Watch the Video on Affordable Remodeling (Fernando Pages Ruiz)
HOST: How do you define affordable housing?
RUIZ: Well Scott I define it as a house you can go to sleep in. (LAUGHS) No losing sleep about your mortgage payments, your rent. Affordable, of course, is a relative term, but it just means no financial distress. The problem with that question is all of us -- almost all of us can achieve affordable housing. There is someplace in town that you can afford really comfortably, but that you don't want it. You want a little more for your money.
HOST: Yeah. And what are some of the key considerations in affordable housing?
RUIZ: Key considerations? Well -- Of course affordable housing has been achieved a lot just through financing -- you know, cheap financing. But for me one of the key considerations is it's house that has what you want in it amenity-wise, features-wise, floor plan-wise, but again it's in your budget. So I mean to me the key feature is getting what you want at a price you can afford.
HOST: And if you want to stay in the house, you want to have something that you can afford also. (RUIZ: Yeah) Okay, now you've got a new book on affordable housing. You want to tell us a little bit about that, your decision to write this?
RUIZ: Well this is affordable remodeling and it sort of came out of a book I wrote on affordable homebuilding -- a lot of friends asking me questions, and most of them were about remodel. "Hey how do I do this? How do I save money on that?" And it really came out of conversations with friends where, you know, I was able to save them quite a bit of money just with my knowhow. And I thought this is -- this is information people know and its stuff your contractor won't tell you.
HOST: Right. So what are some of the things that people can do in remodeling without losing quality and style and still be affordable?
RUIZ: Well affordable and cheap are two different things, right?
HOST: (LAUGHS) I'm cheap!
RUIZ: Well I'm cheap, too -- but with quality. So quality is job one. That's the first thing. And the other is -- The book's about remodeling. You notice it doesn't say "Affordable Additions." I mean I think the first thing is realize that the least expensive way to build or to add on is to modify within your footprint. Modify under the existing roof and over the existing foundation. As soon as you've got to start adding on you're spending a lot of extra money.
HOST: You've got to start moving dirt. You start adding foundations. Give us a couple of tips for people that want to remodel affordably. What are the main tips?
RUIZ: Well one of them is always add by subtraction. That's one of my favorite tips. I always say that the most affordable end of a pencil is the eraser. Use it. And I like to draw out a whole house on paper -- you can have a draftsman do it -- and then you look at it from a bird's eye view. You'll see things you've never seen in your house. You have to define what's structural -- what stays -- and what isn't -- in other words, what you can remove. And a lot --
HOST: (OVER) There's a lot of space that people can use, but they may not see it, you know from -- walking through their house. But they may be able to see it from that plane view.
RUIZ: Yeah, you get lost in the maze. But when you see it from a bird's eye view, possibilities, you know, pop up that you wouldn't know. Also even repurposing rooms -- I like to draw the plan and not put any names on any room except the kitchen and bathroom. (HOST: Good idea!) So it used to be the living room? Hey, maybe it's your new bedroom.
HOST: Great tips! It's a great book! I can't wait to get through it.
RUIZ: Well good. Thank you very much, Scott.
HOST: Tell us about the PATH Concept House and some of the flexible design features.
RUIZ: Okay, this was a really interesting project. And one of the things that we discovered -- PATH -- You know PATH, the Partnership for Advancing Technology in Housing. Through some consumer surveys we discovered that one of the things that people really don't like about their houses is the fact that the houses don't change. Their lives change not even over the span of their life but even within the year. You know, a mother-in-law comes to visit, kids leave, come back.
So life has a lot of changes in it. Houses are fixed. And so one of the things people really wanted was a house that they could adapt very easily to changes in their lifestyle, changes in their circumstance. Well how do you do that? Well we began to think about it and we came up with a lot of ways -- ways like, for example, we have wireless switching throughout the house. That means you can move --
HOST: (OVER) I've seen that! A great idea!
RUIZ: It's fabulous for remodeling, incidentally. It's a lot cheaper than hiring an electrician to -- to run wires up to a new light. But you can move the lights around in this house and we moved the switches around. So if, you know, you want to reconfigure a bedroom or something, you can do that. Change the décor in your living room -- You can do that and not have to worry about the fixed things like light fixture locations.
Very cool! We invented a new product -- Actually we worked with a New York wall company and developed a movable wall system. And this is a wall that you can actually -- It stands firm. It's just like a regular old wall in your house, but in a couple of hours you can take it out, put it back in, create a bedroom where there was a dining room. And so it gives you a lot of flexibility in the sense you don't have to call the contractor. Our house that we built -- this PATH house -- goes from three bedrooms to seven -- three bedrooms to seven without a contractor.
HOST: So I guess you can also take the mother-in-law wall out if you wanted her to leave. (LAUGHS)
RUIZ: Yes, you can. But, you know, tax and turkey season, the two times you use a dining room? Well you should have a dining room those two times of the year.
HOST: Yeah, put the walls up and you have it.
RUIZ: Then you got it. Take them down and you've got a huge rec room. [END]
Watch the Video on Affordable Remodeling (Fernando Pages Ruiz)
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