[00:00:00] Steve Griggs: It's around the house. Lighting is by far one of the most bang for the buck for your backyards, right? Low cost, the effect is crazy. If it's done, it looks beautiful. Most of the time when you're entertaining during the summer, you're hanging out at night. Having a barbecue, sitting around the fire pit. And the light, the lights in the winter, at least where I am in the winter, Snows and when the leaves fall off the trees, it almost looks like

[00:00:26] Eric Goranson: artwork.

[00:00:27] Eric Goranson: Yeah. That you talk about like uplighting and stuff when you're trying to grab the tree branches and stuff and give it that

[00:00:32] Steve Griggs: depth. Yeah. There's there's backlighting, there's uplighting, there's downlighting. You don't want to like, you want to make it like along the house in the front. You shine the well lights up to access the soffits and all.

[00:00:42] Steve Griggs: You don't want to just go out there and stick lights everywhere. There is a little technique

[00:00:44] Eric Goranson: to it. Yeah. That's why there's great lighting design out there that makes it look spectacular. But. Man, if you get good quality lights and like, when it

[00:00:52] Steve Griggs: comes to remodeling and renovating your home, there is a lot to know, but we got you covered.

[00:00:58] Steve Griggs: This is [00:01:00] Around the

[00:01:00] Eric Goranson: House. Welcome to the Around the House show. This is where we help you get the most out of your home through information and education. Thanks for joining us today. We have got a special guest here in the studio that I've been looking forward to for a while, having him on. It's a legendary designer.

[00:01:16] Eric Goranson: This guy has been killing it. You've seen him on television shows out there. He is all over the internet with his wisdom. Steve Griggs, welcome to around the house show, man.

[00:01:25] Steve Griggs: Glad to be here. Nice to have me.

[00:01:27] Eric Goranson: Thanks brother. You have been since the beginning of time building in your entire life, building and designing beautiful places.

[00:01:35] Eric Goranson: I think you were born with a shovel in your hand. I love what you're doing out there, building great spaces, man. I've seen your videos. I have seen your stuff online and it is absolutely stunning. And I wanted to talk about that today. And then maybe our listeners get some wisdom out of you when they're tackling their project this spring.

[00:01:54] Eric Goranson: Sounds good. All right. What got you started in, in landscape design? What got you going into [00:02:00] this?

[00:02:01] Steve Griggs: So basically I like to see it as my art form, right? So some people paint, some people draw, I create backyards. I walk into the backyard and I see the vision, how I get started, whatever, like high school, took the aptitude test, checked all the boxes, couldn't sit in an office, went to landscaping school, studied all that, and then the rest is work for a guy for a year and decided.

[00:02:23] Steve Griggs: And I'm not going to be somebody else's slave. So hence 40 years later, I'm still here. That's a bridge, right?

[00:02:31] Eric Goranson: You didn't start out at 13. I was pushing the lawnmower around the neighborhood, knocking on doors, trying to get stuff going. I can appreciate that. Cut the

[00:02:39] Steve Griggs: grass and college mowing grass for a landscape company.

[00:02:44] Steve Griggs: Oh yeah, there was no free lunch in my house. No, my dad was a construction worker in New York City, so there was no,

[00:02:50] Eric Goranson: come on. Sleeping in on a Saturday did not exist

[00:02:52] Steve Griggs: in your world. No, we had four brothers. Each one got to have to cut a quarter

[00:02:56] Eric Goranson: of the lawn. We had four boys in my household too. I get [00:03:00] this. I get this.

[00:03:01] Eric Goranson: Yeah, yes.

[00:03:02] Steve Griggs: He didn't do his side. You didn't do your side. It's

[00:03:05] Eric Goranson: cool. Yeah. Yeah, I actually, my first gig, I was like 13, I had a job for, it got to be too much because all of a sudden I had this real estate agent that figured they could pay me cash to go around and mow all their abandoned houses that people had moved out of.

[00:03:18] Eric Goranson: And so I was walking that my dad's lawnmower for miles getting from house to house and my dad's you're wearing the wheels out of the thing, man. And I'm like, let's. I'm making money. Yeah. Back then you cut somebody's grass. It was good money. And then, then they'd have the, nobody'd be watering or something.

[00:03:33] Eric Goranson: So they'd pay me to go over and water the lawn or get the sprinkler system going and that's how I got going. But. Oh, so,

[00:03:39] Steve Griggs: so you were

[00:03:39] Eric Goranson: working full time in high school. So I get it. I was like, all right, if I'm going to do it, I better get after it. Absolutely. You get, you really just got into this cool space of designing just.

[00:03:55] Eric Goranson: Beautiful spaces. And there's some designers that I look at coming from the world of interior design. I can see it. [00:04:00] There's some people that quite frankly, over design it, but I've noticed with your projects that it looks natural and it's not over the top, overly done. It just looks like a natural space.

[00:04:11] Eric Goranson: It just, it's something you notice, but

[00:04:13] Steve Griggs: don't notice it. Yeah. So that's one of the techniques we like to use is that I tried to explain to the client is that. Pretend the house wasn't here, right? Pretend we built the house around the landscape. Instead of the landscape around the house, just flip it, right?

[00:04:27] Steve Griggs: Whether it's a rock outcrop or something, just flip it. You want it to make it look natural. And all my job really is, is to guide the client up the mountain to show them the best way to get what they really envision. I'm not there to build a monument like some famous architect wants to build a statue of himself in midtown Manhattan, right?

[00:04:44] Steve Griggs: It's not what it's about. Right. So that's, it was worked for me for the last

[00:04:48] 40

[00:04:48] Eric Goranson: years. Yeah, I get that. It's like the best design is the one that doesn't go noticed. Cause you just walk out and go, it's stunning, but you don't go, wow, that's crazy.

