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The Home Building and Remodeling Show
A groundbreaking platform that is reshaping the narrative on construction. Our podcast is dedicated to championing best practices, offering expert analysis, conducting insightful interviews, and providing valuable product recommendations based on real-life industry experience in the Home Building and Remodeling Industries.
At The Home Building and Remodeling Show, we are on a mission to drive positive change within the home building and remodeling industry, which in turn affects everyone worldwide. As we strive to create better and more affordable homes for all individuals, we believe it is crucial to shed light on the latest trends, innovations, and challenges faced by the industry.
Our podcast features in-depth discussions with industry experts, thought leaders, and professionals, offering our audience invaluable insights and strategies to navigate the dynamic landscape of home construction and renovation. From sustainable building practices to cutting-edge design trends, our podcast covers a wide range of topics that are shaping the future of the industry.
The Home Building and Remodeling Show
The Knowledge Exchange: Learning and Growing in Residential Construction
Ever wonder what really happens behind the walls of a renovation project? What contractors actually find during demolition, and why some renovation estimates seem so much higher than expected?
On this revealing episode, we peel back the layers between television renovation fantasy and construction reality. Host Chris Kirby, owner of three construction companies on the Alabama Gulf Coast, shares a valuable recommendation for Fine Home Building Magazine as an essential educational resource for anyone serious about quality construction principles. The magazine's detailed illustrations and expert advice sections make complex techniques accessible to professionals and enthusiasts alike.
The conversation takes an important turn as we discuss the alarming disconnect between homeowner expectations and construction realities. We share a recent experience where a client believed a $130,000 budget would cover extensive renovations, only to discover unpermitted additions, dangerous electrical systems, and code violations that would have doubled the cost. As professionals committed to safety and quality, we explain why walking away from certain projects is sometimes the most ethical choice.
Television renovation shows have created an entertainment-first portrayal of construction that often misrepresents timelines, budgets, and processes. We reveal insider information about how these shows are produced, including the fact that on-camera personalities often arrive after most of the real work is complete. This discussion extends to the challenges of working with clients who've watched countless YouTube tutorials but lack understanding of the comprehensive skills required for successful projects.
Ready to share your own construction journey? We're extending an open invitation to tradespeople, contractors, designers, and DIY enthusiasts to collaborate with us. Whether you have fascinating stories from the field, technical expertise to share, or simply want to document your renovation adventure, we want to help amplify your voice. Connect with us at thehomebuildingshow@gmail.com to join our growing community of construction professionals dedicated to honest education and quality craftsmanship.
The Home Building and Remodeling Show. Let's go. Welcome everybody to the Home Building and Remodeling Show. My name is Chris Kirby and I'll be your host. I am the owner of three construction companies on the Alabama Gulf Coast. The show is about residential construction. We're going to cover topics of home building and remodeling. Are you thinking of doing a remodel or building a home? Are you a contractor looking to improve your knowledge base or grow your business? Have you ever done a remodel project or built a home? There were so many things you wish you knew or that you could have done differently during the process. Then this show is for you. We break down the process of building and remodeling and how to have the best results during your project. Whether you're a DIYer looking for tips, someone looking to hire a contractor to do a project, or a contractor looking to expand your knowledge base or your business, welcome aboard. Glad to have you. Stay tuned.
Speaker 1:We kick off the show with my thoughts on home building and remodeling. I'll share best practices and talk about some of our experiences in business and out in the field. These shared thoughts and lessons learned are meant to help you on your very own journey. Let's go. I wanted to shake it up a little bit and I wanted to be able to give you some solid reading material, and I don't know what we're going to call the segment. Moving forward, however, I'm going to share with you each week different reading or different material that you can gain knowledge from, and this week I have here Fine Home Building Magazine. I love this magazine I've been subscribed to it for a long time but I also love to learn, and so I have quite a few different magazines and different books that I have learned so much information from. I'm gonna share with you once a month probably. It'd be tough to share a book a week, so this week we're going to focus and hone in on fine home building. They also have a podcast very professional, you know, compared to what we do here. They have a whole production team. So a great reading, fine home building, great podcast to listen to if you are interested in home building and remodeling. This is the June 2025 issue and they are talking about a more resilient roof. But one of my favorite sections in here Ask the Expert section of Fine Home Building magazine this week they're talking about installing pre-finished cabinet moldings, and not only do they talk about it and they answer your questions that you send into the magazine, but they also do a great job of the visualization and showing you not just in words but also in pictures of what it is that they're talking about, based on the questions that you submit.
