13 Crafting Your Dream Home: Part 4 - Floors & Features to Turnkey

In this episode, Landon and Drew discuss the different types of flooring, laminate, LVT, hardwood, tile, and carpet. They also talk a little about heated floors and concrete floors. They talk about trim, trim styles, and the different trim products for the interior of your home. They talk about kitchen countertops and cabinets, and price ranges.  Lastly, they talk about some cool extras that you can add on as finishing touches to your home, including Motion-sensor lighting, a water filtration system, lighting timers, and dimmers, the different ways to install and accent your house numbers, smart home features, smart appliances, and snow melt for your driveway (which is similar to in-floor heat but outside and very expensive). 

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Transcript

Welcome back, folks. We're going to continue our discussion about products and selections. And I think where we left off was flooring options and cabinetry and all that good stuff.

Or we were about to start that. Or we're about to start that. We just left off with paint.

We just left them hanging. Okay, but not hanging wallpaper. No, we're not hanging wallpaper doing that.

And we're not hanging people either. Me. So interior finishes.

Okay, so after paint, we're moving straight into hard surface flooring tile, laminate, hardwood, and some of the different varieties we got in there. Trim options. All right, well, let's kick her off with flooring.

So what we have LVT, luxury vinyl tile, or LVP, depending on there's different types. Luxury vinyl planking. Yeah.

So one benefit of this stuff is it's nearly bulletproof, it's waterproof, it doesn't scratch for nothing. Like, if you have dogs or anything like that, this is an awesome product to have because your dogs can run back and forth and you don't see any obvious scratches. Great.

If you have kids, too, they're tracking dirt around or scuffing stuff or whatever, you don't really see anything. Yeah. Mud stuck to the bottom of their shoes.

I mean, your kids are perfect, so they probably wouldn't do this, but my kids are definitely perfect. Definitely my kids. I'm sure they'd walk in with muddy shoes and rocks just embedded in them and all over the place.

And then the other thing, too, is it's fairly affordable and easy to install. Yeah, and that's part of the reason it's affordable. Right.

Let's see then. If you are going as basic as possible, you can actually just run this stuff through every room in your house. If you go into, say, a low end house where the builder didn't want to make too many decisions, you'll see that they'll just run LVP through the entire thing, through the bathrooms and master bedrooms and everything, kitchen.

So it's super versatile that way. It's actually what I did in my own house. And that was a choice because it's easy to clean.

We have kids, and so we wanted it to be easy. And my wife loves it because it's super easy to clean. You can take a swiffer, mop and just run through your whole house or vacuum on hard floor mode or whatever.

And I also like it also for our allergies, I have allergies and then one of my kids has pretty bad allergies. And so when you have carpet in the house, it's going to collect more. But if you keep your floor clean and it's easy to keep it clean with LVT, you don't really have as many allergens in the house.

Okay, yeah, that totally makes sense. And I suppose, like you said, with a swiffer, it's way easier than, say, busting out the vacuum every time you want to vacuum your floors and whatever. So it's a little bit easier and a comparable product.

But I consider slightly less quality is like a laminate type flooring. And there's different brands of this, but you can tell the difference between them because a laminate flooring is generally really hard, and if you took your fingernail and tapped on it, it would make a real specific clacky type sound, and it's a real hard material, but it's not waterproof, and it also scratches. So kind of an inferior product, in my opinion, to LVP.

I think it had its place about 15 or 20 years ago, but it's quickly dying off anymore. Its stuff has to be water resistant, at least, if not waterproof. Well, and some of the really cheap stuff of this laminate is you'd go into a house that's, like ten years old, and you'd see all the joints swelled up, swelled up, and all the finishes wearing off, and you think, oh, that stuff is garbage.

I remember some people I knew, they installed that. I think he'd gotten some sort of a deal or something on the product itself. So I thought, oh, what the heck, I'll just use this.

Ended up setting a plant down and watered the plant, and a little bit of moisture got and it just swelled up underneath. So you moved the plant, and now you got this big old ripple on your floor. Yeah, I don't ever push that myself.

If somebody wants a maintenance free floor, or affordable and easy floor as possible okay, how is that even a question, by the way? If somebody wants a maintenance free floor no, I choose to not have a maintenance free floor. Well, you know, what's funny is okay, that brings us to hardwood, right? Hardwood is not a maintenance free floor. It scratches.

You can get gaps and stuff like that in between the hardwood planks, and it requires resealing. Sanding and resealing every so often. I mean, depending on how much traffic you have, obviously it could be as low as five years or as many as 20 years or something.

Right. But there's something to say about the authenticity of real hardwood, in my opinion. You can't beat something that's natural and authentic.

