During Episode #14, Joe Raboine, Belgard’s Director of Residential Hardscapes, caught up with Chayce Wilson, owner of Blank Slate Reno. Joe and Chayce talk about the current backyard renovation collaboration between Blank Slate and Belgard, as well as Oldcastle APG sister brands Pebbletec, Barrette Outdoor Living and MoistureShield. They also discuss the process of working with influencers, tips for contractors looking to expand their marketing efforts, and more. For more information on Belgard, visit Belgard.com/InsideOut.
Joe Raboine: Welcome back to Inside Out With Belgard, a podcast made for professionals by professionals who are passionate about outdoor living. I’m your host, Joe Raboine, director of Residential Hardscapes at Belgard, and we’re thrilled to bring you the latest insights from some of the top experts in the industry.
Today I am thrilled to welcome Chayce Wilson. Chayce, welcome to Inside Out by Belgard. How are you?
Chayce Wilson: I’m doing well, Joe. Thanks for having me.
Joe Raboine: Well, for our listeners, I met Chayce I think it was a couple years back. He was invited to one of our dream home events, him and his wife Hannah. And we met and we kinda hit it off and I think was maybe about a year ago, Chayce came to us and had a project for us, which we’ll get into here in a minute.
But a little bit about yourself and Hannah, you guys are located in Fort Worth, Texas, correct?
Chayce Wilson: That’s right. Yeah.
Joe Raboine: And so Blank Slate Reno, what exactly is Blank Slate? Like what do you guys do? I mean, what’s your kind of scope of work and maybe give us a little bit of background on where you came from as well.
I think that’d be great.
Chayce Wilson: Sure. Well, we got started pretty early on. Got married young and before we got married I was flipping homes just kind of casually on the side. But once we got married, Hannah developed a taste for design. She went to design school and it kind of made sense to partner up together where I managed more of the construction side and she managed more of design planning and it ended up working well.
We grew our business. We both quit our jobs eventually to flip full-time, and that’s what we did. Buying homes, renovating them, and then selling them along the way. Hannah started tracking that on social media, so all credit is to her. I really didn’t enjoy that aspect or think that it was gonna be useful, but it ended up being a really important part of our business, growing that social media following to where today we have a decent following.
We both enjoy what we do and seems to be working out.
Joe Raboine: You know, this whole idea of influencers is relatively new. You know, over the last few years especially, and it seems to be taking over the construction and design world at a pretty impressive pace. And I’ve had the pleasure of and not only meeting you and Hannah, but many other influencers over the last several years.
And it’s funny, a lot of ’em have a similar story to what you just said. A lot of ’em, their wives kind of started on the design side and the husbands were I would say not quite sure about where this would all lead. And for a lot of ’em it blew up into something that’s pretty incredible and obviously pretty valuable as well for your audience.
Chayce Wilson: Yeah, sure. And that was kind of a surprise for me, is that it was a source of additional income for us outside of the house. So as we grew, companies would send us products. For instance, Samsung might send us a refrigerator. And we’d get the refrigerator and a little bit of cash in the very beginning, and we would stage it and send them the pictures, and then it kind of grew from there.
So kudos to her for pushing through and not listening to me.
Joe Raboine: I’m married as well, so I would, there’s been any instances where I could totally relate for sure. My wife is usually more on point than I am. Yeah. So we’ll dig into that a little bit for our audience, especially our contractors who would like to learn more or understand more of that world here in a minute.
But if you don’t mind, I’d like to jump to the project that we are working on. So you came to us, maybe it was a little more than a year ago, and you just purchased a new home in the Fort Worth area that, well it wasn’t necessarily new, but a different home for you, right? That you were getting into renovating and thought there might be an opportunity for us to kind of showcase what we can do. And so, could you elaborate on that a little bit and kind of set the stage for what that project is and kind of, you know, what your thoughts were behind that?
Chayce Wilson: Sure. So, yeah, we met a while back at the HGTV Dream Home giveaway.
After that, we did a smaller project on one of our flip homes, and we just really enjoyed working with Belgard. The project turned out better than we thought, so once we sold that home, we bought this home in Fort Worth. It was a much bigger project. The outdoor was just the outdoor area in the backyard, was just in a terrible condition, but had a ton of potential.
And I knew that Belgard was owned by Oldcastle and they had a number of portfolio companies that complimented one another and wanted to see if they were interested in additional collaboration, a bigger collaboration where they could involve more of the Belgard products and more of the sister companies and do kind of a grand collaboration.
I was kind of reaching, but for some reason they were interested and here we are.