[00:04:56] Steve Griggs: Yeah. You want to let it just naturally flow. Of course you have some of those [00:05:00] ostentatious ones that you see there, like in California and Vegas, but here in the Northeast, they like to keep it toned down a little bit and blend with the natural.

[00:05:07] Steve Griggs: Yeah,

[00:05:07] Eric Goranson: that's what we do here in the Pacific Northwest as well. You just, it's just got a fit look, right? It's. It's the ones where they start putting the palm trees here in Portland and Seattle that I'm like, Alright, this isn't Hawaii, folks.

[00:05:18] Steve Griggs: Yeah, it has to all flow and you have to look in place and it looks like it's always been there.

[00:05:22] Steve Griggs: So that's to be a good tip, design the project, the landscape was there first. Nice,

[00:05:27] Eric Goranson: that makes sense. One of the biggest things I think we're seeing now is with people staying home more often. I think the whole COVID thing got us going into outdoor living a lot more. What kind of recommendation do you have for privacy?

[00:05:39] Eric Goranson: Because all of a sudden, especially with some of these newer developments out there, there's six or eight feet between houses and people want to build this. Beautiful outdoor landscape, but they're looking in three of their neighbor's houses while they're sitting out at the barbecue.

[00:05:52] Steve Griggs: We come across that a lot.

[00:05:53] Steve Griggs: Like everybody loves their neighbors, but they don't want to see their neighbors. Oh, hi, Mrs. Jones. Thanks. But no, listen, [00:06:00] I need to block them out. Okay. That is definitely securities. Number one, privacy is number two green giants, right? Northwest tree, green giants, it's a cousin for the red cedar and they grow super tall.

[00:06:14] Steve Griggs: Those are very popular. It's a green giant arborvitae, put those between your properties and they'll grow three feet a year. That is your fastest way to get privacy between the neighbors. So you have your typical fences and all, but people like to have the greenery between not just a wooden fence,

[00:06:27] Eric Goranson: right?

[00:06:28] Eric Goranson: Yeah. And then that way it's not seasonal where you're like, Oh, lost the leaves. Now I'm looking at my neighbors. I'm jumping in the hot tub.

[00:06:34] Steve Griggs: Correct. And don't buy them too big because they grow very fast. Everybody's like you buy a seven to eight foot. It's 300 bucks. You buy a four footer. It's 80 bucks and they grow fast.

[00:06:42] Steve Griggs: Hey, I have a lot of clients that say, I don't want to see them starting today. So, you get a bigger plant. Absolutely.

[00:06:49] Eric Goranson: Absolutely. Have you ever done this, and I've noticed, speaking of bigger plants, I noticed in the northeast, there's a lot more of it than here, but I noticed larger trees seem to get transplanted up there than here in the [00:07:00] Pacific Northwest.

[00:07:00] Eric Goranson: I

[00:07:00] Steve Griggs: don't know why that is, but we can certainly transplant a 20 foot tree, 8 inch caliper means round, they have certain tree spades that are able to take them out and move them. Time of year is important. You want to do it like in late fall or early spring, but yeah, it said it's cheaper to transplant it to buy a new tree.

[00:07:17] Steve Griggs: I think we

[00:07:18] Eric Goranson: just don't have enough businesses around here doing that, which is probably something that we need to, because I see on this old house, for instance, I'll see the, a semi truck back in with the spades on the back. And I'm like, wow, never seen

[00:07:27] Steve Griggs: one of those in my house. I'm surprised out there. You don't have that because it's stuff grows so fast.

[00:07:32] Steve Griggs: Maybe, I don't know.

[00:07:33] Eric Goranson: Or just something that we just haven't invested in it out here. I think it's probably a good prime for somebody to come out and do as far as a landscape company to invest in one of those, just haven't seen them around for some reason on my area, it's a little tougher in my. Local neighborhood.

[00:07:45] Eric Goranson: Cause we got rocks, a size of VW bug. So you're gonna have a hard time getting that in there, but most other places you could get away with that. Huh? Interesting. Yeah. Anyway, just one of those things you notice in the Northeast that it's a little bit different than out here in the Pacific Northwest, but pretty cool.

[00:07:58] Eric Goranson: What's your best [00:08:00] great thing. If you've got a homeowner or a remodeler or a builder, and they're sitting here looking at it going, I'm going to start a project this spring. You're almost late on the design side of it right now, but how should somebody get started on that?

[00:08:12] Steve Griggs: It's not too late, but it depends on you can get a design going.

[00:08:17] Steve Griggs: If it's a basic planting job or patio, you can get that banged out. Once you start getting into like custom hot tubs and swimming pools and waterfalls, that takes a little more planning. Right? So you want to get a design like you would think about it. I find that most people understand the interior of the house better than the exterior.

[00:08:33] Steve Griggs: So when I explained to them, listen. They don't understand the outside design. I said, think about it as a floor. Think about it as a wall. The floor is grass, a patio, the floor in your house could be tile. The walls are walls like in the house. The walls here can be Arborvitae screening and the ceiling could be like a pergola or, or shade tree or something like that.

[00:08:54] Steve Griggs: And then lighting, same thing with lighting. So they can, it's easier for them to relate to the inside because [00:09:00] they just have done it more

[00:09:01] Eric Goranson: than the outside. Yeah, that makes sense. And we end up having a lot of the same schedules, things taken in. You got to get one in front of the other, right? You can't be doing things out of order.

[00:09:10] Eric Goranson: Cause I think that seems to be one of the things that I've noticed on DIY projects outside is. People get these things outta order where they put in the beautiful sod lawn and then have to take all the machinery across it to get to the other side when they're doing something else.

[00:09:21] Steve Griggs: It's also like when they go to the Home Depot and they buy a bunch of plants and they pick one of everything 'cause they just like 'em when they plant it.

[00:09:27] Steve Griggs: They don't realize that white pine's gonna get 80 feet tall next to your front door. So you have to end up ripping it out. You got, you have to a little bit, know a little bit about the plants and how they grow in order to do it

[00:09:37] Eric Goranson: yourself. Man, that is, that's a good call. I've got a guy around this corner.