Yeah, the problem with LVT is it's a mimic. You can't beat the real deal, in my opinion. Right.

So if you have say you have a bigger budget, and you're okay with refinishing your floors every x amount of years, and you don't have 58 dogs and kids running through your house on a daily basis yeah. Then hardwood is actually a really good route to go. And there's also different finishes you can put on hardwood.

You can do an ultra matte, which makes it look like a raw wood, like there's not even a finish on it. Or you can do a semigloss or a satin or whatever. One thing important to remember is the shinier the finish is, the more the scratches will show up, because you can see this smooth, shiny surface, and it reflects when there's a variance in the finish, a little divot or whatever, it's going to stand out like a sore thumb.

Yeah. And so a lot of people nowadays are actually going with a matte finish on their hardwood floors, which makes it look like raw wood. In fact, this is actually matte right here.

This is a matte finish hardwood that we put on the wall. And so because it has a matte finish, you don't see the imperfections as much as you would on a more shiny finish. Right.

And then tile. You own a tile. There's tons of tile.

You can do tile that looks like wood. You can do tight grout joints. You can do bigger grout joints.

You can do tile in your showers. You can do it on your floors backsplashes. It's a super.

You can do mosaics, in my opinion, slightly overrated. I get that it's a flavor that someone likes, but I feel like it's a done to death thing. Right.

Do accent tiles and all that. Yeah. It just gets super.

I don't know. Anyway, opinions? Just my opinion. Just my opinion, folks.

I'm more of a simple taste guy kind of guy. But no, that's a valid point. On the hardwood, you can't beat that authenticity of real hardwood.

But I do think that there's a certain lifestyle that has to be applied with that for it to make sense. Yeah, you definitely want to take that into consideration. But tile, what else? Tile.

Carpet, obviously. Carpet. It's the cheapest option, really.

Well, I think that carpet has its place. I like carpet. I especially like carpet on stairs or upstairs.

One of the big benefits of carpet is one is it doesn't feel cold when you walk on it. Tile and hardwood and LVT can also all feel a little bit chilly on your feet. Carpet always feels nice and warm and it's cozy.

Right. Another thing is, if you're doing it upstairs, it's quieter than walking on hardwood or a different hard surface. Can help a lot with sound in any app.

I mean, if you're going to have it in your living room or whatever, yeah, you better sound it, dampens, all that. And then what else is there? Well, a little bit more on carpet for kids, there's there's kind of like a pro and a con with kids and carpet. Obviously, it's easier to mess, like if your kids sucking on a lollipop in their room and they leave it on the floor and I get this sticky mess that's stuck in their carpet or whatever.

Yeah. But it is cheap. So if you're on a budget, I'd recommend going like an LVT in the main areas and then carpet the bedrooms because that's going to be your best bang for your buck.

And it's cozy, it's warm. But the disadvantage with kids is they're going to mess it up. They're going to be drawn with their markers on the floor and getting it on the carpet or pets who haven't been body pets or just hair stuff's, just in general, going to collect a lot easier.

I personally like that I'll take the durability over the comfort. But there is a lot to be said, especially for sound purposes, too, because my house is a bit loud, louder than it should be, I think. I have vaulted ceilings.

I have more of an open design, higher walls, and I have LVT it's louder, it's definitely louder. And if I had carpet in, that wouldn't be the case. But the truth is that's the most common thing that we're building these days, high open ceilings, lots of tall walls.

You got open floor plan, you got big windows, and then you have no way to dampen that sound, so then it can get loud. Furniture and curtains will help, but they can only do so much. I really need to get sound panels in my room.

Like, I actually need to get sound panels. It's so loud. If the kids are running around and screaming, it's like reverberating in your head and you just want to shoot yourself.

It is horrible. It is so loud. Or if we have a whole bunch of company over, we're entertaining a bunch of people.

You have the gals yaka yakin in the kitchen, which is open to the living room, and then you have the people in the living room talking, and then you have kids running around. You can't hear anything. Well, I'm sure the lady these could turn it down if they could.

Certainly. Certainly. Yeah.

I'm typically not the loudest one in the so sound is a big issue, and carpet is I think that's one of the advantages that carpet can bring. Another thing with carpet is a lot of companies, say, Home Depot, for example, you can get your carpet through Home Depot and they'll actually have somebody come out and install it for you. And they do it really fast and cheap and easy.

They just have a third party company come out and just knock it in in a day. And from what I've seen, they do a good job and they're fast our little pro. Yeah.

What else besides carpet? Well, I mean, you can get into a couple of different things with flooring. One of the things I was thinking about is a heat mat underneath your floor, electrical heat mat, or like, a lot of times, tile. We're putting that heat mat in, and the nice thing about that is, like I said earlier, tile or LVT and stuff feels chilly on your feet.

