Today’s episode is about how to plan your renovation roadmap with a renovation coach.

Katharine MacPhail  00:10

You are listening to Talking Home Renovations with The House Maven. Is it time to renovate your house, but you’re worried that you don’t really know what you’re doing? This is an educational and entertaining podcast that will ease your fears. Or maybe you just love hearing about home renovations, like I do. I am your host, Katharine MacPhail. I am an architect, and I practice in eastern Massachusetts. On the show I interview other architects, vendors, contractors and homeowners to gather tips and stories about home renovations and to learn about materials, systems, sustainable practices, what to expect, what to avoid, and how to make the most of the money that you’ll spend on your renovation. This week, we’re going to talk about renovation coaches. You might not know that there is such a thing – if you are starting a home renovation, you can get some help from a renovation coach. That’s why we’re doing this episode. I am joined today by Mona Ying Reeves, who is an architect I met on Clubhouse. We’ve been chatting there about home renovations, and we actually have a lot in common. Mona is a house coach – she’ll get you past the overwhelm and moving forward. She’s a serial renovator, architect, and behind the scenes design consultant to various HGTV Home makeover shows. She founded Kickstart House to support and empower homeowners with their renovation journeys. For many years she saw homeowners struggle with complicated construction landscape, and is on a mission now to help homeowners align their surroundings and their journeys with their best lives. With Kickstart House, she’s taken her proven framework of delivering dream homes for high end clients and refined it into a roadmap that any homeowner can follow. Mona is a licensed architect in the state of California. She holds a master’s degree in architecture from Harvard University, and a bachelor’s degree from UC Berkeley. Here’s my conversation with Mona.

Katharine MacPhail  01:53

Mona, thanks for coming on today.

Mona Ying Reeves  01:54

Thanks, Katharine. Thanks for having me.

Katharine MacPhail  01:58

You’re an architect, I’m an architect. You’re in California, I’m in Massachusetts, and we kind of do similar things but you have kind of a more formalized approach to everything. Could you talk a little bit about how you got this idea for Kickstart House, what it is and how you help homeowners with their renovations?

Mona Ying Reeves  02:20

Absolutely. So as you said, I am an architect. I’ve been practicing design and working on residential projects for over twenty years out here on the west coast. And what I’ve been seeing more and more of in recent times, is that by the time a client comes to me for help on their project they’ve had quite a journey getting to that point. They either start with the wrong vendor, or talk to the wrong person – oftentimes, they might start with a contractor or a builder without a design. Or perhaps they ask for help from neighbors and friends who say, “Oh, you gotta go use so-and-so who helped me with my project”, but that person has a completely different skill set. The client has kind of gotten the run around, or been bounced around to a number of different people before they reach who they really on their team to help them. So Kickstart House is a home renovation support community that I founded, specifically to support homeowners in understanding and navigating the home renovation process. It’s less about giving a full service design, or building the project for them, because that’s something that each homeowner has to do on their own by assembling the right team. Not everyone’s going to need an architect. Not everyone, frankly, is going to even need a licensed contractor. Basically, it’s about knowing what their options are. How to piece together the right team that they can really trust and do the project that is right for them is where the idea of Kickstart House comes from. What we really do is coach homeowners, we advise them – kind of be their checking point, if you will, so that they’re not going down the wrong path. We also provide a lot of emotional support and accountability in the process. Because as any of us who has done home renovation knows, things never really go as expected. So when things don’t go as expected, how do you quickly course correct, and who’s helping you do that? It’s merging a lot of the background that traditional professionals like architects, contractors, and builders may already have, but condensing it in a way that’s really affordable and digestible for your average homeowner.

Katharine MacPhail  04:58

So is this an online group? Is it a Facebook group, or a membership site? I know there are different levels?

Mona Ying Reeves  05:08

Yeah, that is a really great question. So we are not location based, we are an online community. We really serve everybody, though primarily here in the United States. We don’t serve international clients, obviously. When you get into the specifics of your project, details will change depending on where you’re located. So we’re not here to replace your building team that already knows your local codes, but to lead you through navigating the roadmap or framework of a renovation. That part is very universal, and that’s really what we address there. What I’ve found is most of the community we serve has been largely women, actually – women taking hold of their renovation projects for their family, and for themselves. As a woman myself, I certainly care more about the home and how it functions, and probably have a more in-tuned relationship to to myself and my surroundings than the male counterparts in my family do. I feel like a lot of women share that. There was a study done recently that said over 80% of home improvement projects nowadays are initiated by women. I do think that there is something very meaningful about going through this as not just a checklist, but as a journey or a particular season in your life where you get something done for yourself and your family.

