[00:00:00] Welcome everyone. My name is Bill Reid, I am joining the world of podcasting with my new show called The Awakened Homeowner. I'm really excited to be here. This is my first dive into podcasting we'll see how it goes. I'm really excited about it because this is my opportunity to elaborate on a book I've written.

Titled The Awakened Homeowner that's coming out here in Spring of 2025. It's all about how can we help homeowners tackle significant remodel or custom home projects.

Over the course of 35 years, I've been a licensed general contractor operating a design build business model. In Northern California, specifically the Silicon Valley area where I helped hundreds, I don't know, maybe thousands of homeowners do projects design build means I coordinated all of the design and construction of a [00:01:00] project for the most part, I had my own design staff as employees, interior designers primarily.

And construction staff I started my business in 1992 out of Cupertino and Saratoga, California with one employee. Now that I've been doing it for 35 years, I thought I would try to share some of my experience and wisdom with homeowners.

The purpose of this podcast is really to help homeowners overcome the fears and anxiety, but really just to help people have a good time. With their most significant investment in their home it can be done I'm ready to tackle it, and eventually, I'm hoping to get on some guests, some architects I know, some contractors I know, and even some homeowners I know that have gone through this that can share their experiences.

The book is, like I said, it's titled The Awakened Homeowner it's gonna arrive on Amazon. [00:02:00] On April 25th, 2025, which may be after this podcast actually gets released, but it's gonna be out there in print and ebook version, I really invite you to take a look at it. Even if you're a designer or architect, or aspiring designer and architect, a new contractor, this book can really help with all different aspects of the business.

It is directed towards homeowners. I've got one quote I wanna share that really stuck with me. It's a little long, but I'm only gonna say it once in this introduction, so I promise. This is by Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of my favorite authors. To laugh often and much to win the respective intelligent people and the affection of children to earn the appreciation of honest critics.

Endure the betrayal of false friends to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others, to know even [00:03:00] one life has breathed easier because you have lived this is to have succeeded. So that last sentence really resonated with me. 'cause that's my goal. That's the whole thing. That's what this is all about.

It is helping you breathe easier while you're trying to get through this potential horrifying hanging experience, which we're not gonna let that happen so that is a very quick background, you can go to our website, awaken homer.com and see a bit more information. The book and this podcast are gonna go hand in hand.

The most common homeowner challenges I hear, and it's a statement that I don't know it's actually not just specific to remodeling or construction, it's all over the place, it's almost becoming a cliche, but a lot of people just say, I don't know what I don't know. You've probably heard that statement before.

That is a really big part of this project, I'm gonna help you overcome [00:04:00] that one sentence and at least get what you need to know in your brain, and then you can do with it what you want. I'm even gonna help you with that too. So the, a big part of this book is about. Everything you do before you even break ground.

In fact, the whole book is about that. I start with certain stages of that what I call the discovery stage. We're gonna get into that in a minute. In the book I wrote a story actually, when I was working with my editors, I said, does anybody ever put a prologue and epilogue in a book, in a nonfiction book, I should say?

You look online and people say not really. You can have somebody else write it or you can try it, but so I did it and I wrote a story about two couples and my editor just loved it and said, you might want to think about writing novels. I said let's just stick with this for right now.

But there's a story there at the prologue at the [00:05:00] beginning of the book. That is about Ben and Jane and about the McMillans. It's two couples who went two completely different ways when they did their project. It explains in a fictional story, although it's based on real life events about how you can take the wrong path or the right path, .

I invite you to go to the website I'll put a link at the bottom of the podcast here where you can go download the story for free. Even if you don't buy the book, that's okay. But the story's kind of fun to read download it read it and you can join our community.

I'm not gonna be one of these people that pound you with email and. Marketing a little bit here and there, but I'm not gonna be, I can't stand that, so I'm not gonna do that to people. But when it's important and relevant, I'm gonna do it. So download that story and get a kick out of that.

I came up with these guiding principles during the writing of the book, early in the writing of the book, I said, what am I trying to do [00:06:00] here? My editor even asked me that question. In fact, she asked me a big question. She said in the first round of editing, she said, what am I supposed to do with all this information?

I paused and didn't know the answer. Long story short, that triggered a complete rewrite to build a book of knowledge and then. I'll talk about an action plan coming up here at the end of the podcast. But so I came up with these guiding principles and it goes like this, enlighten, power and protect.

So the idea here is to enlighten you with knowledge. Knowledge is power. We know that. Everybody knows that but the people that really take the time. To build their knowledge before they tackle something. Anything. Learning a new piece of software or learning how to work on your car, YouTube these days, you can learn a lot pretty darn quick.

But the book is about enlightening you, building your knowledge, it's a lot of information. It's [00:07:00] a, it's a lot, you're not expected to absorb all of this at once. But to have this as a resource guide and then this entire podcast is gonna revolve around this book, what I love about podcasting as you can tell already, I'm able to elaborate and explain in more detail outside the bounds of a book and text.