But you put this electrical heat mat in, there's a thermostat on the wall. You can set it to whatever you want. We put those in our master bedrooms sorry, master bathrooms as a standard on our homes.

And people love it. I'd highly recommend it. I did the same thing in my house.

And middle of the night, you're getting up to go use the bathroom or you're stepping out of the shower and it's a cold winter day and you step onto that warm tile. For the listeners, too, a lot of times they think those are like luxury items. For those of you who are on a bit more of a budget, those luxury items are like, oh, that's just yet another add on.

And it is, but it's really not that expensive. Some of those things are just worth some of those things are one, they're worth it. And two, a lot of those luxury items aren't even that expensive.

Really? Yeah. I'm not going to throw a number out there, but it's probably a lot cheaper than you might think, so or at least it's affordable. If you're going to do tile in a bathroom, which you should, in my opinion, then you better heat it.

Yeah. So something that we didn't think about was concrete floors. So we've actually done this a few times in houses where you power trial your concrete floor like a slab on grade type finish.

Sorry, slab on grade floor. And then power trial the finish. And then after you're getting close to moving in, you actually go through and you scrub the floors.

You just clean and clean and clean and clean. It's a pretty big job. And then you seal all the cracks and you just finish it.

You just put a clear coat over it. And there's two different ways of doing a clear coat. You can do an epoxy finish or you can do like a concrete sealer finish, and they're two different epoxy finish is by far stronger, but it's also very expensive.

So if you're very expensive yeah. If you're doing something that's maybe not high traffic, you can actually get by with doing this concrete sealer, just realizing that in a few years or whatever, you're going to have to reseal it again. And when you reseal it, it's pretty amazing because you'll start seeing scratches show up on your concrete and when you reseal it, they just disappear.

Yeah. It looks like a whole new floor. Yeah.

So that's pretty cool. During the concrete stage, you can actually do dyed concrete or acid stain, or you can do acid stain. And that's also more like in the finish time.

Keeping in mind that if you're doing a slab on grade build, I know we talked about foundations, a few podcasts back for the listeners who didn't listen to that, go back and maybe hear that episode. Slab on grade is rather than having a crawl space area underneath the house, it's just one slab, right. And you have, say, your plumbing and everything that goes in during that phase.

Well, one advantage to that can be that you don't have to do any flooring. You don't have to do carpet and LVT or hardwood or tile or none of that. You pour your concrete slab, which is your foundation, right.

And it's done. You acid stain it or you stamp it or you leave it finished or however you want to do it, but it's done. So one thing also that I was thinking about is when you have a concrete floor, you're generally going to be having a bunch of rugs, like rugs to kind of define areas and like your living room and your entryway and your master bedrooms and stuff like that.

So you'd end up buying big rugs. And one cool thing about that is you can switch them out. You get bored of that rug.

Well, you just get a new rug and it kind of gives you a little bit of variation that way. I've asked a lot of people what they think of concrete floors, like people who have lived on them and actually the opinion is pretty much the same. I mean, there's some mixed things in there, but by and large people agree that you don't really notice it.

I would argue that for kids it has its pros just like everything else has its pros and cons. One of which is if you have small kids, them learning how to walk and their phone and knocking their teeth out on the concrete, that's probably not a good thing. I hope they don't have too many teeth when they're learning how to walk.

Well, yeah, exactly. But the other advantage is that it's just bulletproof. Kids can smash on it, draw on it, whatever.

How do your dishes agree with that? Dude, if you're dropping dishes, there's a chance it's going to break. I don't care what kind of floor you have, right. It's going to break on concrete, it might not break on LBT, right? Yeah.

So let's move on from flooring. Do you think we covered flooring? I think it covers no, we don't want them to get too bored of it, you know what I mean? So flooring is in and we start on our baseboard trim and installing doors and doing casing around the doors. All your trim? Yes, trimming out of the house and after that building closets.

So baseboards. I don't know how in depth we want to go with each. Let's just talk about the different products, maybe what are the common ones? Right, you got MDF, which is your cheapest.

Then you have say a basic wood, maybe pine or alder or whatever. Poplar poplar? Poplar is a good paintable type wood. And then you have your higher end woods, maybe oak, cherry, that kind of stuff.

Yeah. So obviously, like you said, MDF is the cheapest and actually the easiest to install. What is the acronym for manufactured something? I don't even know.

I don't know. Maybe it has something to do with fibers. Could be manufactured dust particles.

