Remodeling and construction journeys are complicated. It’s no wonder homeowners get stuck in the process. Having a renovation roadmap means reducing frustration and always knowing your next step.
In this episode, you will discover…….
- What “roadmap” means in the context of home renovation.
- Some common mistakes homeowners make on their renovation journey.
- Whether it’s ever too late in your project to start making your roadmap.
- How to find the right expert to ask for help.
Link to Mona’s Renovation Roadmap
About our guest
Feeling stuck when it comes to navigating your renovation? Mona Ying Reeves is the House Coach that will get you past the overwhelm and moving forward. A serial renovator, architect, and behind-the-scenes design consultant to various HGTV home makeover shows, Mona founded Kickstart House to support and empower homeowners with their renovation journeys.
After years of seeing homeowners struggle with a complicated construction landscape, Mona’s on a mission 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.
In addition to coaching homeowners, 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.
Learn more about Mona Ying Reeves
Website: Kickstart House
Facebook: Kickstart House
Twitter: Kickstart House
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Renovation Roadmap With Mona Ying Reeves
I am joined by Mona Ying Reeves, who is an architect I met on Clubhouse. We’ve been chatting there about home renovations, and we have a lot in common. Mona is a House Coach, and 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 a complicated construction landscape. She’s on a mission to help homeowners align their surroundings and 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. She is a licensed architect in the state of California, and 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.
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Hi, Mona. Thanks for coming on.
Thanks for having me, Katharine.
You’re an architect, and I’m an architect. You’re in California, and I’m in Massachusetts. We do similar things, but you have 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?
I am an architect. I’ve been working and practicing design architect for residential projects for many years out here on the West Coast. What I’ve been seeing more and more in recent times is that by the time a client may come to me as architecture or interior design professional for help on their project, they’ve had quite a bit of a journey before that point of either starting with the wrong vendor or talking to the wrong person.
Oftentimes, they might start with a contractor or a builder without a design, or perhaps they’re asking for help from neighbors and friends who say, “You got to go use so-and-so who helped me with my project,” but it’s a completely different skillset. They have gotten run around and been bounced around to a number of different people before they reach who they need as their team to help them. 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. It’s not about faith-building the project for them because those are things that each homeowner has to do on their own and assemble the right team for them to do. Not everyone’s going to need an architect or a licensed contractor. It’s knowing what their options are, knowing how to piece together the right team that they can trust, and do the project that is right for them is where the idea of Kickstart House comes from.
We coach homeowners and help advise them to be their check-in point so that they’re not going down the wrong path, and provide the emotional support and accountability in the process because, as any of us in home renovation knows, things never go as expected. When things don’t go as expected, how do you quickly course correct, who are you talking to, and who’s helping you be able to course-correct? 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 affordable and digestible for your average homeowner.
In home renovation, not everyone needs an architect or even a licensed contractor. You just need to know what your options are.
Is this an online group, Facebook group or membership site? I know there are different levels.
We are not location-based. We are an online community, so we serve everybody primarily here in the United States. We don’t serve international clients. When you get very specific with their project is going to be very regional, according to where you’re located. We’re not here to replace your building team that knows your local codes and what’s required of your particular location. From general things like how to navigate or what roadmap or framework for going about in renovation, that part is universal and what we address there.
What I find now is most of the community we serve has been largely women taking hold of their renovation projects for their families and for themselves. As a woman myself, I care more about the home and how it functions and relates to my overall mood and have more in tune with myself and my surroundings than the male counterparts in my family do. A lot of women share that.
We see that in statistics too, where there was a study done that said over 80% of home improvement projects nowadays are initiated by women. There is something that’s very meaningful about going through this as not just a checklist thing you have to do adding onto your to-do list, but having that part of this milestone, journey, or a particular season in your life to get something done for yourself and your family.
Is there a chat group? If I were part of the group, how would I interact with other people? Can I get on there and say, “They’re trying to push me into this tile, but I like this other tile.” Is that a question people would ask, do they need reassurance about certain things, or do they need help choosing the different contractors? What are the typical issues?
Our typical issue covers the whole range from the confusion of starting a project all the way down to people who are either in the design or build process and all the way down into under construction. We have three areas that we support our members. The first one is the coaching aspect, which is what I call house coaching. With the house coaching, you have access to expertise such as myself or a renovation coach. You can schedule a consultation on as a needed basis to get you through a hurdle.
Let’s say you’re stuck at some point in the process, and you need a sounding board and an expert to help make sure you’re on the right track and identify your next step. That is what the house coaching component does. That 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 training. This is more do it at your own pace.