[00:09:40] Eric Goranson: There's a little farm store in the corner from me here that's uh. That, uh, has got a really great horticulturist in it. And I know my plants fairly well, but I just go in and lean on Craig in there. Cause that guy knows more than, than I've ever known. And it's awesome because I can just lean on somebody like that.

[00:09:56] Eric Goranson: And he'll go, no, no, this is what you do. And then you've got the [00:10:00] expert advice. He knows

[00:10:00] Steve Griggs: what they'll do. Yeah. He'll know, you know, if they're going to grow tall, the deer are going to eat. And we have a lot of deer around here and they eat all the plants. You have to be very careful on the selection of the plants.

[00:10:10] Eric Goranson: Yeah, great example. I was just down at my brother's beach house this weekend and he's doing a renovation there. We're talking about the grass and I'm like, man, this is going to be a rental. Do you want to take care of grass out front? He goes, you forget we have a herd of elk every other day in the front yard.

[00:10:25] Eric Goranson: You don't mow your lawn here. Oh, you started laughing. I'm like, excellent point. Forgot about that. Forgot about the natural beings.

[00:10:32] Steve Griggs: So you have elk? You have elk out there, really? We have just a whitetail deer.

[00:10:36] Eric Goranson: You have elk with the horns the whole place. Oh, they're massive in Cannon Beach, Oregon out here.

[00:10:40] Eric Goranson: Yeah, to the video cameras every day. His cameras go off like it's somebody's breaking into the front. No, it's six elk in the front yard eating grass.

[00:10:47] Steve Griggs: Is there different times when they're like, well, more

[00:10:50] Eric Goranson: popular than others? Yeah, I think in the wintertime they come down a little bit more, but we'll see.

[00:10:53] Eric Goranson: We just picked that house up in the fall, so we'll have to see what the cameras do, but it seems like they're in town. It's almost like a resort [00:11:00] town in a way that the elk just hang out there because they know there's food and there's green grass and it's easy for them.

[00:11:04] Steve Griggs: Yeah, no one's gonna, no one's gonna, they're just saying, yeah, that's

[00:11:09] Eric Goranson: one of the biggest challenges I had in the Pacific Northwest too, is I'd plant beautiful roses in the front yard.

[00:11:14] Eric Goranson: It'd be gorgeous. And I'm like, Oh, I can't wait for these to bloom in the next couple of days to come out and they're all gone. Cause the deer went after

[00:11:20] Steve Griggs: him. Yeah. So they'll eat the roses too. Sure. They'll eat the buds right off them. Yep.

[00:11:25] Eric Goranson: Yeah. Are there plants and stuff that you design around that when you get into those kinds of natural areas?

[00:11:29] Eric Goranson: Cause I know in the Northeast you've got that similar problem. Yeah.

[00:11:31] Steve Griggs: We have that. We have, we don't forget we're a coastal state. We have to design for the beach, healthy air in some areas you have to design for the animals. You have to design for the rocky climates. Yeah. Each little micro micro environment has its own set of specific plants that do well.

[00:11:46] Steve Griggs: And people don't like low maintenance, high maintenance is it's just like designing inside. Most people want a lot of color. They don't want bees and they don't want a lot of maintenance. It don't work. It doesn't work that way. So you have to, you have to

[00:11:59] Eric Goranson: [00:12:00] educate. Mother nature. Yeah. You can't put color in a lot of color and go, Oh, where are the bees and the wasps and the hornets coming from?

[00:12:07] Eric Goranson: You just put up. Yeah. So four star party out there. What do you expect?

[00:12:10] Steve Griggs: Yeah. And the flowers don't last that long. So you want to, you, you can create color with different shades of green, different type of leaf structure. You can get that color by designing with the right plants. It doesn't have to all be flowers, right?

[00:12:22] Steve Griggs: You can mix it up with the different textures and colors of the

[00:12:26] Eric Goranson: leaves. Makes sense. Do you do a lot of artificial turf up there? Is it still mostly good natural grass?

[00:12:31] Steve Griggs: No. Natural grass, Kentucky blue sod, fescue sod. That's awesome. I find that turf is, I'm surprised how hot it got. It's hot. Like

[00:12:42] Eric Goranson: my, you can't even walk on it.

[00:12:43] Eric Goranson: Yeah, my, one of my best friends lives down the street here and he has, gosh, he's probably got 4, 000 square feet of it in his backyard with no trees. And I, every time I'm out there standing, I'm like, man, it's like, it was like asphalt out there.

[00:12:57] Steve Griggs: I'm very surprised how hot I was a little [00:13:00] taken back how hot it actually got.

[00:13:02] Steve Griggs: I noticed that the first time when we were playing soccer with the kids on the soccer field, there was the artificial turf field of real, I'm like, man, it's super hot down here. And the heat just comes

[00:13:10] Eric Goranson: off that. Yeah. I'm sure they'll get better with it.

[00:13:12] Steve Griggs: Good thing. You don't have to water it. You don't have to cut it.

[00:13:15] Steve Griggs: It does. It

[00:13:15] Eric Goranson: definitely has a lot of benefits. It does. Yeah. On my neck of the woods, I've got an area that I designed off the side of my house for my dogs with artificial turf. So, if they want to go out and use the bathroom in this little area, they're not, I'm not having to chase them around the whole backyard and figure out where they went to the bathroom, but I've got this little area.

[00:13:31] Eric Goranson: Man, when you've got fir trees and stuff out there, that is a maintenance nightmare. When it's grass, it just breaks down in the grass, but. Every few days I got to get out there and get that thing cleaned up from the needles and stuff that just fall out. So they don't break down. So it's just like having something land on your living room carpet.

