high ticket, those are the high ticket clients when you have a one decent project. Because how we grow our businesses, different marketing style, different marketing aspect, we need to include that business model. So definitely offering sustainable products is also a big part of it. Not a lot of people are mentioning this sustainability and it’s amazing to see that you are talking about that on your website, also your podcast channel. You’re talking about the sustainability. That was really interesting. But basically when we look at the percentages of the homeowners, if they want it like a sustainable product or if they want it more economical, like in cheaper way. A lot of them is gonna be go for the low price because there are people on the market they are trying to improve, constantly improving their quality of their lifestyle and they are investing their money. Sustainability is a good way to present your projects if you’re offering sustainable products. For more information we are gonna share the links right after this podcast. You can go there and have a look at it. I’m gonna go back to the renovation and I’m gonna ask you what excites you when you are renovating an old house.
Katharine MachPhail: I guess I just love old houses because I’ve always loved history. And I think it’s because I love stories or maybe I love imagining stories. So to me it’s a really rich. We’ve just bought an old house, for 1794 house, and I have all these stories. I’ve already told myself about the house, whether or not it’s true, or, this 230 years of people living in a house, that’s a lot of weddings, funerals, regular old days. I really love it for that reason. And the idea of not tearing houses down or the housing stock. I just feel like it helps with, I mean, where I live, there’s a lot of older houses. So if people are tearing down the houses and building much bigger houses, it kind of changes the street scape and the nature of the neighborhood. And a lot of times the trees are, old trees are also torn down. So it is just kind of changes the, the vibe. Yeah, the vibe, it just changes. It just changes having one giant house and a bunch of other older houses. It’s just ends up like, okay, this is definitely going to be dropping like flies there. and there are lots of things like, windows, for example, like people are always throwing away old windows and then just putting in vinyl windows. And that’s one of the things that I find disappointing and most of my projects, okay, I’m going to say that, I try to convince people to rebuild their windows. And like you said, people are gonna go for the less expensive option. And also they’ve just been told for years that these new windows are better. And you can rebuild a window. My windows are from the 20s in this house. Which is my old house that I’m not, not the one I just bought, but anyway. The windows were built from the 20s so the wood is like a stronger denser wood. It’s a better, it has a kind of waviness to the glass. It just has more character to it. So I love that the just the old materials that are just better quality than a lot of what people can buy today, because it just is really expensive to buy. A window like that, which you can’t even get with the, with a wavy glass. I don’t know why I like wavy glass and some people might say I’d rather be able to see exactly through my window without any distortion, which, I guess I can understand, but I don’t, to me, it’s just like something there’s like an element to it that’s interesting. I mean, I love, I love that people can, like this house when we bought it was a hoarder house. And so I got the sense from the house that it was like kind of sad. It was a sad house that probably felt like it was gonna be torn down let’s say if the house could feel anything, that’s what it was probably feeling. And then instead it’s just been made into this beautiful house that it has a new family moving in and a month or so. And it’s going happen another a hundred years of life happening in it. That’s what excites me. I like that I can give the houses a second chance, which I guess sounds a little odd, but that’s the way I feel about houses.
Dennis Oz: Well then there’s another question, the quality of all the new materials are pretty different, right? Then that’s the question: How can you modernize the house without losing that vibe?
Katharine MachPhail: No secret that I really like walls. I’m a fan of walls. And I know there are a lot of people who don’t, they think going into an old house, and this happened near the house that we just bought because it’s in this old neighborhood and there was this old house and you look at the pictures of it for sale and it is completely stripped of any character on the inside, like completely. There’s hardly any walls left to the point where there’s just a fireplace sitting in the middle of the room by itself. What is that? I mean, what is that? That makes no sense that this fireplace is just sitting in because all the walls have been removed, I feel like we could keep some of the walls and luckily a lot of people are coming around to this after the pandemic or during the pandemic realizing that having separate rooms is kind of a nice thing. Because if you have to be alone with, I mean, if you have to be in a house together with other people, for like two years that you don’t all want to be in the same room for the entire time. I’ve been saying this for years. And so finally people are, are kind of agreeing with me and I feel like you could have, like, Sarah Susanka, her, not so big house. She talked about having, different public spaces. So you could have some spaces that are open to each other, but then have some private public spaces. So you can close the door and have a phone call, or you can close the door and read a book or watch TV or whatever. So to me, you can kind of keep the old vibe by thinking about the trim that was in matching existing trim, thinking about the rooms as being separate rooms. So you could open up, let’s say people always want to open up their dining room to the kitchen. Whatever, they want to do that and even now, it’s kind of funny. I don’t know if you’ve seen this, I’m sure you have, but that people have their messy kitchen and then their kind of display kitchen, because it’s too open to all the rest of it and just looks too bad when they have people over. So they have this. So anyway, that’s kind of coming around the full circle I think. But anyway, so doing things like keeping the trim and really thinking about separate rooms, not just blowing out the walls altogether, but maybe having a big opening, but it’s still two different rooms. That way you can have two different paint colors if you want. I mean, they can relate to each other, but not be all one room.. The key is walls really, and openings in walls rather than taking them out entirely.