Yeah, that's probably what it is. Actually, MDF is I know the contractors know what it is, but for the people who don't, MDF is a manufactured type of trim or material. It's not a true wood, it's not a solid wood.

It's not a solid wood. It's like lots of little particles that are compressed together. Yeah, it's a particle board.

There you go. Particle board. Thank you.

It's cheap and readily available. It's easy to work with. It's a paintable product that typically comes just pre primed, but it is not the highest quality product.

Well, and there's pros and cons to it, though. One is it's flat and it's smooth. Mason what is it? It's medium density fiber board.

There you go. Medium. There you go.

Thank. Google smart. Don't act like you knew that.

Smart contractors just don't even know what MDF is. That's hilarious. But anyways, that's okay.

Why do we need medium density? Meaning if you punched it hard enough, you might leave a knuckle mark, but that's not going to happen with oak. Right, okay. But as I was about to say, there's some pros and cons to MDF.

And one is it's a flat, smooth surface that doesn't require hand sanding and stuff to make it that way. It comes from the factory. Yes.

Easy to paint. And you don't have the wood grain of like, say if you painted oak, you're not going to be able to make that a flat, smooth surface without a ton of work and wood filling and all that. So if you want a flat or a shaped but I mean flat as in no wood character to it.

Right. It's a very sleek, minimalist looking you can get MDF that's like it's got a design molding, molding to it. So then it's easy to install.

I've never installed it not painted. We install it. It's pre primed, but I've never installed it in a way that it's left raw.

So you pretty much always plan on painting it. And that's actually part of the protection because one of the cons is it has a really bad water resistance. It'll soak water up like a sponge and swell up just like that laminate flooring.

Yeah. All you'd have is basically the same material. Actually, when you think about it, particle board or whatever, all you'd have to do to do damage to MDF is set.

Say you have an MDF window sill and you set a cup of ice water on it and it's sweating, and that condensation runs down the cup and lands on the MDF sill. That alone will make it swell. Simple solution, get some coasters if you're going to put your cups on your windows sill.

Yeah, that's a good idea. So that's one of the cons. And it's also cheap.

So that's a pro. It's used in most, I would say most houses that we build, to tell you the truth. We do wood trim, but it's probably like two thirds to one third.

Right. Or you'll do some main areas with this and then the focal points of the house you'll do with your nice trim or whatever. Yeah.

And then the other thing with painted MDF trim is the installer doesn't need to be as talented because they can butt some pieces together. Oh, there's a little gap. Let me caulk it.

And it's getting painted anyways, and you don't even know the difference. Yes. A monkey with a wrench could install some MDF.

I installed MDF. I'm not a trim guy and I did it. So if I can do it, you guys out there can do it.

That's for sure. Yeah. And then with wood, you're getting two different wood grains and wood, because it's a fully natural product, it's going to react differently to climates and stuff like that.

And it could open up gaps in the winter, could cause expansion in the summer when it warms up and reacts differently to humidity. The thing is, you're not generally painting wood. Sometimes on a real low grade wood, you will like a poplar or something like that, you'll paint it.

But I'm talking about a high grade something you're going to stain or you're going to keep the natural look of it. What's the point of painting wood? You might as well just do MDF at that point, right? Because you're not going to caulk it, because you're not going to paint it. There's a potential that those gaps could open up.

You hope not, but there's a potential for that. Wood moves. Yeah.

And obviously your house is climate controlled. It's just the fact that when humidity rises and drops and all these weather changes are happening, things fluctuate a little, even if your house is climate controlled. And then the other thing too, is sometimes people like to match their doors to their trim, or sometimes they like to mismatch them intentionally.

They'll do like a white painted trim and then do a wood door. And that's just a personal preference style. There's really not an advantage or disadvantage in that.

Well, one nice thing about MDF is if you're painting something, you can just select your colors and make stuff match or not match easily because you're painting it. Whereas if you're trying to match a set of windows that come with a wood frame and the grain is a little bit different on that wood because it came from Idaho. And then you get the same type of wood for the door, but it looks different.

Right. It can be harder to match and play with that. And I think that's a little bit expected when you're dealing with natural products.

You don't expect it to be perfect, I don't think. But I would say one of the problems that sparked a thought with that comment was sometimes they don't offer a wood species in a specific door. I've experienced this before we've gotten doors, the trim was maple and the doors were birch.

And they're slightly different. And the doors are manufactured. They're F flat panel door that they don't have any knots or anything like that in them.

So it looks like it's a real light colored wood. And then the maple right next to it is also real light colored, but they're slightly different. And if you knew your wood species, you would know that they're different, but if you didn't, you probably wouldn't ever know the difference.