Speaker 1:So for this month of May 2025, I am going to shout out continually the Fine Home Building Magazine. You can get a subscription. I'm not exactly sure what I pay for ours, but I always enjoy getting this every month in the mail and reading through it. And again, I'm going to continue to give you and share with you different books, magazines and material that can further your education and professional development in our industry, and so I look forward to giving this segment a name. I look forward to giving it a title. So I would love for you to write in email thehomebuildingshow at gmailcom. Let us know what you think I should call the segment where I'm going to be sharing this reference material magazines, books, reading material to further your education and once a month I'm going to give you a new one, and ours for this month is the Fine Home Building Magazine. Go like it, subscribe to it, go watch the videos, visit the website, and the podcast is amazing.
Speaker 1:Another thing me and Adam were talking about on the episode this week were some of the crazy stories in remodeling and we want you to get to know us and we want to get to know you and we want to tap into the audience, and so what I'm going to start doing is allowing different contractors and businesses even homeowners, if you want. If you've got a DIY page, I would love to check it out. We would love to check it out. We would love to bring you into the fold and shout out your company, your page, your business. We love this content and we want to bring it to the masses and we want to share our stories, your stories, our journey, your journey with everybody, while educating and empowering people to go into the trades, to take that risk of doing that home remodel, to become an expert in the field, to start a contracting business.
Speaker 1:We want you to be in our industry. We want to open the door to our lives and what we do every day, so it may inspire you to do your next project. Hey, and you know what? We would love to come and consult on that project. So we definitely are open to. We've had friends come here before and people that were strangers have come to our facilities and trained and worked and went to projects with us. We are definitely open to you coming to visit with us, training with us, going to projects with us, learning with us, and we would love for you to open your doors and allow us to come into your world.
Speaker 1:I would love to get with some contractors out there that are willing for me to tag along, ask them questions, put them on video and do some of their own how to's, because we are doing the best we can but we're not the experts in everything. So if you are open to that, please reach out to. Our email is thehomebuildingshowatgmailcom. Again, that's thehomebuildingshowatgmailcom, and send us an email. Let us know what type of work you do, and we'd love to travel to your site and just film, talk to you, get educated by you and, again, build those relationships. And this is open to anybody that is in the home building, remodeling, that's a tradesman electrical, plumbing, any of that type of stuff will wide open. If you are a DIYer and you've been doing your own projects and you've got a cool setup or a project you'd like us to be a part of, that you would like for us to see, please open that door, reach out to us at thehomebuildingshowatgmailcom and we look forward to hearing from you and we look forward to you continuing to listen to us and leave us comments, shares, likes, and let us know what you liked about the show, what you don't like about the show and what you would like to see more of, what you'd like to see less of, and share your story. Okay, we want you to share your story with us. If you want to come on the show, come on the show. We want you to be a part of it. We want to shout you out and we want to celebrate our industry together.
Speaker 1:On the show this week, there was another topic when we were talking about TV timelines. We were talking about realistic expectations as far as how renovations should go. We dove deep into some cool finds. Adam was telling us one of the craziest things he'd ever found behind a wall, and then we were also diving deep into you know, as an estimator, our lives are pretty interesting. As far as you know, it can be boring and monotonous because you know you've seen one kitchen, you've seen them all, but it's just not true because we have been to some sketchy areas. We discussed that on the show this week, adam shares a story of basically a homeowner that had an encampment going on and had some squatters on the property with some huts and different things, and we want to open the door for you to be able to share those style of stories. I'm sure there are so many more that you know you may have pulled up and walked into something crazy. I've had my share of those stories as well.
Speaker 1:So this week I wanted to ask you what is stopping you from starting your own company? This show is for home builders and remodelers, interior designers, people who are in the home industry in general, home service professionals and DIYers even. But I wanted to encourage you, I want to take this time during this episode to encourage you to start your own show, share your journey. Don't be afraid to get out there and put yourself out there. Okay, that's kind of how we started this show and it really started with befores and afters and going on our our sites and we would get a lot of clicks and likes and follows because our before and after reveals are so dramatic, from, you know, the before picture to the after and as we built on it, I decided I wanted to continue to deep dive and really learn about our industry and learn best practices, because I wanted to take in and soak in as much information as I could to make my company better and now that we're so far down the road in this journey, I am starting to get inspired by others that I'm watching. Some of my favorite videos come from other what I call construction influencers or home influencers and the HGTV types without the big brand of HGTV out there, doing it on their own on YouTube, on social media, and I just wanted to shout them out. But I also wanted to encourage you this week If you're listening to the show, don't be afraid.