Dennis Oz: We’re going to talk about smart homes Let’s say this is an old house, and let’s say you would like to turn this old house to a smart home. Is that possible?
Katharine MachPhail: Oh yeah. Yep. I’m working on that now. I mean, the smart home just means that you can, it might be automated or you can control it from your phone. I mean, it depends on what kind of system you get, but we’re working on this. I don’t even know what to call it. The new, old house that we’re getting, we’re working on that in terms of lighting, having automatic lighting, when you go into different areas and different layers of light, and the idea of being able to just push, have this little pad that might say party weeknight or whatever it says, you can call it whatever you want. And then you just push the button and the whole house goes to that. Whether it’s like the music comes on or the lights are in a certain, dimmer level and all that. And llights are a big thing about it. We’re getting shades that are going to go up and down based on what time it is to kind of keep the, the sun out in the summer and let it in, in the winter. Those will be automated, because it really does make a big difference if you block sun from going into a room, it will get less hot. We’re doing stuff like that. There’s like the whole audio thing we’re doing throughout the house and having this little home theater and this tiny little room that, we’re going to end up painting. I haven’t gotten a hundred percent, permission for this yet, but I’m really working on this angle of having it all painted like kind of a dark color. It was this nice, cozy little room with the surround sound and everything for watching movies and things. Just the idea of being able to, manage all that, like from my bedroom, like they put one in the primary bedroom so that you can set, push this button and get up and then your bathroom mirror is set to the right flattering tone when you get up. I mean, who wouldn’t rather look at themselves in the mirror like that, but besides all these cool things, I really will help with energy efficiency too, because it takes, appliances that aren’t being used and cuts off the electricity while they’re not being used and things like that, more practical things, but it is pretty cool.
Dennis Oz: Wow. It was amazing to hear your expertise about like these old houses, how to turn them to a smart one and also how to keep the old vibe. That was pretty interesting one. Thanks so much for that. I just wanna talk about your podcast right now, because you are also a podcast host and you have numerous different podcasts. Just listen couple of them. It’s like a library right there. So just wanted to ask you, what was your purpose? What was the motivation when you’re starting it? And who’s your ideal audience?
Katharine MachPhail: When I started it, the reason I started it is because I like to listen to podcasts. And when I thought about, my clients learning more or having an easy way for learning more about what they might need to go through for home renovation than without me telling them. Someone else that they could learn from, it turned out that there wasn’t really the type of podcast back. This was only in 2019, but it really wasn’t, available what I was thinking of. I decided to make it myself, because that’s kind of the way I do things. I decided to make it myself. And my first season, my intention was just to build this library of information and my ideal client at that time was just, a couple who like were building on for no payer actually. I was very specific, I wrote it all out, like who this person was, her name was Anne, and she went to the gym, listen, a podcast and blah, blah, blah. Now you try to get in front of your ideal client. The first year it was just a couple with two kids building onto their house for no pair. And then the second year or the second season, I wanted it to be more of like a DIY thing. So my ideal client was and it wasn’t all [00:26:00] DIY, but the concentration was kind of on that. And I had various guests who would talk about doing things yourself. And my client at that time was supposed to be a young couple who just bought a bungalow and she was a graphic designer and he felt like she doesn’t, he didn’t really trust her to do stuff herself. I know this is strangely specific, so that was my second season ideal listener. And then my third one, I wanted my ideal listener to be, or the person I was making the podcast for would be people who were interested in learning more about sustainability, like what could they actually do. Even though I’d had to add previous sustainability, it kind of gets it’s a little bit, like water in between the seasons. And then this is the fourth season and I’m basically using our new, old house as a case study to, to think about like next level renovation. So this would be more like I’m going to be talking to people about like cedar shingles, which very limited, maybe it’s very limited, people don’t really all want that information, but it’s pretty interesting to me and like geothermal heating. What does that mean? How’s it different from regular air pumps and heat pumps? A lot of the questions that I have this season are questions that I actually have. But one thing I love about doing it is that I learn a lot and I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know everything. I, we kind of joke about how being an architect means, knowing where to look things up. But anyway, so I really enjoyed meeting all these different people and hearing about work around the country. And, uh, yeah, so it’s been, it turned out, it was really fun.