So that can also be a challenge with dealing with they may not make all your products in the same type of wood, even if you may be going for that look, right? So how about cabinets, where's in my opinion, a pretty heavy subject. I think most people will put a lot of emphasis on their cabinets, or it's one of the main focal points of a house. People will OOH on some cabinets.

Right. So we both know you can spend a lot of money on a set of cabinets. And so really, your budget is going to be a big dictator.

But let's talk maybe we can talk about sort of the different grades and what you can expect to pay for a standard kitchen, say, and maybe break those out a little bit. What's truly the difference? Okay, so first I want to talk about the price variation between inexpensive and high end. You can buy some super cheap cabinets, even unfinished if you want, and you have to finish them yourself for one kitchen.

Let's just say this specific kitchen is $3,000. If you get nuts on the cheapest, unfinished standard cabinet that you can this cheapest cabinet you can find anywhere, right. And then you can go the opposite direction with the high end, ultra luxury custom cabinet for the exact same kitchen.

It could be instead of 3000 or 5000 or that super low price range you could literally pay, and I'm talking like this ten x ten kitchen, or just a really small basic kitchen. You could literally pay 60 $70,000 for that exact same kitchen, only with different cabinets and different options and pull outs and wood with this certain molding. Yeah.

Glass doors and backlighting. And you start adding all these things in and all of a sudden this super cheap home oops, I almost said that. Store brand, kitchen cabinet brand versus this custom.

It's just a vast difference. Yeah. Now, functionally, what's the difference? Okay, so if you go buy an in stock cabinet that's unfinished one, obviously you have to finish it yourself.

So you have to figure out how to do that. And if you don't know how, it can turn out really bad because finishing cabinets is actually pretty dang difficult. Fine art to it.

Yeah. Sanding it down and getting the finish just right or painting it. And however two, the way the glides operate, you have a type of glide that's a rail on each side with a little wheel, and then the drawer matches and it just rolls on those glides.

That's what the cheapest cabinets come with. A high end cabinet is going to have a really high quality glide that's actually undermount. Like Bloom is a really popular brand that is in high end cabinets.

Bearings. Yeah, they're bearings. The difference is you can blow on it and close it.

You blow on it and close. It has soft clothes and it feels luxury when you are using glides like that. And then to take them out, there's little catches on the bottom.

You can just squeeze them and pull it right off. And everything about them is way better, higher quality. And the durability too.

You load the thing down with silverware and suddenly you got 30 pounds of silverware in the drawer and it's not bending and flexing, it's still going to close the same. Whereas the cheap ones, they might sound like a witch being boiled in oil when you're trying to close it. Right, slam.

Your kids are slamming them because they don't have soft clothes. There's a difference. Yeah, definitely.

And then the quality of wood that they're using on the faces and how they assemble the drawers. So they might have a process to build the drawer faces that's naturally weaker because they're not focusing on the quality of their build, they're focusing on production and just trying to get as many cabinets out as possible when you're dealing with a cheap cabinet. And so when you buy a high end cabinet, they're really focusing on how they design and how they build, how their drawers are connected to the face.

Are they using dovetail or are they just gluing two edges together and putting a couple of brad nails through them, which over time you open and close and open to close and pretty soon you got some separation going on. And then you're talking about on cheap cabinets, they're doing particle board sides with literally a sticker over the particle board that looks like wood. The first time I seen it I thought this looks like it came out of a trailer house just trash.

Probably did. Well, it was in a store. And then the high end one is going to have an actual plywood side which has a wood laminate over the top.

It's not a sticker, it's actually wood with plywood sand, smooth sanded plywood in the same species that the faces are and so that matches. But yet another big difference is a custom built cabinet. They're going to come in and measure your house and ensure that all the cabinets are actually sized specifically for your house.

Even if there's size variations from the plan. You go down to one of your stores and just order cabinets and they have these sizes as they come in and that's it kind of a one size fits all type of setup. You're only going to get it's a 16 inch or you can go up to an 18 inch while my space is 17 and five eight.

Well, but you can buy this filler here. You can buy this little filler strip. Yeah, it just starts looking stupid.

Yeah, same thing goes for countertops too, by the way. You can. Get a premade countertop, cheap laminate.

Right? Or you can build a laminate in place. Sorry, I'm digressing. No good.

But it really comes down to you get what you pay for. But I do think there is a threshold when it comes to value. What do you really you know, everyone wants a function.

Most people I'll say most people want a functional kitchen of good quality that's going to last. Right. And obviously looks nice.

So in your opinion, how much are you looking to take the same kitchen example, how much are you looking to spend? Um, I would say a reasonable price. Price to value and quality. I would say for a ten x ten installed, everything done.