Joe Raboine: I had actually forgotten about the smaller project that we did the year before with art forms in the kitchen. And that was great. Yeah, I think, you know, with this project when you came to us, and you and I had a lot of early on conversations about it.
I think the timing was right. We had just acquired Barrette Outdoor Living, Pebbletec, you know, some of the other Oldcastle sister brands, and were looking for an opportunity like this where we could kind of collaborate and create a space that really showcased all those brands and what could be done in this space.
And I think what’s cool about your project is the majority of our projects, you know, through our contractor network, our renovations, right? And I think there’s this thought that most outdoor living spaces are new construction, but that’s actually a pretty small part of what we do, about 70 to 80% in many markets is renovation work.
So when you brought this project and the style and the thoughts of what you wanted to try to pull off, we thought, man, this could be a great opportunity for us to collaborate and learn on both sides, you know, kind of the process and what it would take to execute a space like this. And then, you know, kind of working through the collaboration of with yourself and Hannah as designers and in construction, you know, what that could be like.
So the house itself is, I guess, mid-century modern. Is that, would that be accurate for the home style?
Chayce Wilson: Yeah. Yeah, I think so. It’s a larger one story, you know, mid-century modern home and there were a number of challenges, you know, kind of thinking through working with Belgard on this. It was a learning curve for sure, but I will say compared to the last, the smaller collaboration with the art forms where I didn’t really get to enjoy and utilize some of the Belgard design suite, the studio and the AR rooms, this project specifically really, those elements kind of came to the fore and really got to utilize those and see how cool and powerful they were.
I mean, it made a huge difference cuz we were lost on this backyard. I mean, it was an overwhelming task.
Joe Raboine: Yeah. And so I know this isn’t a visual medium, but just if you kind of picture, so this home is a, like you said, a large ranch style home, all brick. The backyard was a combination of like broken concrete, I would say, a little bit of decking that had been had, it’s a little bit past its prime, let’s say.
So it was really, truly a blank slate. No pun intended. But the cool part is, is that you wanted to make this kind of a modern, really modern space. Right? So, and you were adding things like a folding glass wall, you know, transitioning out of the house from the kitchen. So you kind of came to us with a list and kind of an idea of where you wanted to start.
And we collaborated between utilizing Belgard rooms and our design studio team, and kind of went back and forth and came up with a plan that I think turned out great. I mean, you’ve got pretty much every feature in there that you could want. You’ve got a pool, right? With a swim up bar. You’ve got a fireplace area, a full blown kitchen with an island, a putting green space.
You’ve got a deck as part of that. Lighting, fencing, retaining wall, decorative screen panels, outdoor shower. We kind of have it all in there. Outdoor shower. Yep. Forgot that.
Chayce Wilson: Yeah. When the team sent me this design in the beginning, I was like, okay. You guys are really, there’s no way you guys are dreaming.
But sure enough the final result is pretty close to the original design. And that kind of surprised both me and Hannah because it just was so grand in the beginning. But they, we pulled it off.
Joe Raboine: Yeah, that’s great. This project hasn’t necessarily gone smoothly in certain aspects, right?
Like most other projects that involve weather and, you know, all kinds of other issues, zoning, and, I mean, there’s a lot going on in this space that requires a lot of thinking and planning, and I know obviously you live through that daily with what you and Hannah do. I mean, but actually living through it as an owner of the house, could you maybe offer some insights or, you know, suggestions for our listeners that could help maybe smooth that process out a bit.
Chayce Wilson: Sure. I would say definitely have the buy-in of your significant other. You know, that if you wanna stay married, at least if you don’t, then just go right ahead on and do it. But if you wanna stay married, I would say have the buy-in of your spouse.
Luckily for me, I did and we knew mostly what we were getting into, but this was the first large scale backyard renovation. My first pool build, I’d never done a retaining wall before, and the retaining wall in this case was 10 to 12 feet high in some places. So there was a bunch of firsts for us. So, yeah, I would say managing expectations, if you go in expecting that, there’s gonna be challenges, tension, you know, so when they come, you’re not thrown off guard by ’em and you get to stay married.
So there’s that. So yeah, I mean, it was definitely a big. Learning curve, like I said before. Yeah. But having the Belgard team kind of prep us on and then provide other sources, other local sources to help us get the job done, you know, made a big difference.
Joe Raboine: You know, there’s a lot of contractors who, and I’ve talked to several even on the podcasts, who would aspire to offer this full suite of services, right?
When you’re looking at pools and structures and you know, all the bells and whistles of an outdoor space. There is a lot there. I mean, it’s essentially like building a house outside. You have really the same subcontractors, the same types of permits and requirements that are necessary. You felt that, you live that, right?