If you want to propel your renovation more, or you’re doing research on your end, you can sign up for a course or training. They come in various lengths and download a free resource. We have plenty of free resources on the website now. That’s going to give you a bit of information framework that you can go at your own pace.
The third component is more emotional or going through it as a journey or approach, and that comes more from the community. We have a private support community where it’s largely homeowners, mostly women, going through various stages of the process. We occasionally do have events where we can have 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.
How did you decide to go in this direction instead of the more traditional that typically architects have worked that way? How did you decide to do it differently?
I don’t know that I’m doing it that differently because I still have my architectural practice, and that is Re:modern in Northern California. My practice still does full-service design, but I see it more as a sister-arm or extension out of that. Kickstarter House does a lot of the work that we do with one-on-one clients. We have those conversations and discuss these things with our full-service clients.
I want to make that accessible and affordable to everybody because not everyone’s going to need full-service design, but everyone deserves to have access to expertise and some of that navigation help that we do as traditional architects. That’s why we split that off in a bit, so it’s up for the homeowner. It serves more than one homeowner at a time.
It’s interesting that we have the ability to reach people all over the country, whereas years ago, we didn’t. To get your radio show wasn’t like you could just get your radio show, whereas essentially, that’s what we do now. We can gather people on Facebook and talk to them on Clubhouse. I know you have a Clubhouse club, and I joined you on Monday evenings, for me, 5:00 PM Eastern where we can talk directly to people all over the world. It’s pretty amazing the reach and the impact that we can have now that we couldn’t years ago.
It was exciting for me to discover your show here because here we are, two women architects both talking about home renovations. If you look traditionally at how construction has worked, it’s still an industry that’s over 91% male. Anytime you’re dealing with the actual building part of who you’re reaching out to, you’re talking to a largely male audience. The technology now has allowed us to go beyond that one-on-one relationship and have these conversations that will help everybody understand the goals of the homeowner and how they get that built.
Home improvement is very meaningful to go through and not just be a checklist that you have to do.
One thing that I say a lot is that architects are for everyone. There’s this concept or idea that architects are for certain types of people, that we are only for the elite, but we can help anyone who is undergoing this process. It can be a little stressful, and if you know more about what might be coming, then it makes the whole process smoother.
Our society and media contribute a lot to that when we watch television shows, HGTV, or many of the shelter shows. You have to recognize that those shows are done for content, not necessarily for reality. I’m saying this because I’ve worked on those shows before as a behind-the-scenes design consultant for them. Women tend to have a relationship with the homeowner, so they’re more driven for an audience that are women for whatever reasons the network executives and those show producers like to put the contractors in front of the camera.
In real life, you have teams that are much more complex and complicated than that. Through our media, we’ve trained the average homeowner or everyone to feel like they’re an expert in their home, but we’ve also trained them 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 get it done. That’s where a lot of frustration comes in when you’ve got a homeowner who thinks they can call the builder and say, “Give me this kitchen,” but in their mind, the kitchen they’re imagining or hoping for is very different than what the end up asking for.
Kickstart House and my work are about putting that power and agency back into the homeowner so that you know how to ask for what you want and how to navigate that process. No one’s out there to mess up your house, but you’ve got to take a bit of that lead role in there as the patron or the client too. It’s giving you the tools to be able to do that in this current climate that we’re working in.
People make assumptions about the way things will look like. I want this baseboard, but I didn’t mention it, so the contractor might think this is the baseboard I always put in. You get something that you’re surprised isn’t what you want, but that’s because nobody talked about it. To me, that goes to planning, which is the most important thing about this whole thing. You can’t go to a contractor, and he’s going to start building right away exactly what you want because that involves a lot of details that need to be planned out in there.
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 neighbors get onto. One of the questions that I see all the time is, “I want to do a kitchen remodel. Can someone recommend a contractor? I want to do a bathroom remodel. Can someone recommend a plumber?” As I see this as someone in the building industry, I cringe a bit because if you’re doing a bathroom remodel, you don’t start with a plumber. If you don’t realize that, you only know what you know.
If you’re asking the plumber, you might end up with the plumber who says yes because they want the job, but they don’t know how to deliver it. You don’t end up going to that next professional until you’re frustrated or get bounced around to 4 or 5 different people. These vendors are not calling you back because they think you’re not realistic because you’re calling them for something they don’t do. As a homeowner, you might not realize why they’re not calling you back, so there’s this whole miscommunication going on that doesn’t need to happen.