You shouldn't have to pay too much more than I would say. I'm just winging this here, but going off of memory, we're talking about 20,000, $30,000. So that's kind of the middle of the road.

You get some really good options. You got the soft clothes, you got some pull outs, you got the garbage pull out. You got oh, yes.

For anyone considering that option, by the way, definitely do the garbage pull out. Maybe. Let's describe for real quick.

You had a big drawer that's essentially a tall drawer. You pull it out and it holds two, like, 13 gallon kitchen trash cans. The beauty of it is your garbage is always out of sight.

You don't have a smell. It's part of the cabinet, and it's super easy to change and take out. And it's a simple drawer pull out system.

It's awesome. That's genius. So if you're thinking on doing it, my opinion, do it.

Yeah. But anyway, the other thing is there's all kinds of cool little pull outs you can buy that are in addition to your standard kitchen set that a lot of people don't even know about. Like spice racks? Yeah, spice racks.

But even more like niche down than that. Niche down. Niche.

Niche underneath. Where I come from is pronounced niche underneath your kitchen sink, for example, you can buy a pull out, and if you're trying to always grab your cleaning supplies back underneath the kitchen sink, there's sponges way back in there. Well, you can actually buy a pull out for underneath there.

And all your stuff sits on there. And you open the doors and you just pull the slide it out, slide it out. Or cutting boards even built in that slide out.

And there's all kinds of cool things like that. And those all obviously make the price go up. But the thing with kitchens is, it's a very expensive part of your house per square foot.

It's about the most expensive square footage because of the cabinets, because of the customization you can do to it. And everyone's spending their time there. You got your appliance package in there, appliances, they can be pretty affordable.

About $3,000 for a sit all the way up to you can actually spend over 100,000 for a set if you want, and kitchen faucets and your sink. And there's all this stuff packed into a small space, so it makes your square footage price. Go way up for that square footage.

Yeah. Again, the focal point of a house. Right.

A lot of people, at least in the US. The big focus in a house are your living area and your kitchen, where you're going to be spending most of the time. Bedrooms.

Know you go in there to sleep. Yeah. Master is a bit in my opinion, the master and the kitchen and the living room are the three most important areas when you want to put money into an area.

Right. The areas you use a lot and appreciate the most. Yeah.

And it's the areas, one, the master bedroom is where the owner is at. Right. Because they care about that the most.

Kind of the crown jewel. Yeah. And then the other two things is where your company is at.

Your friends come over and they want to I mean, you want to kind of give them that pop factor, like, oh, this is what we can do in our house. We can sit by a fireplace and we can have this big multi slide section door that goes out to the back patio. Right.

A lot of times people want to have these nice things so their friends can enjoy them with them. And in the kitchen, living room, that's where they do that at. Part of the first choice questionnaire is one of the questions on there is what do you plan on doing in this house? And we're going to help guide you in that direction.

Oh, I plan on entertaining or I have pets, or both, or I'm going to retire or whatever. Well, if you're looking to retire and you don't care and you're going to be traveling most of your time with your RV, then don't dump 15 grand into your whatever. So we kind of got a little bit off track.

Sure. So back to your example of the cabinets, the ideal kitchen or the good, best bang for your buck kitchen? Good quality stuff. You're looking at $20,000 to $30,000.

You're going to get some soft closed drawers. You'll have, say, quartz or granite countertop. You'll have well, and I was just talking about the cabinet specifically for that price countertops that obviously have to go on after the cabinets are installed, which leads us into the next phase.

Right. They'll come in after your cabinets are set and do like a laser template so they can go back to their shop and actually cut all your cabinets or sorry, your countertops off site. And then they deliver them there and assemble them on site.

And same thing with the custom. They are getting the exact, like, down at the 16th, the exact amount or exact size for your specific kitchen. So it fits perfectly.

Yeah. In our houses, we're always doing a solid surface. We pretty much never do a laminate type countertop, and that's simply because that's the market we're in.

It's not like it is the cheapest route to go, and it's really not that durable. They get beat up pretty easily. Yeah, there's a time and a place for that type of thing and the type of person who wants to use it.

I don't have anything really against it's, just that you get what you pay for. And we want to provide the top notch products in our houses. So solid surface is always, in our opinion, the way to go.

Quartz. Granite. Quartzite.

You can do like a coron type plastic type composite. There's a product called Rich Light, which is actually a paper product with epoxy and stuff in it and butcher block. So you can do tile countertops.

We don't personally recommend tile countertops. They're kind of an outdated thing. But we have been asked about it and we kind of encourage the people, maybe we can go this other route.