[00:13:46] Steve Griggs: So what happens with that turf? When the dog urinates on it, like, where does that go into the gravel?

[00:13:52] Eric Goranson: I get a sand and gravel base below it. And then I go through and throw out some enzymes and stuff. Every week or two to help break it [00:14:00] down. I've got just a hose end sprayer. That's easy for me. I can just lean over the fence with and spray it down at the enzymes and it helps break it down and, and, and that way it doesn't smell, but it's worked out really well in my area because if I put grass out there, one, it's not going to do well, but two, my whole property is full shade.

[00:14:18] Eric Goranson: So it's just, I can't, it's not going to live. So for me, it works out really well that way. And it's a lot easier to clean stuff up and worst case you get the hose out. You can clean up a mess out there, but being plastic, it doesn't really pick up the dog smell that you would expect it to. So it does pretty well with that.

[00:14:35] Steve Griggs: No, I find interesting that people are like, Oh, save the environment. You don't want to water your grass and all that. But then I'm like, what do you do when that turf is expired? Like, where does that go to the landfill? It's like, I just say, I just like, where does it go? You're saving water. I get it. But then you.

[00:14:52] Steve Griggs: After five, eight years, whatever life is, they roll it up and they throw it in the landfill.

[00:14:56] Eric Goranson: So, yeah, especially got big trees around it. Those roots are underneath that [00:15:00] turf anyway. Right? So it's, I mean, when you're watering the grass, you're watering the trees. And so it all is all there. So I look at it and go, I don't know if you're saving much.

[00:15:09] Eric Goranson: I get it. If you're in like Southern California or Arizona or someplace like that, where it's a really big deal and you've got a natural landscape, you want to have the green, I can understand it maybe there, but it's still going to be hot as blazes. And it's still

[00:15:21] Steve Griggs: like the trees, you want to plant trees that are indigenous to the area that don't need a lot of water.

[00:15:26] Steve Griggs: There's certain, there's xeriscape and certain plants that you can plant that don't need a lot of water. And the truth of it is, once those plants get established, here, at least here in the Northeast, they'll, mother nature takes over. Like you don't need to overwater it. Overwatering is worse than underwatering it.

[00:15:40] Steve Griggs: It looks brown, I just threw more water and ended up killing it because the soil is very clay and it's just

[00:15:47] Eric Goranson: Yeah, I, what's funny with watering. I found some new technology this last year. I don't know if you found it yet, but I put it in my backyard when I did my yard and it's called Irrigreen and they're not paying, they're not sponsored here, but it was an interesting one.

[00:15:58] Eric Goranson: They use inkjet [00:16:00] printer technology to run the sprinklers. I don't know if you've seen that. Yeah, so I can design out like a 12 point star as my grass area and put bark or wood chips or stone around it. And I can program that sprinkler to hit the grass and not go outside the shape. Interesting. So it saves

[00:16:19] Steve Griggs: water without watering

[00:16:21] Eric Goranson: the mulch.

[00:16:21] Eric Goranson: Yeah, so you can water and basically what you do is it's a full line pressure that goes out to the sprinkler head and you run a control line out there so that's always on at the sprinkler head. And the sprinkler head has a little computer in it and you set it up by using the app. So it's a play in a video game where you can arrow out arrow back and you can put points out there as it goes and you can control the stream of where it goes and where it goes.

[00:16:46] Eric Goranson: And so you just follow it around. It's a good sized lawn. You can put two or three sprinkler heads in it. And so you're only watering the stuff you want to water, and then you can go out, adjust it as you need to, but it's a really cool adjustable. You put it in the middle, [00:17:00] just basically in the middle of the space and you can, you can get down to eight feet or go out to 35 feet.

[00:17:07] Eric Goranson: Pretty cool. Uh, so I'll send you some stuff on it, not to make this a commercial, but I knew that I, I always like testing out new stuff at my house, especially home tech. And that's one of the ones that passed the test this year. I'm like, okay. That's cool. That's new stuff. And as

[00:17:22] Steve Griggs: long as it's easy, as long as it's easy to use, and your typical homeowner can use it.

[00:17:26] Steve Griggs: Otherwise, it's just going to be, but the irrigation contractor should be able to dial that. Oh, yeah, just

[00:17:31] Eric Goranson: put it on the phone and the homeowner. It's just got little dots on the screen. So you can, when you pull it up on the app and it's watching the weather and if it's 100 degrees outside, it goes, Hey, you need to increase your water.

[00:17:42] Eric Goranson: If it's 40 and rainy and goes, Hey, we're going into rain, skip mode today. So you don't need to water today. Cause you're going to get too much.

[00:17:48] Steve Griggs: So cool. Yeah. We use the hydro wise. Yeah. We use the same thing from Toro, the hydro wise, same thing reads the weather report. It's all important

[00:17:55] Eric Goranson: stuff. That's good.

[00:17:56] Eric Goranson: And it's funny out here where we are. Water's expensive in the [00:18:00] water in your grass. Even when it's efficient, you can have a five or 600 water bill if you're not careful, so you gotta be careful.

[00:18:06] Steve Griggs: Yeah, you start getting bills like that. You'll learn how to

[00:18:08] Eric Goranson: use that. No kidding. No kidding. That gets expensive.

[00:18:13] Eric Goranson: So I wanted to talk about what I think one of the most important things in design, at least inside, but lighting is one of those things that you can have a pretty nice designed backyard and all of a sudden you throw some lights at it and you've made it look like a million bucks. Like it should be on a TV show.

[00:18:28] Steve Griggs: Lighting is. By far one of the most bang for the buck for your backyards, right? Low cost, the effect is crazy if you, if it's done, it looks beautiful. And most of the time when you're entertaining during the summer, you're hanging out at night, having a barbecue, sit around the fire, but, and the light, the lights in the winter, at least where I am when it snows, when the leaves fall off the trees, it almost looks like

[00:18:49] Eric Goranson: artwork.