So enlighten, build your knowledge, empower. So the power, the empowerment comes with the knowledge. So now that you are, you've got some knowledge in your, in the back of your brain on this, they go hand in hand. There's also gonna be a whole part of this book and a subsequent venture called Build Quest that's coming up soon where.

You're gonna be able to apply this knowledge with tools to get it done. So you can read the whole book, learn as much as you want, but then you're gonna be able to set it [00:08:00] aside and then tap into an app I'm developing now. It's not out yet and it's a big project, much bigger than I thought. But even though I don't have the app live right at the publishing of the book.

You are gonna be able to use this book to get way ahead of the game than most people. The last of the three is protect, enlighten, empower, and protect. All of this effort is to protect you, to protect your experience, to protect your family, to protect the quality of your job, to protect everything as you go into this process.

It can be fun, it can be rewarding and exciting to see a project at the end. We're gonna try to make it so it's not miserable for you. So that is the three guiding principles. And it's interesting. There's one other thing that it's a wrapper around all of this, of the three guiding principles and it's expectations.

And again, you hear this word dropped all over the place, [00:09:00] but what do we do about it? How do we even set our expectations if we don't know what we don't know? How do we manage 'em? How do we convey 'em and how do we share 'em? How do we make sure the people that are supposed to help me or help you design and build a project?

How are we gonna be able to hold them accountable and even yourself accountable, frankly. To setting, maintaining, achieving expectations. So it's like these three guiding principles are all wrapped up with this term expectations. I use it all the time with my subcontractors, my suppliers, my kids and we're gonna be, this is gonna be in the back of our mind the whole time.

Enlighten, empower, protect, I. All wrapped up knowing that we need to set and share expectations, realistic expectations. So the book is broken out into four parts, part one is discovery. What [00:10:00] discovery is about is everything that you need to do before you even pick up the phone or. Go on the internet and start looking for five star contractors, or talking to your neighbors and getting all kinds of referrals from all over the place, you're gonna do that.

But discovery is a part that a lot of people. They might do it subconsciously, but they don't really think about it in a way that is valuable to themselves or others. Really the big part of the discovery stage is guided by those guiding principles and setting expectations at the end of the discovery stage.

You should feel good about your project. You should be in a position to share your expectations with potential architects, tier designers, contractors, however you approach a project that [00:11:00] is the idea before you talk with anybody. The goal is to build a package, if you will,

you'll be able to assemble yourself and eventually the app's gonna do it for you or with you, I should say. The idea here is to build enough content and information that you can literally hand it off to somebody and say, this is who we are. This is what we have to work with. This is our dream, this is our budget.

Can you help? So we talk about dreams and visions and. All the ideas out there plastered all over the internet. Everybody's showing their pictures of their beautiful homes and there's guys out there showing all of the construction methods. And this is great. We love this stuff.

They're showing all the new technology, all the new applications, the methods. We have designers out there showing all of their new finished professional photoed projects. And this is great. In fact, you're probably even, maybe right now you're [00:12:00] stuck in bed swiping through your iPad or your phone saving picture after picture.

And that's great. You need that. That's called inspiration, but it's also daunting and overwhelming. I know many people that just give up and they just become overwhelmed. So we're not discounting any of those folks. But what, where my niche is that help you get there, how do you get there so it doesn't become a nightmare.

The knowledge and the tools are gonna teach you how to capture all of these inspirations in a way that is manageable so that you can then share it with your potential designers. Then I talk about, delusions and realities, I call it. There's all kinds of delusions out there that, that are going to throw you off.

And incidentally this podcast episode is just an introduction to the entire podcast. So I'm gonna get many episodes coming up are going to be about, we're gonna dig deep into these so that you can [00:13:00] gain as much knowledge and tackle it dreams and visions, delusions and realities. And then a few other things that you're gonna need to do to help your architect help you is share your personal profile and your property profile.

So I have steps and methods in here. If your architect can see you within minutes of meeting you with this package that. The awakened homeowner methodology creates, you are gonna be so far ahead of the game. They're gonna love you, they're gonna understand you. So you're gonna share dynamics of your family, you, your kids, your spouse, your partner.

Details about you as much as you want to feel, as much as you're comfortable sharing. The more you share, the better about current situations, your careers. You're gonna have more kids, grandma and grandpa are gonna move in, whatever, you're gonna share as much as [00:14:00] you can so that the architect can read through this and go, oh, wow.

I already know who these people are. The tool I'm developing is you're even gonna be able to upload images and videos and whatever you want. And then the property profile is going to be there for you to give them a headstart on all the details of the property you wanna renovate, remodel, or build on, or a property you're considering building on that you don't even own yet.

Then a big part of the discovery is the almighty budget. This is the elephant in the room. This is the one that nobody wants to talk about. People don't even know. They need to think about it this early don't even know how to think about it. I have methods in here to first establish an investment goal.