They're overrated. I grew up with a tile countertop, and by year four, you have three cracked tiles because you're slamming dishes on them and the grout is all nasty looking because you're prepping food on there. They're not as level.

Don't do a tile countertop. Yeah, sorry. 80s are over.

They've come and gone. So mid range countertops, you're talking about your standard granite and your standard quartz, and those are your mid grade all purpose type countertops. When you start specializing in rich light and these things, the price jumps up pretty quick.

But for your standard countertops, you're talking about like about $85 a square foot. We've installed them for much more than that. But you can go be very specific with a piece of granite that comes from Egypt and spend double that amount.

Well, it's granite. Well, yeah, but it's this specific type of granite that can fluctuate a lot, too. Maybe talk a bit about the maybe.

I think this is kind of common knowledge, but a lot of people don't perhaps know that it's not just the looks thing or the durability when it comes to countertops. But you think about cutting on countertops. You think about setting hot stuff, maybe a hot pan.

You do that on laminate, you're going to literally burn and char the laminate, which is horrible. Yeah. First of all, you wouldn't want to do that in a laminate period.

But the other thing, too is we actually don't recommend that on a solid surface either, unless it's like a composite type. The thing with natural stone, like a granite, you take a boiling pot of water and you set it on your granite countertop. That granite is real chilly.

It's kind of a cold stone. And then you take this boiling pot of water, pull it off your stove, and you set it on the counter and crack. Yeah, it can shock just like a windshield, hot and cold.

And so we always recommend using potholders for any of your surfaces, but there's certain brands out there that they actually promote like, hey, set whatever hot stuff you want on here. But rule of thumb, just always use a pot holder on your countertops and a cutting board when you're cutting. Nonetheless, some of the knives might not damage the countertops, but the countertop is going to damage your knife.

Right. Once again, how about staining? Yeah, so natural stone is porous and you spill something like, say red wine. Yeah, I mean, that's a common thing that stains, right? You don't wipe it up and it goes down into the pores of the stone.

You may not ever get that stain out. And so one thing you can do to help avoid that is seal the stone every year. Or if you do go the other way and you say you get a quartz countertop, which is a manufactured ground up stone glued together with the composite like an epoxy type product.

There's no pores in that. So it's waterproof and there's no staining. And so there's just a lot of things to consider when you're figuring out how you want to match your house with your lifestyle.

Okay, so let's say your average builder, that first choice is going to come across. What's the most common one that you see or what's one that you would recommend? Of all our most common is by far granite and quartz. Either one.

Okay. They're about the same as far as popularity, but people just have to understand and know what the effects of each one is. Okay, what do we else we got for I know we're getting down to the minute here for the episode, but there's still so much more to talk about with interior finishes.

Maybe we talk about flooring trim, cabbage, countertops, maybe. What are some really cool products that you think are maybe not as common but are available? Say for example, motion sensor for turning your lights on. You walk into room, boom, lights come on.

So in general, cool add on features for your house. Okay, let's see. This is a practical thing, but a lot of people don't really consider it is install a radon system while you're building.

A lot of times what will happen is someone it won't be considered while you're building. And then you move in and you keep noticing like kind of you can't really smell radon, I guess, but it's just that you just feel like an air quality. Yeah, you feel like it's like I don't know, it's like this 6th sense, like this poor air quality or something.

And you get stuff checked out and you learn that maybe you have radon in your house and radon is you can get rid of it fairly easy. But a lot of times people just don't consider that while they're building. And that's the easiest time to put in a radon system.

Well, real quick, give a fast rundown on what radon gas is. How it about? Radon gas is decaying organic matter from under the Earth, and the gases are coming out. And the higher the radon level, the more chance of causing cancer or the higher risk of cancer.

Sure. EPA, they have recommendations on the picilitres that is safe and what's not safe. And I believe it's like they call it like a four level.

Four. I don't know a lot about this stuff, but sure sounds like it. We've been talking pickle leaders.

The only pickle leaders I know come in a big liter pickle jar. So that must be like a unit of measurement. Yeah.

Okay. And we've had houses tested that were like, 25, and then you install the system, and it brings it down to, like, a two. Okay.

So it really just depends on what's under the Earth, and I'm sure that can vary all over the place. You know what, around here, we pretty much plan on it being in there. Really? In Wyoming, most houses have it, but some people just don't care.

I don't know anybody who's died of radon poisoning. Right. The other thing, too, is kind of cool features water filtration systems.

A lot of times, people don't want the flavor of city water. You can actually filter all that out with different types of filters, whether it's a charcoal filter, a UV filter, or sodium, even a paper filter. There's all kinds of different options for that to get really high quality.

Like Ro even. Yeah. Ro is a little bit complicated because Ro takes everything out of your water, every mineral, and it's just pure, pure water.