[00:18:50] Eric Goranson: Yeah, that, are you talking like up lighting and stuff when you're trying to grab the tree branches and stuff and give it that depth?

[00:18:55] Steve Griggs: Yeah, there's backlighting, there's uplighting, there's downlighting, you don't want to like, you want [00:19:00] to make it like, along the house in the front, you shine the well lights up to access the soffits and all, you don't want to just go out there and stick lights everywhere, there is a little technique

[00:19:07] Eric Goranson: to it.

[00:19:08] Eric Goranson: That's why there's great lighting design out there that makes it look spectacular, but Man, if you get good quality lights and like you and I were talking earlier, you don't go down to your home center and pick up the kit there, but if you go into your lighting store and get the good stuff, it'll last you decades if you're not careful.

[00:19:23] Eric Goranson: We like

[00:19:23] Steve Griggs: the solid brass, get them online, LED, you know, 10 2 wire, 12 2 wire. The lighting is again, like I said, if you DYI want to do it yourself, that's something you can definitely do yourself. Like we said earlier, don't put a swimming pool in by yourself, but you can certainly tackle a night lighting

[00:19:40] Eric Goranson: project.

[00:19:40] Eric Goranson: Yeah, it's people don't, my little brother did this house over in Eastern Washington, did his. Pool by himself and at least dug the hole out himself. And he had a bunch of high school kids came over that he paid with wheelbarrows because they couldn't get an excavator in the backyard because the way the houses were, so he basically went in there with kids and they had a dump trailer out in the front and they were just [00:20:00] digging and wheelbarrowed it out there.

[00:20:01] Eric Goranson: And I'm like, got it done, right? You got it done, but I'm like, you're insane. There's no way I'd have tackled that myself. That's just too big of a project. But. You had a bunch of kids that wanted to work and paid them handsomely. And they just came over there and started knocking it out about three weekends.

[00:20:16] Eric Goranson: He had a dugout and I was like, all right, you got it

[00:20:18] Steve Griggs: done. So you go over there and

[00:20:20] Eric Goranson: enjoy, enjoy the pool and stuff. Exactly. So I was laughing about it going, dude, that's a lot of work. It's hard just even repairing pools by yourself, little, I'm putting one in. What

[00:20:30] Steve Griggs: did he do? He got the guys to dig the hole and he put the vine, lines.

[00:20:33] Steve Griggs: Well

[00:20:33] Eric Goranson: he helped the frame and had a company come in and put the liner in and have them do it right. Yeah. Yeah. So he's

[00:20:38] Steve Griggs: a handy guy. He's like you. He's a handy guy. Yeah. And I'm not

[00:20:42] Eric Goranson: doing that. Let's forget it away. And the bad part is everything else when you're putting out everything else in, you got to have it done because by the time you put the aprons and the concrete and everything else in, there's no going back at that point.

[00:20:52] Eric Goranson: It's got to be right. You don't have another second shot at it.

[00:20:55] Steve Griggs: You got to be one of those guys that are like just the handy guy, right? Um, I do what I [00:21:00] do and I do it great. I'm in the outside, like working on the inside of the house. I get it done, but it's not like a craftsman. It, it, it looks like I did it.

[00:21:08] Steve Griggs: I'll fix the stove. I'll fix the washing machine. I'll Google it. I'll get it done. But it's not, I'm not allowed to paint anymore. Wife, she squashed that. I'm hiring a general contractor to do my inside of the house. I could do it. It hurts me to pay.

[00:21:22] Eric Goranson: It hurts. Oh man.

[00:21:25] Steve Griggs: But if I take it over and it don't, if something goes wrong, she's going to, I don't want to hear.

[00:21:30] Eric Goranson: I told yourself from the wife, man, I've been married 27. I don't want to hear. I told you. That's coming at you. Oh, it's common.

[00:21:37] Steve Griggs: It's common. I'm just going to leave it alone. I got the guy. Just, but yeah, I'm just going to take it like a man and just pay him what

[00:21:43] Eric Goranson: he wants. That's wisdom is what that is.

[00:21:45] Eric Goranson: That's wisdom. Yeah. That's it. That's free marital advice. Oh, it's good. Cause I do TV. You've done TV. I do TV. It's one of those things with TV show. My biggest battle in life is getting those projects that are TV ready to a hundred [00:22:00] percent done. Right. Everything's done. It looks good for television. But there's all the little details that you wouldn't hand off.

[00:22:06] Eric Goranson: If it was a customer's project, it would look great for television, but it's not a hundred percent. You got all those little things that aren't seen that you got to get buttoned up. And for me with my TV, they like it for the camera.

[00:22:17] Steve Griggs: They like it long as it looks good for the shot. They say like it, it looks good for the shot.

[00:22:22] Steve Griggs: And when it's, it was a learning experience last couple of years ago, we did some of this stuff, but it was pretty amazing on. How it looks on TV versus reality,

[00:22:32] Eric Goranson: schedules of the thing, right? They don't want to have the crew sit around for another six hours. Will you bang stuff out? That doesn't look any different behind the camera, right?

[00:22:40] Eric Goranson: No,

[00:22:40] Steve Griggs: they would come out, shoot a little bit and say, okay, we'll be back tomorrow morning, eight o'clock. And then the reveal is tomorrow afternoon or whatever that was. So you had to, and they would leave and come back and we'd be stuck. Yeah. It was lot of work. Lot of work. Not as much glory as you would think,

[00:22:57] Steve Griggs: It's just a lot

[00:22:58] Eric Goranson: of pressure and it's, you know, oh man, [00:23:00] I do it every week. I do 52 shows a year. I, I get it. It's just, it's uh, and there's no room for air. You do 50, you do one a

[00:23:07] Steve Griggs: week. You do one a week. Yeah. One

[00:23:09] Eric Goranson: one hour show a week. Yep.