Dennis Oz: It is really fun, I was looking at your episodes. You guys are having a lot of fun with the conversation and everything, and I really wanna give you a personal thank you, because all the things that you give back to the industry. These content is pretty important because the number, one thing that most of these homeowners really feel scared is lack of information. Another episodes that we are talking about using the correct language. I was hosting Duane Becker, from SaPre training. He was saying that the homeowners are just jumped out after getting the quote, or even talk to a kitchen designer or like any kind of an architect, because the language is very scary for them. Imagine that you are planning to spend like thousands of dollars and you are on the edge, not like a hundred percent sure, but you are not really sure if you wanna do it or not. Once you talk with these professionals: I’m bailing out. We don’t wanna do this. We are happy. We are happy. We are not gonna make an hassle.
Katharine MachPhail: Yeah. It just gets overwhelming.
Dennis Oz: That’s why the information that you put in place is really important. One thing that I see that you have a qualification method for your speakers. How do you do that? How do you qualify your speakers?
Katharine MachPhail: The reason I have the application and I recommend it to anybody who has a podcast is because eventually people will write to you and say, Hey, this is what I could talk about. And then instead of having to engage with them, just to take the time, first of all, but also just if they’re not a right fit, then just send them over to this application and [00:29:00] then, maybe they are a right fit, but they can fill out the application. And another good thing about the application is that it has all our in information on it. So when you’re writing up the show notes and all the rest of it, it’s all right there, which so that’s convenient. But, yeah, I just want to know how they heard about me and how like what they can offer to my audience. And a lot of times I say no. Believe it or not. Because I have a certain ideal client in mind, right? Like my fourth season is someone who’s purchased this old house and really wants to invest the money into doing it right. And its sustainably and blah, blah, blah. If that person’s not going to be interested in what that potential guest has to say, then I just say no. Like house flippers. A lot of times they would want to come on and I don’t feel like that’s really relevant to what I’m doing. . It saves you time and people just fill that out instead of calling you and they just fill it out and then you have the information, like, why should you be on my show? Well, then you tell me, and then I say, yeah, seems like a good idea.
Dennis Oz: Just to let the listeners know guys, we were going after Katherine. I mean she didn’t apply. We went after.
Katharine MachPhail: No, I don’t.
Dennis Oz: We messaged her several times and I’m glad that we listened her today. That was amazing. Thanks so much for joining me today.
Katharine MachPhail: Thank you. It was fun.
Dennis Oz: And also all the things that you give back to the industry is amazing. Thank so much for our listeners and that was the another episode of remodeler success podcast, Katharine any final words.
Katharine MachPhail: Oh, gosh, I didn’t know. I had to have final words. Any final words? Just really think about how much space you need when you are adding onto your house. That would be my one thing, because you can spend a lot less money, get nicer materials. If you don’t build this much.
Dennis Oz: Okay that’s why I was asking you this question. Maybe I asked the question wrong. Just wanted to ask you if anyone is interested in getting like a little more kind of detailed conversation with you.
Katharine MachPhail: Oh, those kinds of final words. Okay.
Dennis Oz: Ask you the question the wrong way. Sorry about that.
Katharine MachPhail: I thought those were pretty good final words, but, it’s Talking Home Renovations with the House Maven is the name of my podcast, and of course you can listen for free wherever you get podcast and that’s basically it. I also have a, another podcast called, Context and Clarity where I’m the cohost on and that’s for small business owners. So we talked to a lot of interesting people on there about, all things it would have to do with running a small business.
Dennis Oz: That was amazing, and that was another episode. Everyone. Thanks for listening. We’re gonna see you next time. Goodbye