Speaker 1:You can be the next construction influencer, you can be the next person going on TV or you can just be the next person sharing your story. You may have seen a lot that you have to share. You may have a great amount of experience, but you're scared to shoot the content and share your story for some reason. Well, whatever that reason is, get it out of your mind and get it out there. I am very willing to help you out.
Speaker 1:If you want to email the homebuilding show at gmailcom, you definitely can reach out if you have any questions and want to know any tips or tricks, and I'm not the best producer right. So I'm doing this all from my iPhone and at the house right now, and the videos we shoot are all done from my iPhone, with me behind the camera. And we had a media person, a marketing person, that did social media for my company, for my businesses, for a while, but we still do a lot of this stuff and self edit. I spend a lot of time producing and editing myself to get it how I like it. Ok, it can definitely be better. It can definitely be better, it can definitely be more, but we've got a couple hundred thousand followers just by sharing what's on our hearts and minds and taking the time to really dive deep into the industry.
Speaker 1:So, if you're listening to this this week, we definitely want to encourage you to share your home journey, and I would love to shout you out, call you out and put you out there. So let me know in the comments what it is that's stopping you from doing this or getting your journey started, and I really wanna encourage you. So please, please, feel free to reach out to me at thehomebuildingshowatgmailcom and let me help you out and get this journey started for you. And now we move into Shop Talk. It's the portion of the show where I bring in a co-host and we cover trending topics in home building and remodeling. Hope you enjoy, let's go. We went over there and you looked at it and they had a $130,000 budget, but they had an addition that wasn't permitted to be on there, so that would have had to come off, which is what would you say was about half the house. That would have had to been tore down and rebuilt and then get everything back up to code.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Nothing was in code there. Yeah, the ledge goal running to the main breaker box was just coming out from underneath the house. No conduit, nothing coming in to the breaker box and just. I mean the wires were uncovered that far coming out of the breaker, like if you you could get seriously hurt. It would have been there, wouldn't have been a cover on the thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah and so just kind of it's just a fire hazard. But you gave it an honest effort, like you. Came back you started working on the bid but then we started going through the pictures and then the inspection report and knew right away A, that's a tough city when it comes to building standards anyway, right? So you know, in our county there are the county inspectors, there's multiple city inspectors and that city is one of the toughest to get just a normal everyday remodel through because they're pretty strict with their standards. But there was no way we were going to be able to without. I mean, there is always a way. It's just how much money is it going to take and what he was expecting for the budget.
Speaker 2:He was 100 grand out.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So you know, adding 100 grand doubling the budget of what he thought was going to be the high end of his initial budget, it wasn't going to be worth it, plus the time, delays and headache. And we do that. So we try to communicate with the client and we'll walk away from things like that, Just being honest, saying hey, that's not for us and probably isn't for you either, Right?
Speaker 2:that house I went to with reggie was uh, that bedroom was one of the weirdest things too. What do you mean? What? What well, he told me.
Speaker 1:He's like hey man oh I know he was like gosh.
Speaker 2:He's go ahead and tell this story it smells like death in there, just so you know. And I was like you know, I mean can't be worse than anything I've ever smelled before. I'm not good with smells and I opened that door and I started gagging and about threw up on an old boy and I shut the door back real quick and he's like I got the measurements on that already. So it was the same thing, though, right, but something was dead or had been dead in there, and no people lived in there too.
Speaker 1:And what freaked me out was you. I thought you were telling me that the owner, or whatever, died and maybe had died in that room, and that was the smell, right, but it wasn't the owner had passed away but the kids had inherited or something.
Speaker 2:But these were all rentals, so she or he was not part of dying in there, Gotcha, it's just it smelled like.
Speaker 1:I thought you were saying they died in there and so when you went in there the smell of death was still in there. I was like heck, no, but you know that comes with the territory, all right. So going back to you said the homeowners thought it had good bones, probably had been told that what is the one thing that every homeowner thinks they know but they really don't know about construction?
Speaker 2:A lot of things.
Speaker 1:I said one thing.
Speaker 2:You said that was a lot there's too much tv and shows for people to watch, you know, and they're not getting a realistic view of how it actually comes together, because we have a friend that does it for a living. Yep, and she had told us, you know like.
Speaker 1:Oh, it's all rigged up, and ready it's already ready.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and when she walks on the set, she just sticks the last couple pieces of tile or whatnot. She didn't do any, so all the real heavy lifting is in the background. She knows how to do the stuff from speaking with her.