[00:23:10] Steve Griggs: Wow. That's a, yeah, that's a lot of retakes.

[00:23:13] Eric Goranson: So they, we shoot three days a week basically.

[00:23:15] Eric Goranson: And so all my projects I have to have pretty much knocked out unless I've got a bigger project. Like I did a, an outdoor pizza oven, one of the, one of the ceramic ones with the wood fired and stuff that I built. And that was a, we had 20 hours of camera time on that thing of film, just of the steps of putting it together.

[00:23:32] Eric Goranson: Who's building it? Oh

[00:23:33] Steve Griggs: man, you are one Really? You put

[00:23:37] Eric Goranson: the whole thing together? Oh yeah, 900 degrees and it takes two hours to get it warmed up and man, you're cooking a pizza in 90 seconds. So, so speaking

[00:23:47] Steve Griggs: of pizza ovens, we get a lot of requests for that lately and what we're finding is that the pizza oven, the wood tastes better, but I'm telling you, if you're not like chopping wood, it takes a few hours to heat up.

[00:23:58] Steve Griggs: Oh, I don't want that. So they [00:24:00] like the, they like the, yeah, if

[00:24:01] Eric Goranson: you don't want to, it's like people out there cooking brisket, right? There's people that love to go out and cook brisket and make it a day of it. And that's one class of person. That's how they are. And then there's the other people that like the Weber, the cook turn on gas.

[00:24:14] Eric Goranson: They like to throw up a couple of burgers and dogs on two different people. Most of the time. If you're the burger and dog person, don't do a wood fire pizza oven.

[00:24:22] No,

[00:24:22] Steve Griggs: because it takes, yeah, we got to chop wood. No, people just want to turn it off at the party, impress their friends. They got a pizza oven and be done with it.

[00:24:29] Steve Griggs: That's the first question I ask.

[00:24:31] Eric Goranson: First question. Now, my secret for doing the wood to get it up to speed, what I do is I do this Jenga thing where I actually stack the wood up. So I could actually get it heated and I put wood in the back of the thing and I stack it up and light the fire at the top, let it burn down.

[00:24:46] Eric Goranson: And then it heats the wood up in the back. I can leave that for 2 hours and walk away and go get my piece of dough going or whatever. And it's nice and hot, but you still got to plan it all out. It's a day deal.

[00:24:57] Steve Griggs: So at your own home, are you one of those? [00:25:00] Guys that do everything in themselves and run the house.

[00:25:01] Eric Goranson: So you two, I'm still doing it cause I do it for TV. So I'm taking on those projects and make it into TV content. So

[00:25:08] Steve Griggs: yeah, so you just, one of those guys that just been born with, there's some guys that I know that just got it right. Like they just have it like my expertise. And then I planted trees. I've done all that, but there's just some guys with the handiwork.

[00:25:22] Steve Griggs: It just do they'll build a deck on a weekend. I don't know. I built a deck, something like that. Oh,

[00:25:26] Eric Goranson: yeah. No, I'm not kidding. I built, uh, last spring. I knew I had, I needed some more covered space out back, because I had a little cover over the, or where my outdoor kitchen is. So I've got an 8x8 bar out there, but I'm like, I need some more covered space here, because it wasn't that it's the rain, it's the The junk that falls out of the trees, it gets on the lawn furniture and stuff.

[00:25:45] Eric Goranson: So I wanted to have, so I built a kind of a cool mid century looking patio cover and did that for TV. And then I'll come in and do some woodworking stuff like that. So I just, my dad was a super active handy guy. So I was using a hammer at age eight, that kind of stuff. She just kind of learned. And when I didn't know, I went, [00:26:00] ah, let me go figure

[00:26:00] Steve Griggs: it out.

[00:26:01] Steve Griggs: Yeah. You'll figure it out. You can just basically Google it or just watch one of your episodes, basically you show them how to do it. Yeah. That's the

[00:26:07] Eric Goranson: plan. And sometimes things go, sometimes things don't go perfectly. That's the TV show. I thought, Hey, I'm going to take this interior door, see if I could save it and refinish it.

[00:26:15] Eric Goranson: I got halfway, got it stripped down. I went, there's no saving this. So I ended up going out and buying a new door and just use that as part of the show. And I went, yeah, this isn't worth saving. Let's go get it. It's cheaper right now to go in another door. We went and got another door and put it in. And that was just part of the segment because that's honestly what happens.

[00:26:30] Eric Goranson: That's

[00:26:31] Steve Griggs: the truth of it. You could have probably finished it. It would have taken you a hundred hours as opposed to buying, you know what I'm saying? You have to, and I say, I think what happens is like on the bigger projects, anybody can really, a lot of people can just design the job. It's like, how do you, like you spoke earlier, how do you sequence the project?

[00:26:45] Steve Griggs: How do you get it efficiently? That is. Executing of the project is the most, also the second most important. How does it all pieces fit together, especially when you're spending a lot of money on a

[00:26:54] Eric Goranson: backyard. So true. Some people go in, they'll get the lawn done and they're like, Hey, I want to do a paper Patty over [00:27:00] here.

[00:27:00] Eric Goranson: And I'm like, dude, you're going to destroy that whole yard. Just trying to get the pavers over there, let alone the equipment, everything else, and all the materials you need to bring in to do it right.

[00:27:08] Steve Griggs: And nobody wants you in their backyard all summer long, you got to get in and get out. No, I'm sorry. But especially here in the Northeast, that's why you want to do it off season, right?

[00:27:18] Steve Griggs: Because you want to enjoy it in the summer.

[00:27:20] Eric Goranson: So what's interesting to me too, is you're a lot like we are in the Pacific Northwest here is that you have so many climates and you could be out at the end of Long Island out there doing something. And all of a sudden you're over here in the mountains doing something else.

[00:27:32] Eric Goranson: And you've got a whole different climate zone and everything else you're working with.