Right. The challenge with that is that when you take all that stuff out, it starts actually damaging your equipment. Your equipment like water heaters and faucets and even your pipes and stuff.

It requires minerals for it to maintain its life. And so with an Ro system, it takes all that out, and then you have to have a mineral injection system to reinject. Okay.

So if you're going to do an Ro system, maybe just specified for your drinking water and that's it, for example. Right, yeah. And the other thing, too, is Ro water is really not very good for you to drink.

Oh, yeah. Your body's not meant to have water that's that pure because it also can have effects on the inside of your body. Interesting.

So, yeah, basically, anytime you install an Ro system, you have to have we always recommend a mineral injection type system. That's funny. It's almost like it seems counterintuitive.

Let me get a dehumidifier, and then I'll get a humidifier to counteract the dehumidifier. Right. Well, the difference is you're taking out, say, you have a really high iron content, and your Ro system strips all that out.

You don't necessarily need to put all of it back in. You just need to put the right amounts back in. Okay.

So it's essentially a diversion of water filtration. Okay, we have cool light features, timers, timed lights. I mean, it's such a basic it's a $30 part.

And you can have all your exterior lights turn on when the sun sets, or you can shut them off when the sun rises. A lot of fixtures, too. You can even have it fixture specific.

Hey, I want these lights to stay off on a normal switch. But this one in particular, I want it to say, it's the floodlight above my garage. When I pull up, I want it to turn on, or when it gets dark, I want it to turn on and whatever.

Yeah. And some of these features you can get without even having actual hardwired in smart home features, you can do some of these really cool things, but they're actually super basic to install, and they don't require an entire smart home system just to have these cool features. And I think people a lot of times we'll just write them off like, oh, I can't get that.

That's a smart home feature. Well, no, all you really need is this. When it's innovative, it's pretty expensive or whatever, but as time goes, like, take the Led light bulb, for example.

That's extremely common. And the reason it's extremely common is because now it's affordable. Fun fact for any homeowner or building a home, doesn't matter if you're not buying LEDs, then start buying LEDs.

They're so much better than an incandescent. They're so much way more superior. Keeping those mineral mines open, right? There you go.

Mineral mines. There you go. Yeah, that's right.

Maybe we could do a full on episode about some smart home and electrical stuff. Sure, absolutely. What other cool features? So something that people don't generally think about is your house numbers.

And you go to Home Depot or you go to the store and you see there are three different little package number options you can buy. Well, forget all those. There's so many places online to get these really cool numbers.

And when somebody walks up to your door or wherever your numbers are installed, it really kind of makes a difference. Like, hey, that's unique. I've only seen the ones at Home Depot.

Yeah. Or even like a keystone design above your garage. Or maybe some people do like a metal plate that's cut out in the shape of an elk or whatever.

Yeah. Super basic things that you can get here's. The challenge with this conversation is your options are almost unlimited and where do you stop? Right? But one cool thing that people could consider around here, as long as they're okay spending a little bit of money is snow melt in their driveway.

You run a boiler system, smelt all your snow in your driveway, and you don't ever have to shovel it. If you're doing electrical, which I have a fair amount of experience with this with roof melt and with driveway melt. But if you're running it as an electrical system, it is quite expensive.

It works extremely well, it's very accurate, but it is expensive and it's expensive to run. So that's really probably not going to be for the common guy. But if you do have a boiler system that kind of opens your options up a little bit more.

Yeah, it is really expensive and it's also very expensive to run. But yeah, once again, the person buying that they probably don't care how much it costs. Right.

You can do basic features like adding what am I trying to say here? Designs into your house plan. When you're doing the planning stage that actually don't cost any money, but add certain characteristics that you might be looking for. Sure.

The way the wall here's an example. One time we built this house in the hallway. The front door opened into a hallway, and the hallway went back towards the main area.

And instead of having a straight hallway, the architect actually put that wall at an angle. And when you're walking in, it feels a lot more inviting because you're walking in to this hallway. It's like widening as you walk.

Yeah, it's widening as you walk down. It doesn't cost really any money to add that wall at an angle, but it has to be designed in, and it's a feature that people can actually do. So planning ahead is critical.

Yeah. I don't know how long you want to go on. We could literally talk about features for days.

Why don't we call that a wrap? I think most people with a few keystrokes, they can look at any kind of feature they want, but just some common stuff that we covered. Yeah, there is a lot that you can do. Yeah, no, that sounds good.

Plus, we're probably out of time. Yeah, I think we're rocking 50 minutes now or what are we at Mason? Okay, let's wrap we're up. Until next time.

See you later. Bye.