Katharine MacPhail  07:01

Is there a chat group? If I were part of the group, how would I interact with other people? Can I just get on there and say, “They’re trying to push me into this kind of tile, but I really like this other kind of tile”? Is that the kind of questions people would ask, or do they just need reassurance about certain things? Or do they need help choosing different contractors, or…? What are typical issues?

Mona Ying Reeves  07:24

Typical issues range from confusion over starting a project, to people who are in the either design or build process, and all the way down to under construction. We really have three areas where we support our members – the first one being the coaching aspect, what I call house coaching. With house coaching, the client has access to expertise, such as myself or a renovation coach. You can schedule a consultation on an as needed basis to get you through a hurdle. So let’s say if you’re stuck at some point in the process, and you really just need an expert to be a sounding board to make sure you’re on the right track and identify your next step – that is what the house coaching component does. That area of support gets extremely personal, because it is a one on one conversation. Parallel to that is what I call the information or the clarity component. That component is made up of courses, workshops and trainings. So it’s more a “do it at your own pace” kind of thing. If you want to propel your renovation forward, or you’re doing research on your end, you can sign up for a course or training. They come in various lengths. You can also download a free resource – we have plenty of free resources on the website right now. That’s going to give you an information framework so that you can go at your own pace. The third component, I think, is more emotional, where you really delve into your renovation journey. And that comes more from community. We do have a private support community which is largely homeowners, and currently mostly women, going through various stages of the process. We do occasionally have events that are face to face Zoom meetings, but on a day to day basis it is a Facebook-group based forum where you can check in, ask questions,  and see what other people are going through.

Katharine MacPhail  09:34

How did you decide to go in this direction, instead of the more traditional way that we would normally…well not normally, but how architects have typically worked. How did you decide to do it differently?

Mona Ying Reeves  09:45

You know, I don’t know that I’m doing it that differently because I still have my architectural practice, which is Re:modern in Northern California. My practice still does full service design. I see Kickstart House more as a sister arm, we’re extension out of that. Kickstart House does a lot of the work that we do one on one with clients anyway – we have many of the same conversations. I want to make that accessible and affordable to everybody, because not everyone’s going to need full service design. But everyone certainly deserves to have access to expertise and some of that navigational help that we do as traditional architects. That’s really why we split that part off into Kickstart House, so it serves more than just one homeowner at a time.

Katharine MacPhail  10:44

Yeah, it’s interesting that we have the ability to reach people all over the country now. Whereas even ten years ago, we didn’t. There are things like podcasts, which are…I mean, I guess that was going on ten years ago. Let’s say twenty years ago. I mean, to get your own radio show wasn’t like you could just set it up by yourself. Where as essentially, that’s what we do now. We can gather people on Facebook, we can talk to them on Clubhouse – I know you have a Clubhouse club, which I join you at on Monday evenings. Well, evenings for me, 5pm Eastern. And there we can talk directly to people all over the world, actually. It’s pretty amazing, the reach that we can have, and the impact that we can have now that we couldn’t before so easily.

Mona Ying Reeves  11:29

Yeah, I think it’s really exciting. And it was really exciting for me to discover your podcast, because now here we are, two women architects talking about home renovations. It’s a space that, if you look at how construction has worked traditionally, to this day it’s still an industry that’s over 90% male. So anytime you’re dealing with the actual building part, you’re talking to a largely male audience. The technology right now has allowed us to go beyond that one on one relationship, and have these conversations that I think will help everybody understand the goals of the homeowner, and how a project gets built.

Katharine MacPhail  12:20

One thing that I say a lot is that architects are for everyone. There’s this concept, or there’s this idea that architects are just for certain types of people, that we are only for the elite. But we can help anyone who is undergoing this process. Because it can be a little stressful, and I feel like if you know more about what might be coming, then it just makes the whole process more smooth.