I mean, you had to go, we had to get, I think it took quite a while to get the permit, right? For some of that, for the wall and kind of the setbacks and all that. So just doing your homework upfront as much as you can. Right. And then yeah, setting those expectations that hey, even despite our best efforts, things may not go 100% the way we would want them to go, and just being able to adapt.
Chayce Wilson: Yeah, I would echo that. I mean, especially the planning upfront, just as much as you possibly can because there’s a point in the project where you can’t go backwards. Like for instance, you know, laying water lines or focusing on drainage and the way that water’s gonna pull up and run off. You know, those are things that once it’s been graded and the hardscapes have been put down, it makes it very challenging.
So, and there were a number of things that we didn’t realize we needed to plan for, at least for me. You know, for instance, lighting was kind of an afterthought both above lighting and in ground. And in the deck lighting were things that I realized, okay, we should have thought through this a little bit better, but next time.
Joe Raboine: Well, we still got most of it in, right?
Chayce Wilson: No, no. So it looks great. It just, you know, on every project you learn what to look for and, but yeah, the lighting did turn out great.
Joe Raboine: Yeah. What’s interesting about this project is, you know, having the ability to work and collaborate with you, right, to kind of create this shared end result. What was great is that you were also renovating the house, so you were able to do some things like adding the, the folding wall to come and transition out. We’re able to transition out of there using the Moisture Shield product and then down ultimately to the pool deck. That had to be a challenge though. I mean, you basically are renovating this entire property at the same time.
Chayce Wilson: Sure.
Yeah. That added an extra level of you know, headache, but especially that you mentioned the folding wall, like that’s a product I’ve been trying to fit into one of our homes for years but they’re so expensive.
Like just the work and the framing that has to go in before you put in this large, and if you don’t know what the sliding glass wall is, essentially, you might have five large glass panels and they both completely fold to each side of maybe a 20 or 25 foot span. So, you know, when you’re in your living room, it looks like that divider between the inside and outside kind of vanishes.
And that’s something that we’ve enjoyed trying to do throughout is kind of that melding of the inside with the outside and that smooth transition in between. So with those products and with this folding glass wall that got rid of the barrier in between your living room and the pool. It really is unique and enjoyable for us at this point.
Joe Raboine: You’re not living in the house yet, are you? Or are you officially?
Chayce Wilson: Yeah, we are. We’re here.
Joe Raboine: So have you been able to enjoy the space yet on a personal level, or you’re still tweaking out some of the finishing touches, is that correct?
Chayce Wilson: I was in the hot tub last night with a seltzer.
So we are definitely making use of it. The water’s pretty cold, so when you jump in the pool, it still hadn’t heated up quite, but it’s still pretty nice. So yes, we definitely have enjoyed the pool, the fireplace, this modular fireplace kit that Belgar d sells. It’s great. It’s really cozy.
So we’ve enjoyed that, especially on the colder nights. The one thing we haven’t made use of is our pizza oven. I’m really excited about this pizza oven. I think it’s part of the elements collection with Belgar d.
Joe Raboine: It is. Yeah.
Chayce Wilson: So we gotta find some dough recipe, but we’re excited to use that pizza oven for sure .
Joe Raboine: That’s awesome. That whole kitchen turned out amazing, I think. So you’re just starting to use the space, and you’re fresh off of the construction. Would you say it’s been worth it through all the struggles and efforts to get that end result?
Chayce Wilson: Absolutely. Yeah. Definitely worth it. I mean, just seeing the before and after pictures. You know, that says it right there, but it’s kind of strange every single day, every weekend has been towards getting to this completion. So now that we’re finally there, it’s been kind of weird. I’m not used to this feeling of just sitting there and enjoying myself, but yeah, it’s great.
The wife loves it. It’s perfect.
Joe Raboine: Yeah. That’s funny. I’m always working on projects around my house too, but it does feel weird when I actually sit down and enjoy what I’ve been working on. You feel like you need to be doing something and usually I am. I’m like, you know, tweaking something with the flowers or plants and all that fun stuff.
Yeah. Well, and I haven’t seen, I’ve just seen photos. At some point I’d love to come see it in person. I think I mean, it looks fantastic. I mean, you’ve got porcelain in there. You’ve got, you know, dimensions, art forms, I would say almost the full suite of our new product assortment, which is really cool.
So we’re able to integrate some of those textures and colors and kind of pull it all together in that very modern, you know, kind of overall aesthetic, which is awesome.
Chayce Wilson: Yeah, we really enjoyed the different textures and the art forms is a pretty cool product that we saw in that first collaboration.