Sure, you want to build a 4,000 square foot house, but. Should you, could you, will you? How much is it gonna cost? Nobody can really tell you that early on. I'm gonna try to answer that question [00:15:00] in the app that's coming up, but I'm gonna give you some methods on how to do it yourself, and I'll have a separate episode for that and maybe even some downloads for you.

But we're gonna first set an investment goal. Forget about the project for a minute. How much are you comfortable investing in the property?

Now everybody's got their own financial goals and objectives, and some people are more sensitive to resale than others, and it's very personal and everybody's financial conditions are different, but. What's important here is that you at least just start with this. If you wanna build a 4,000 square foot home and it's gonna cost you, $400 a square foot minimum, and plus a lot of other costs, you could be into it for 2 million bucks.

Or more. Is that smart? Do you care? So anyway, there's methods in order to do that. And then what we do is we go through a budgeting exercise of the actual project that you think you want to do, [00:16:00] and I've got some stuff pulled together on that's gonna help you. At least go through some exercises so that you can, do you, how big of a home, how many bedrooms and bathrooms, how many accessory structures do you want?

All that kind of stuff. That's what part one is. Part two is the world of design. I'm not gonna dive into too much details, but we touch on understanding design professionals, the design process. Design agreements understanding design limitations that are already in place that you don't even know about.

Your architect probably knows about 'em, but I wouldn't assume it. What our plans and blueprints, they used to be called blueprints. Now they're called plans, but understanding plans and the basics of 'em. We're not gonna teach you how to be an architect, but. You at least need to know how to look at 'em.

It could be 'cause it's your house. We go through the approvals and permit process and how you go about obtaining all of the approvals, which is just a huge hurdle in of itself. [00:17:00] Part three of the book gets into the world of construction. So we went with the world of design. Now we're in the world of construction and we talk about understanding contractors the types of contractors different profiles personal characteristics of contractors.

Estimating your project. How do you go about estimating your project? You are not the estimator, but you're the one facilitating the estimating, even if you're a DIYer. That wants to build your own house, you still are gonna end up hiring some people. Unless you do it all yourself, then gimme a call 'cause I'd like to hire you.

And then the con different types of contracts. There's different ways that these, that contractors price out projects and enter into contracts with customers. There is what's called a fixed price and cost plus, or time and material. And then we talk about managing your risk. With different insurances and things that you need to consider.

Part four is building your team, and that is how we assemble this design and construction staff. What's important about that? [00:18:00] There's different paths you can take to doing a project. Are you gonna hire everybody yourself? Are you gonna maybe just hire one company to handle it all? I get into what I call the guided and self-guided options.

I talk about specialized options like owner builders and hiring an owner agent. I wish I had a thousand pages to put in this book. So I'm gonna be keep feeding this with more and more information through the blog and the podcast and the app. So that is very quick synopsis of the four parts of the book and the upcoming episodes are going to.

Dig into these deep, what I'm hoping I can get out of this is I'm really passionate about, I really just want to help people at this stage of the game. I've been doing this 35 years. I'm just hitting 60 years old, and I'm at a stage of life where I can step back and.

Start sharing and teaching and learning so that a lot of people can just, we can [00:19:00] just progress with this process when it comes to how homeowners accomplish their projects. I invite you to subscribe to the podcast and follow future episodes. I'm not gonna be a social media mongrel and just pummel you with stuff.

I, I really don't like that myself, but. If I do like somebody and they provide content that's important for me, I'll read it. Otherwise, if I get an email every day, you're dead. Me, I'm done. So you're not gonna get that. I encourage you to visit the website I'll put places on there for you to join the community.

'cause you might wanna follow along as I develop this app this could be a really interesting development. And I'm doing this like open, like I'm just showing people the progress and what's the expectation with this, with the application. I think I mentioned, I'm gonna call it Build Quest, and that's what we're doing, right?

We're trying, we're on our quest to [00:20:00] build our home one of the funnest parts of podcasting is. I would love to hear your questions and try to answer 'em for you on the episodes. It would be awesome if people could post some questions or maybe some situations they're in that they need help with.

If you're planning a project or if you're in the middle of construction I'll have a social media presence in Facebook and whatnot, and I may even come up with a Facebook group. But this is more of a private community. I'm really not interested in talking about a scratch in your sheet. Rock, drywall, finish.

This is more about deeper knowledge base. There's a lot of people telling you how to do drywall and what's good and what's bad, and I don't know, maybe I'll get into that. But this is really more about people that really wanna learn, that, wanna plan, that it will take the time to plan. I'm gonna be able to help you with that.

So that is the objective [00:21:00] with this podcast. This is the very first episode I'm really looking forward to it and I'm hoping you'll follow. If you have things you would like episode based on, throw that in the comments too. Appreciate it. My name's Bill Reid. I'm the author of the Awakened Homeowner book, which I'm hoping you'll also go download and I hope to see you on the next one.

Thanks.