[00:27:36] Steve Griggs: I was out there last week in my, in my talk out in the tip of Long Island. I said, let me go out there. Let me measure something. It was, I've never seen it so cold. The wind off the ocean was just, it was just like, Whoa.

[00:27:49] Steve Griggs: And then you go out there in the summer and it's beautiful. It's amazing how it can go from that to the beautiful summer in six

[00:27:54] Eric Goranson: months. It's crazy out there. I got a buddy that lives in middle Island. So yeah, I get it. And he's out there [00:28:00] and he's an hour from out there from the tip out there. And man, it gets beautiful and brutal on the same six

[00:28:05] Steve Griggs: months.

[00:28:06] Steve Griggs: All the same time, but it is sure as it's beautiful, but summer paradise, right? But the Northeast is like the Northwest. I guess you have different climates. You get a, you don't get a lot of

[00:28:16] Eric Goranson: snow out there. We don't. It'll come in waves where we don't get it for four or five years. And all of a sudden we got two feet in the ground and nobody knows what to do with it.

[00:28:23] Eric Goranson: But, uh,

[00:28:24] Steve Griggs: Northwest, you would get a lot of snow. Yeah. You would think a lot, but no, we haven't got, we got a little bit this year, but not like it used to be

[00:28:30] Eric Goranson: when I was growing up. Yeah. It's interesting. I think we have that Pacific ocean that kind of brings, it cuts the snow down a little bit just because it warms the water up a little bit, warms up the storms coming in off the Pacific.

[00:28:40] Eric Goranson: So they're not as cold where you guys get all the, those beautiful gifts out of Canada dropping down. And then all of a sudden you get all that cold air.

[00:28:47] Steve Griggs: Snow, ice,

[00:28:47] Eric Goranson: rain, whatever. I'm ready for spring. And then by the end of the summer, you're going, I'm ready for fall. That's how we do it here too. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:28:53] Steve Griggs: Oh, I need a break. I can't wait for Christmas. That was like, a wife is, you gotta go, like it's time to go. But now you, [00:29:00] what we're planning, we use the winter time to gear up for the spring, line everything up. So when the weather breaks, you're ready to go. Got a

[00:29:07] Eric Goranson: question for you. It's curb appeal. That's such a huge deal for the value of homes and things like that.

[00:29:13] Eric Goranson: Are there a lot of things that you see people are doing, or you have any tips and tricks for people that are really trying to make that front yard look a little bit better? Because somebody will go in and move into some housing development. That's a few years old and. And there's probably a little 18 inch row of flower beds along the front of the house and everything else is just grass to the curbs and the sidewalk.

[00:29:31] Eric Goranson: And it looks a little yawner. What would you do with that? A lot

[00:29:35] Steve Griggs: of times we'll get calls from realtors and stuff like that. And I find like you're gonna, if you're shopping on Amazon for a book or something like that, what's the first thing you look at? You look at the cover, right? Everybody looks at the cover.

[00:29:45] Steve Griggs: If you're selling your house, people don't even, they're not going inside. They do a drive by. They'll come and look at the house. By far, curb repeal is you can, for minimal dollars, you can knock it out of the park, right? For instance, make sure [00:30:00] everything's trimmed properly. Don't have trees like we spoke about earlier, like you're planting the wrong trees that grow 20 feet in front of the front door, blocks the light, right?

[00:30:09] Steve Griggs: Make sure you, and then you want to draw your eye towards the front door. Maybe you paint the door a different color, right? Maybe put some lighting in there, some light because people drive around at night, whenever late evening to check out landscapes and it's. Look at potential homes, but mulch is easy.

[00:30:24] Steve Griggs: You can get mulch at Home Depot flowers, keep the bushes trimmed. Just make it look neat and clean. Neat and clean. Yeah. And if you have natural grass, throw a bag of fertilizer on that. Green that up. People love

[00:30:37] Eric Goranson: green grass. Amen. Amen. And it's really not that hard to do. You can really get that thing looking good pretty quickly.

[00:30:43] Eric Goranson: That's a good weekend project for most people. And you just transform the whole front of the house. And that's great. So are you seeing any trends out there when it comes to backyards or pools or hot tubs or outdoor kitchens? What's the hot stuff that you're seeing these days?

[00:30:58] Steve Griggs: So like [00:31:00] right when COVID hit, we live about 20 miles North of Manhattan and everybody made a mad dash for the suburbs.

[00:31:06] Steve Griggs: And what happened was a lot of these people that never owned homes before they lived in apartments for their whole life now live in the suburbs. And now they used to call the super to fix everything. Now they're clueless. Okay. So now they don't know what to do with the house. They don't even know where to begin on the outside.

[00:31:21] Steve Griggs: It says, don't you go outside? I never go outside. I says that my backyard looked like that. I wouldn't go outside either. And I start to paint the picture of what it could look like. Now we're into, we do a lot of outdoor offices. Now, super popular people are home now. Nobody's. Fridays, everybody's

[00:31:37] Eric Goranson: home and working from home air quotes.

[00:31:41] Eric Goranson: We

[00:31:41] Steve Griggs: did a job. I was doing a walk through on a job over the summer and the girls, the younger college girl, she's hanging out by the pool on a laptop. I'm like, what are you working? She goes, yeah, Fridays. It's they call it something Fridays where they can like work from home, but like you're sitting by the pool.

[00:31:55] Steve Griggs: So we try to design outdoor kitchens, huge outdoor fireplaces, [00:32:00] huge covered areas. We do a lot of motorized pergolas now. Basically anything to drag people outside. Get them outside.

[00:32:07] Eric Goranson: Yeah. No, that's nice, man. That's nice. Cause yeah, it's, and it's the cheapest addition you can do to your home, right? That's living space.

[00:32:13] Eric Goranson: So it's a great way to do it because you're sure not going to put on square footage onto the house. Any, anything less than what that, what that is, that's going to be the best bang for the buck right there. And a lot of people are looking for it too, I bet.