Mona Ying Reeves  12:45

Yeah, I agree. And this whole notion about architecture being for the elite, I think our current society and our media contribute a lot to that. When we watch television shows, like HGTV, you have to recognize that those shows are done for content, not necessarily for reality. I’m saying this because I’ve actually worked on those shows before, as a behind the scenes design consultant for them. As I say, women tend to have the relationship with the home more. So these shows are looking to attract an audience of women. For whatever reasons, the network executives and show producers like to put the contractors in front of the camera. But you know, in real life, you have a teams that are much more complex than that. And so our media has trained the average homeowner to believe that when you want to do this project, you can have it done right away by calling a builder who automatically knows what you want and gets it done. And that’s where a lot of the frustration comes in, I think, when you’ve got a homeowner who thinks they can just call a builder and say, “Hey, give me this kitchen” – but the kitchen they’re imagining is very different than what they end up asking for. So Kickstart House is really about putting that power and agency back into the homeowner, so that they know how to ask for what they want and how to navigate that process. No one’s out here trying to mess up your house. But you’ve got to take an assertive role in there as the client, too. So it’s giving you the tools to be able to do that, in this current climate that we’re working in.

Katharine MacPhail  15:04

People make assumptions about the way things will look. If I don’t say what kind of baseboard I might like, like I think it’s obvious but I didn’t mention it to the contractor, they might think, “well, let’s go with the kind of baseboard I always put in”. So then you get something that isn’t what you want, but that’s because nobody talked about it. So to me that’s a part of planning, which is the most important thing about starting a project. Like you were saying, you can’t just go to a contractor and expect him to start building exactly what you want right away, because that involves a lot of details that need to be planned out.

Mona Ying Reeves  15:32

Right? And frankly, not every contractor is going to be the right fit for you. I know, at least where I am, we have one of these online neighborhood forums that anyone who lives there can join. One of the questions that I see all the time is, “hey, I want to do a kitchen remodel, can someone recommend a contractor?”, or, “I want to do a bathroom remodel, can someone recommend a plumber?”. When I see this as someone in the building industry, I cringe a bit because I think if you’re doing a bathroom remodel you don’t start with a plumber. But if you don’t realize that, you only know what you know. So if you’re asking the plumber for a design, they might say yes because they want the job but then they don’t really know how to deliver it. So you don’t end up going to that next professional until you’re frustrated. Or you get bounced around to maybe four or five different people who aren’t calling you back because they think you’re not realistic, since you’re calling them for something they don’t do, which you might not realize. So there’s this whole miscommunication going on that really doesn’t need to happen.

Katharine MacPhail  16:51

That’s true, there is a certain value to knowing how the renovation process would typically go. So then if you decide to deviate from that you can do it knowingly, rather than accidentally and inefficiently. So yeah, you’ve been coaching a lot of people. What’s the most common issue that people have?

Mona Ying Reeves  17:10

A very common issue I see is that people are really asking for somebody else’s dream house. You might see an image and say, “Oh, I really want those countertops”, or, “I really want this open plan”. And it’s influenced by this photograph, or idea that that you’ve seen somewhere else. But they’re asking for that without having done the internal work with themselves to understand, you know, why are they drawn to this space? Why do they want an open plan? Why do they want white marble? Why do they want this kind of space, and does this really work for how they want to live their life? I think that’s a conversation that architects and designers often have been trained to do – interior designers as well. It’s not always a conversation that those on the building side, the contractors or builders, tend to ask for. Because their business model is more, “Tell me what you want, and let me build it”. They’re not really about questioning or discussing it with you further. And so I go back to that as the biggest mistake that homeowners can make, because you can end up spending a lot of money building something that doesn’t actually solve what you’re trying to solve, if you haven’t given that initial thought to it first. A lot of times, when I’m doing clarity work while coaching homeowners and we’re identifying where they’re stuck, is it usually comes down to being drawn to a certain solution without really understanding or questioning whether that’s the right choice for them.

Katharine MacPhail  19:10

Using the example of open plan, do you know why people want an open plan?

Mona Ying Reeves  19:18

I think we’ve been fed this open plan. Honestly, trends for community spaces swing back and forth kind of a pendulum. Most homeowners, or building renovating population, have grown up in closed spaces with closed layouts and are going to find open plans very appealing because it’s something that they haven’t had. They want something different.