There is a certain value to knowing how it would typically go. If you decide to deviate from that, you need to do it knowingly rather than trying to get it done but not knowing how to do it. You’ve been coaching a lot of people. What’s the most common issue that people have?
The very common issue I see is that people are asking for somebody else’s dream house. You might see an image, and you say, “I want those countertops. I want this open plan.” It’s influenced by this photograph or idea that you’ve seen somewhere else. They’re asking for that without having done the internal work with themselves to understand, “Why am I drawn to this space? Why do I want an open plan? Why do I want white marble? Why do I want this space? Does this work for how I want to live my life?”
That’s a conversation that architects and designers often have been trained to do interior designers as well. It’s not always a conversation on the building side where the contractors or builders tend to ask for because they are purely by a business model more influenced by, “Tell me what you want and let me build it.” They’re not about questioning or discussing it further.
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 solve what you’re trying to solve if you haven’t given that initial thought to it first. That’s a lot of times part of the clarity work I do when I coach with homeowners, and we’re identifying where they’re stuck. It usually does come down to some point of thinking or being drawn to a certain solution without understanding or questioning whether that’s the right choice for them.
Using the example of an open plan, do you know why people want an open plan?
I think we’ve been fed up with this open plan. Spaces and trends come a swing in a pendulum. If you have most of the building owning renovating population, having grown up in closed spaces and closed layouts, an open plan is going to seem very appealing because it’s something that they haven’t had, and they want something different.
Now, we’re seeing the pendulum almost swing the other way because open plans in more years have become quite prevalent. It’s easy to get that open plan, whether you’re buying a house or renting an apartment. We’re starting to see, especially since everyone has spent more time at home, the swing is now towards the close plans because that’s something different. It has a little bit to do with the grass being always greener on the other side.
It’s no secret that I’m not a big fan of open plans. I understand a big open space, but it’s important to have closed-off spaces so people can go there and do whatever they’re going to do. It hasn’t been that long, and it’s probably hundreds of years that open plan has been even an option. Before that, it was closed in-houses that had different rooms for 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 with less so since COVID and people are trying to do Zoom in to classrooms and work from home. They’re devaluing closed rooms. I’ve been hearing about people taking work calls in their closets because they can shut the door.
Everything has a roadmap, a framework that someone has to follow to get their project done.
Time and culture influence a lot of those things. When I think back to close plans, I often think back to Victorian times, where there were spaces that were compartmentalized. You think about the 1920s when a lot of these upper-middle-class or wealthier homes had servants in their homes. You had this very distinct served space versus those being served and 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 something being accessible to everybody.
There are cultural influences as well as how things work for your own family. That comes down initially to a lot of the work that architects might do with a client where those types of conversations come out early on and regular renovation that may not always need that level of design. It becomes hindsight or something you realize afterward. We’re trying to help people avoid those frustrations.
For some reason, I’m thinking a lot about the Brady Bunch house because he was an architect and his plan was pretty open. It was also because it was a set of a TV show, so that could have been into.
Don’t get me started on a Brady Bunch house because so many of us form our idea of what the architect does from the Brady Bunch house too. Nowadays, when you’re thinking about doing a building, I don’t think most people imagine hiring this architect who looks like Mike Brady sitting and locking himself away in a room for months, having this individual creative genius moment. That’s very disconnected from what we need. We need someone to tell us what we need to do. It’s why I’m asking, “Is it feasible? Can I afford it? How do I go about doing this without adding on to my busy schedule?” It’s a very different set of problems we’re dealing with. We architects and our training are still able to help people in that sense, but it’s not something that regular people are asking for. It does come at it from both ends.
I’m sure you have heard of the undercover architect in Australia.
I have.
I’m trying to get her to come on this show, but I don’t know if she ever will. She has her own podcast. She’s another one that comes to mind as a way of helping people on a larger scale. Her courses are about building new homes. Do you know anything about that?
I don’t know specifically about her courses. I know a number of different people who offer courses because I am familiar with the community. You and I met on Clubhouse, and I have a house and renovation club there. I know there are a number of us tackling this issue from different points of view. Many of those come at it from, “You can design this yourself. Here’s how you would design your project.” I come at it a little bit differently in mine. It’s something you can pair up with any of those other courses that you take that have more to do with the design component.