Speaker 1:So timeline right. One of the things you were saying is so that makes it look like, hey, on all these TV shows they never show, unless it's one of the like zombie homes or something. They just do all kind of crazy stuff, but they never show the real dirty stuff.
Speaker 2:No, they want you to see the before. It's like extreme home makeover. Yeah, they remodel it in a weekend, right, how do you? You know that's not real.
Speaker 1:Correct can Right, how do you? You know that's not real Correct. And so we see that so often where people have these preconceived notions on timeline and it kills me because they will get somebody that tells them, yeah, it can be done, because they want the work, because they want to win that bid. They will tell them, yes, we can do it. In that and don't get me wrong, like estimating is exactly what its name is, Estimating right, you are given an estimate. So even though we've done a hundred bathrooms, you know a hundred kitchens, whatever it may be, everyone and every scenario is different. So we've got to be very careful. And, yes, those TV shows kill it because they're just you're seeing, you know, months of work come together in a 30 minute episode.
Speaker 2:Those people do it one way and they think that's the only way it's supposed to be done.
Speaker 1:Yeah, true.
Speaker 2:But there's, you know what's this?
Speaker 1:But that's the 30 ways to skin a cat. Yeah, that's the YouTube warriors too, where they'll get on there. And don't get me wrong, we post our own videos so people may watch ours. There are so many different ways. Even with the way that we've been trained and we show in our how-to videos, we get thousands of comments on hey, you should have done this different or you could have done this quicker. This is a better tool to use for that. You know what I mean. Did you think of this? Which is great, because we look and read the comments and we, you know we use that feedback and to get better.
Speaker 1:But there are so many different ways in construction to do stuff and what we try to do is just like perfect our way. So if it's not working, we train to it, get better at it. But, yes, so timeline is one thing and then how to do something you know. So we've been doing it. The reason they usually call us is because they see something on our social media or our website, or just some work or referral social media or our website or just some work or referral. So there's a reason that they called us to begin with. But to get to those pretty after pictures as builders as remodelers. We just want to do our job.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:And so being micromanaged by the client is tough, and it happens more frequently these days because there's so many bad actors out there.
Speaker 1:There's so many contractors, or stories of contractors who have done this or that, and people to where you know they're cautious going in as it is. Plus, our projects aren't cheap, right? Our projects cost a lot of money, so they're already a little bit apprehensive. They may be giving you what they've saved up for years and years and years to get that done, and so they are going to be super cautious, but a lot of times it's just the fact that they've watched the YouTube videos and you can Google anything and Google is going to spit out a whole thing of how to do something. So you know, that's one thing too that's starting to hinder hinder us and what we do, and it does start to mess up with the flow. If you've got the client questioning, well, wait, stop, let's have a conversation about why you're doing what you're doing, right. That's another reason we do our how to's to, to reflect the process, but like if they're over your shoulder, nothing, I think, makes a contractor especially our workers, our team more nervous, yeah, or stressed out.
Speaker 2:You have to tell them that costs more for our audience.
Speaker 1:Yeah right, and you make those jokes with them, but also in the back of your mind, you're kind of like I'm not joking, please stop staring. You know what I mean? And sometimes we get a lot of them that are just genuinely interested, so they want to talk and they want to watch while you're doing it, but it's still like it's taking time and stuff. They're wanting to to grind it out, our team's wanting to grind it out, and you're in there looking asking questions. So, um, but yeah, so that's one thing like um, you know, homeowners think they know because they've watched something, but the reality is every video, even our videos, are cut up to be to best fit an audience. It's not the entire process everything's edited down yeah, absolutely so.
Speaker 1:just so everybody out there knows that's. That's one thing. You just be cautious when you're, when you're watching and listening, because we're cutting these things down. What took us eight hours is cut into a 30 second short or a one minute video. So there's so much more to the background and everything that we do. Um, and we're not going to bore everybody with the 55 steps we took. You know what I mean. We're just doing the highlights, so that's one thing that kind of gets us messed up.
Speaker 1:All right, so let's go to this. This is a good one, because we run into this quite a bit too bit too, but we do have a good person that does the plans for us and that has done the plans for us for dang near our whole time, which is eight years. But what is the one thing that you wish architects and designers understood more about these projects and the plans. Thanks for joining us today. As always, we are grateful for our listeners and your continued support. Please subscribe to our YouTube channel, follow us on social media via Facebook, instagram and TikTok. Get more info at our website, wwwthehomebuildingshowcom. And, as always, remember who we are are the home, building and remodeling show you.