Katharine MacPhail  19:48

Right.

Mona Ying Reeves  19:49

And now we’re seeing the pendulum almost swing the other way, because in recent years open plans have become quite prevalent. It’s kind of easy to get that open plan wherever you go, whether you’re buying a house or renting an apartment. So now we’re starting to see, especially since everyone’s spent more time at home now, this preference now towards closed plans because it’s different now. I do think it has a little bit to do with the grass is always greener on the other side.

Katharine MacPhail  20:21

Well, it’s no secret that I’m not a big fan of open plan. I understand the appeal of a big open space, but I really think that it’s important to have the closed off spaces too so people can go there and do their own thing. It’s only been about a hundred years since open plan has even been an option. Before that it was just closed in houses that had different rooms of different sizes, depending on how much money you had, how much you could heat and all that. Now people want to knock out all the walls in the house. Though less so since COVID, like you said, with people trying to Zoom in to classrooms and work from home. I’ve been hearing about people taking work calls in their closet, because they can shut the door.

Mona Ying Reeves  21:11

I mean, I think the time and the culture influences a lot of those things. When we look at closed plans, I often think back to the Victorian times where a lot of spaces were compartmentalize. You think about the 20s, when a lot of these upper middle class or wealthier homes had live-in servants. So you had this very distinct server space versus the space for those being served, and a delineation between those two. We start seeing the open plan come from the 50s onwards with modernism, as an idea that was more about the masses and being accessible to everybody. And so there’s the cultural influences, as well as how things work for your own family. Again, I do think it comes down to a lot of the initial work that architects might do with a client, or those types of conversations they have early on. For your regular renovation, you may not always need that level of design. We’re trying to help people avoid those frustrations.

Katharine MacPhail  22:34

Yeah. Anyway, I got a little off track. A little off track with my favorite subject, open plan.

Mona Ying Reeves  22:41

I love it.

Katharine MacPhail  22:44

For some reason I’m thinking a lot about the Brady Bunch house, because he was an architect and his plan was pretty open. Maybe that was because it was a set of a TV show, that could have been it too.

Mona Ying Reeves  22:56

Don’t get me started on the Brady Bunch house. I think so many of us formed our idea of what an architect does from the Brady Bunch. Nowadays, when you’re thinking about doing a building, I don’t think most people imagine hiring this architect who looks like Mike Brady who locked himself away in a room for months to have this individual creative genius moment. That’s very disconnected with what we need, right? We need someone to tell us what we need to do, is why I’m asking for feasible, can I afford it? You know, how do I go about doing this without adding on to my busy schedule? So it’s a very different set of problems we’re dealing with now. Architects are able to help people in that sense, with creative breakthroughs, but it’s not something that regular people are asking for.

Katharine MacPhail  24:00

Have you ever heard of the Undercover Architect in Australia?

Mona Ying Reeves  24:07

Oh, yes, I have.

Katharine MacPhail  24:11

I’m trying to get her to come on the show, but I don’t know if she ever will. She has her own podcast. But she’s another architect that comes to mind whose work focuses on helping people in a larger scale. Right? So are your courses similar? I think her courses are about building new homes, do you know anything about that?

Mona Ying Reeves  24:33

I don’t know specifically about her courses. I do know a number of different people who offer courses, because I am familiar with the community. For instance, you and I met on Clubhouse and I have a house and renovation club there. So I do know there are a number of us tackling this issue from different points of view. Many people with programs like that come at it from a “here’s how you can design your project yourself” persepective. I come at it a little bit differently in mine, so it’s certainly something you can pair up with any of those other courses that have more to do with the design component. My courses are more about process, less about planning the design for your project. It really does depend on the person – one family might be able to design and plan it themselves, and another family may need to hire out. But there is a common process, or what I call the roadmap. It’s a framework that someone has to follow to get through those decisions and commitments to get their project done. That’s the part that I focus on, how to keep yourself on course and figure out whether you need to hire out or not in between. It’s something that’s different for everybody.

Katharine MacPhail  26:06

Yeah. Well, let’s say someone wanted to learn more about you, which I’m sure they will – how do they find you?