[00:32:26] Steve Griggs: Yeah, I try to explain to them, listen, basically it's an extension.

[00:32:28] Steve Griggs: We're building an outdoor room, right? We're building an outdoor room as extension of your house. And honestly, from an investment standpoint, big dollar return on your money. Huge.

[00:32:38] Eric Goranson: It used to be like that pool was always a horrible investment in that. But now as soon as you put that as part of a outdoor living space, that's changed over the last five

[00:32:46] Steve Griggs: years.

[00:32:47] Steve Griggs: Absolutely. Since, since actually it's had people looking for pool, like it was crazy back then people wanted swimming pools. And I think they're really grown to appreciate the outdoors more because it was taken away from us for so [00:33:00] long. Right. Like it was like now everybody just. Wants to be outside, which, Hey, it's helped my, help my

[00:33:05] Eric Goranson: business.

[00:33:06] Eric Goranson: It put a waiting list in your world, even more so than it was before.

[00:33:09] Steve Griggs: Yeah. So it's been good. Thank very grateful for that. And then

[00:33:12] Eric Goranson: TVs and entertainment outside. That's a big thing too, as far as music and, and watching the game outside or whatever. That seems to be another big thing that's grown too, is just the electronics outside.

[00:33:24] Steve Griggs: Oh man. Outdoor TV with the fire pit, watching a game with a cigar and the boys, we got a lot of most projects outdoor now have TV fire pit, some sort of water feature could be a little bubbling fountain and some sort of outdoor kitchens are big. So basically we're taking the inside and putting it outside.

[00:33:43] Steve Griggs: It's the same thing. Living room, kitchen. Outdoor TV. It's the same thing as just being outside. And we have, we use a lot of the outdoor Brahma a lot of times and they can sit outside and

[00:33:53] Eric Goranson: yeah, exactly. It's funny. I used to buy it when I first time I put an outdoor TV, I spent a ton of money on one of [00:34:00] those exterior cases and to put it in and.

[00:34:04] Eric Goranson: It's covered at my place. And so I'll be honest, I just put a regular TV out there and for as cheap as TVs are, I can go buy another one. I sound like a horrible person, but I just, I don't go out and buy all the expensive, it's too cheap. I did the

[00:34:16] Steve Griggs: same thing. I went to best buy bought an outdoor TV, hung it up, bought a cover on Amazon and it works, I'm telling you, I take it in the winter because when it snows, you want to take it in, but

[00:34:27] Eric Goranson: it works great.

[00:34:28] Eric Goranson: Yeah, it's funny. Very good. Last time. High impact. Yeah. When I replaced the TV, I had an old, what is it? I think it's a Samsung and I've had it out there for two years, all year round. It's still sitting out there. It's still doing great. I don't have cover on it or anything. I just went, ah, it was going to get recycled anyway.

[00:34:44] Eric Goranson: Let's see how it worked. Good. It just, I just upgraded TV's analogy are. It's still working great out there, but I haven't changed it out of it. It's cheap on it going. I need to change it out, but I'm like, it still works great. The picture looks good. So why mess with it?

[00:34:57] Steve Griggs: Yeah. Yeah. A few hundred bucks, a few hundred bucks [00:35:00] on the TV.

[00:35:00] Steve Griggs: You don't really care. If you spend 10 grand out there, I guarantee you'd be absolutely yeah. So yeah, like you say, it's a few hundred bucks. You can get a brand new TV. It's not the end of the world as opposed to those. Years ago, though, they used to be like 10

[00:35:11] Eric Goranson: grand for TV money. You're spending a lot of money on TV.

[00:35:14] Eric Goranson: And then to get the outdoor rated one and the cabinet and all the other stuff, how you wanted to put it in there, it got pretty crazy, but mine's in the shade. So you don't have the issues that's undercover it's protected. So it's, it's not that out of the ordinary, what a normal TV would be at. Hey, we're starting to run out of time, brother.

[00:35:31] Eric Goranson: So I wanted to sit there and make sure that we send people your direction to take a look at what you got going, like your website and that kind of stuff. So people can crack you down. If we've got plenty of people in the Northeast to catch the radio show and the podcast, I think we have more people. I think our number one state right now in the podcast is New York.

[00:35:48] Eric Goranson: So we're in your backyard. So we need to make sure people find you.

[00:35:52] Steve Griggs: I was out in your neck of the woods out in Sacramento doing a design a few months ago out there. I like doing a little traveling and see other parts of the [00:36:00] wall, the parts, different types of plant materials. So it's cool. We've been doing a little bit of that lately.

[00:36:04] Steve Griggs: I'm at Steve Griggs design do com. It seems like the Instagram is the biggest thing at Steve Griggs design. Yeah. Any questions, whatever. I'm here and I appreciate what you're doing with the podcast because I'm listening to your tile episode now because I'm about to hire the tile contractor for my own

[00:36:20] Eric Goranson: Nice man.

[00:36:21] Eric Goranson: Yeah, that is one of the, that's. That there's those things in the project where you go, okay, there's these key people that are, maybe the painter, you'll get an okay paint job or a great paint job, but boy, that's how contractor is one of those that we were talking about that got to be really careful to get the right one, because there's a big difference between good and bad

[00:36:38] Steve Griggs: and ugly.

[00:36:39] Steve Griggs: Exactly. Exactly.

[00:36:40] Eric Goranson: All right, Steve Griggs. Thanks for coming on today and guys check his workout. It is stunning over at street, stevegriggsdesign. com. Check it out over there. Thanks for coming on today, brother. I really appreciate the time. Thanks Eric.

[00:36:52] Steve Griggs: Good luck with those Elk.

[00:36:55] Eric Goranson: Free lawn care, right? It can't complain.

[00:36:57] Eric Goranson: All right, guys, you've been listening to around the house.