My courses are more about the process. It’s less about the design or, “Let’s plan or design your project.” For that, it does depend on the person. One family might be able to design and plan it themselves. Another family may need to hire out, but there is a common process, what I call the roadmap. It’s a framework that someone has to follow to still get through those decisions and commitments to get their project done. That’s for the part that I focus on is keeping you on course and where you need to be, and whether or not you need to hire out or not in between it. It’s different for everybody.
Let’s say someone wanted to learn more about you, which I’m sure they will. How do they find you?
I have a website. It’s KickstartHouse.com. It’s fairly simple to find. At KickstartHouse.com, there are a number of resources that you can download. One of the most popular ones I have now is a free guide for things you must do before you hire a contractor. It was one that I wrote from a personal experience with the worst contractor I could have ever possibly hired in my life. There were certain things that I had always advised my design clients to do as we did the contractor search. It’s easy as a professional advising someone else to be very detached and not get emotional with it.
There was this one time in my life when I got personally impatient where I didn’t want to call some more people and didn’t follow my own rules. That was when this project went straight. It got me thinking about like, “What were those rules I always advise my clients on to prevent them from having this construction horror story experience?” That is the guide I’ve written that I tweaked and boiled it down to six steps. That’s something you can get off of my website.
From our conversation, I have a new download, which is called the Renovation Roadmap. It’s a framework that gives you the steps that any major project needs to go through to capture the individual’s ideas and dreams and bring them to fruition through design and the building process. There’s a free download too. I invite you guys to grab that from KickstartHouse.com/roadmap.
Are you also on Instagram?
In Instagram, we offer a number of tips and motivation to help everyone keep the house dreams at the front of mind because it’s a little bit like habit building. If you want a nice house or you’re working towards a nice house, you don’t take that idea out once every few years and do it on a weekend. You have to build that muscle and build that thinking to make those decisions that are meaningful.
What about Clubhouse? You had mentioned Clubhouse.
Clubhouse is a fun community. You can always find it through my Instagram and also link to my website too. It’s a fun community to connect not just with design professionals and homeowners but anyone having those conversations.
Any final thoughts?
The final thought is I’m excited to be here on the show because when I think about who’s having these conversations about construction related to nowadays homeowners. It’s not the discussion for building professionals or people who are a handyman and build their stuff, but truly homeowners who want their problems solved, who fumble through and need to hire people trying to navigate that process. Very few people are having that conversation. This is a wonderful forum where you go deep on these topics.
People are getting something out of it, which makes me happy. Thank you for doing what you do and maintaining these communities. I’ve been enjoying spending Monday evenings with you. For the readers, tune into that on Clubhouse. You can talk directly with me and Mona and how exciting it is that it is a great opportunity in itself.
It has been a blast. We have our weekly women-at-home renovations room, and the vibe is peaceful.
Thanks, Mona.
Thanks, Katharine.
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I hope you check out the downloads that Mona has to offer. Having a roadmap she mentioned is important. Thanks again, Mona, for taking the time to be on the show. As always, I appreciate you, the reader. Thanks for being here. Usually, I have this big outro where I talk about all of everything that you can do. Go to my website, Talking Home Renovations, social links, transcripts episode enhancements, linked to my newsletter, and everything.
This show is part of Gabl Media, the biggest AEC network on the planet. Check out the fine offerings of the other shows and video channels at GablMedia.com. I have my version of coaching, but it’s more design-based. It has to be in Massachusetts, where I am a licensed architect. If you need some advice on a plan, are stuck, and don’t know what to do. I can give you some architectural advice. Check that out. The link is on my website. Subscribe to the show. The show is a production of my architecture firm, dEmios Architects, where we believe architects are for everyone. Until next time. Take care.
Important Links:
- Kickstart House
- Re:modern
- Renovation Roadmap
- Instagram – Renovation Support Community
- Clubhouse – House and Renovation Club
- GablMedia.com
- dEmios Architects
- Talking Home Renovations with the House Maven – Apple Podcasts
- Kickstart House – Facebook
- Kickstart House – Twitter
- @TalkingHomeRenovations – Instagram
About Mona Ying Reeves
I’m a serial renovator, licensed architect, and former design consultant to numerous HGTV home makeover shows.
I’ve met a lot of people just like you, whose lives are held back by the current state of their homes. They start off strong with a desire to renovate, then end up getting stalled, confused, overwhelmed, or side-tracked. Many times, life simply gets in the way. The next thing you know, years may have passed and you’re still living in that too-outdated, too-small, or too-broken house that you once vowed to change.
I know because I’ve been there, too. And I know how to help you get moving again.
Kickstart House is the support squad I wish existed whenever I go through a project. And I’m so excited to share it with you.