Mona Ying Reeves  26:13

I have a website, it’s called it’s Kickstart House dot com. Fairly simple to find. Currently at Kickstart House dot com, there are a number of resources that you can download. One of the most popular ones I have right now is a free guide for things you must do before you hire a contractor. It was one that I wrote, actually, from personal experience with the worst contractor I could have ever possibly hired in my life.

Katharine MacPhail  26:15

Uh oh.

Mona Ying Reeves  26:49

There were certain things that I had always advised my design clients to do we went through the contractor search. It’s easy as a professional advising someone else to be very detached from it, and not to get emotional. But there was this one time in my life when I got impatient, and I didn’t want to call any more people. I really didn’t follow my own rules, and that was when this project went astray. It really got me thinking about like, what were those rules I always tell my clients on to prevent them from having this construction horror story experience. And so that’s the guide I’ve written, I tweaked it a bit and boiled it down to six steps. That’s something you could get off my website. And then also, from our conversation today, I have a new download which is called a renovation roadmap. It’s a framework that gives you the steps that any major project, I should say, needs to go through to really capture the individual’s ideas and dreams and bringing it to fruition through design and the building process. I invite you guys to grab that from Kickstart House dot com, forward slash roadmap.

Katharine MacPhail  28:22

And then you’re on Instagram, also.

Mona Ying Reeves  28:23

I am on Instagram, yes. So on Instagram, we offer a number of tips and motivations. That’s to help everyone keep their house dreams at the front of their minds. Because it’s a little bit like habit building, right? If you really want a nice house, or you’re working towards a nice house, you don’t just take that idea out once every few years and expect to be able to do it in a weekend. You really have to build that muscle and build that thinking to make those decisions that are really meaningful.

Katharine MacPhail  28:56

And what about Clubhouse? You’d mentioned Clubhouse, you have a club there?

Mona Ying Reeves  29:00

Yeah, Clubhouse is just a fun community you can connect with. You can always find it through my Instagram, and through my website too. It’s a fun place to connect not just with design professionals and homeowners, but really anyone having those conversations.

Katharine MacPhail  29:16

Any final thoughts?

Mona Ying Reeves  29:18

Well, I guess my final thought is I’m excited to be here on this podcast because when I think about who’s usually having these conversations about construction related to today’s homeowner, it’s usually not like this. On average this kind of discussion is just for building professionals, or people who build their own stuff. But today’s homeowners, who kind of fumble through and need to hire people to navigate that process, don’t have a lot out there that they can turn to. Very few people are really having that conversation, and this is a wonderful forum where you go deep on these topics.

Katharine MacPhail  30:02

I think people are getting something out of it, which makes me really happy. And thank you for doing what you do, and maintaining these communities. I’ve been enjoying spending Monday evenings with you, and I also enjoy when listeners tune into that on Clubhouse. You can talk directly with me and Mona, and how exciting is that? That is a great opportunity in itself.

Mona Ying Reeves  30:24

It has been a blast. We have our weekly ‘women in home renovations’ room, and the vibe is really peaceful actually.

Katharine MacPhail  30:33

It is nice. I like it. Thanks, Mona.

Mona Ying Reeves  30:37

Thanks, Katharine.

Katharine MacPhail  30:39

I hope you check out the downloads that Mona has to offer. Having a roadmap, like she mentioned, is really important. Thanks again to Mona for taking the time to be on the show. As always I appreciate you, listener. Thanks for being here. Usually I have this big outro where I talk about everything that you can do. Go to my website Talking Home Renovations dot com. Social links, transcripts, episode enhancements, a link to my newsletter, and everything else are there. This podcast is part of Gabl Media, the biggest AEC network on the planet. Check out the fine offerings of the other podcasts and video channels at GablMedia.com.

I have my own version of coaching, I guess you could say, but it’s more design based – my ‘Ask An Architect’ design helpline. The one thing is it has to be in Massachusetts, where I am a licensed architect. So if you need some advice on a plan, you’re stuck, or you don’t know what to do, I can give you some architectural advice. Check that out – again, link is on my on my website. Also check out the show notes, and maybe also subscribe to the show. Definitely tell your friends. This show is a production of my architecture firm Demios Architects, where we believe architects are for everyone. Until next time, take care.