But the versatility of, you know, it can be a wall covering, it can be a planter or a fireplace, or in this case a kitchen, a shower, the basalt, we really like the texture of the basalt, that volcanic kind of rougher texture really accents well. But we were pretty impressed with, be cause in the beginning we knew the amount of products that were going in here.
So we were concerned with, wow, how are they gonna, you know, bring all these together in cohesion, but it works and it looks great. Everything just kind of accents one another and it works.
Joe Raboine: When people think about these projects, there’s a lot going on with Product Choice too, right?
You got colors and selections, and I know with the PebbleTec finish and PebbleTec light streams tiles, and, you know, all those different pieces, trying to pull that together with, you know, how’s the screening going to look along with the fencing. There’s a lot to consider and so I hope that our 3D renders helped that a bit, right?
And helped take away some of that potential confusion upfront.
Chayce Wilson: Yeah, no, they more than helped. They made it possible. It was such a large project that we couldn’t capture that vision. We wouldn’t know where to start to bring all of this together. And especially what was really unique is the AR rooms portion, you know, they’re these rooms that Belgard has created that already have the different products, the products together. Some of the vertical hardscapes and you could just hold your phone up to this area, click a button, and then it locks, and then you can walk around and see, you know, this entire room from different perspectives. Really cool.
Joe Raboine: Yeah. I think we had three or four different rooms in there that were AR models that were essentially kind of stitched into that complete plan.
We had your, I think it was your fireplace, the outdoor shower area, the kitchen, and then I think part of that bar area that’s kind of by your swim up bar was part of that too.
Awesome. Well, that was our hope. I mean, we hope that those tools do help people kind of understand better upfront what these spaces can be, and then hopefully simplify that process of kind of developing that full personalized plan.
Chayce Wilson: Sure. And it takes the guesswork out of, you know, just starting from scratch. So I mean, if you have a large open space, you have these AR rooms where the dimensions are already set, the products are already there, so it kind of gives you a starting place or even more than a starting place. So it really helped us out quite a bit.
Joe Raboine: Yeah, that’s fantastic. So if you don’t mind, I might switch back to the influencer conversation that we had talked about earlier. So a lot of people are fascinated, I think, by influencers and I think for contractors especially, they would love to work more closely with influencers or even become an influencer themselves.
I mean, is there anything, any insights or advice that you could provide even if it’s at a broad level, kind of suggestions that they might be able to to utilize?
Chayce Wilson: Yeah, a couple of things. You know, first, don’t be like me. I mean, just allocate towards that type of marketing and be open to allocating towards that.
I think the return, you’re gonna quickly see the return is there, not just in dollars and cents, but just in viewers. And so that would probably probably be my first suggestion is just be open to putting some money towards that type of marketing and partnership. And also be flexible because it’s not gonna work out.
You might find an influencer or influencers that don’t work with you or they’re just trying to get free product, but stick with it and just keep working to find the right person, cuz you’ll see the benefits pretty quickly.
And the second thing probably is, yeah, I would just say keep finding the right influencer because there’s people out there that are just looking for free product and you don’t really get value for value.
So, you know, find someone who really wants to deliver that value for value and it’s equal for both parties or not just say, hey, send me that product and then 500 bucks and then they, you know, send back a Polaroid for your picture. So there’s people out there like that. But, you know, don’t lose faith in the process because you’ll have to eat crow like I did.
Joe Raboine: Well, great. Well any other tips or insights that you could provide as in terms of projects like this or, you know, renovations that our listeners could, could benefit from?
Chayce Wilson: I guess for me, just manage your expectations. Don’t start your first big project or small project and then think it’s gonna go perfectly.
Like use every project to learn and hone your skills and get a little bit better for the next project. So yeah, just don’t expect for everything to go perfectly the first time. Keep learning, keep growing, and you know, you’ll see the fruit over time. Maybe not immediately. But it’s worth it. It’ s a part of my flipping business that I had kind of let fall by the wayside, never focused that much on the outdoor, especially the backyard. And I think I lost a lot of opportunity in doing so. So make it a part . Yeah.
Joe Raboine: You’ve got a couple of these projects under your belt. Is this is adding outdoor living space to your flips and your project’s going to be something that you’re looking to do in the future, continue to do?
Chayce Wilson: Yeah, absolutely. I think you have to be careful that you don’t overdo it, which is my personality. You know, if it takes you $1 to build something, you don’t want to get $1, you know, in your sell price that you could add. If it takes you $1, you wanna be able to add $5 to, you know, your eventual sale price, so don’t get too carried away.
Just kind of create that blank slate for a new buyer who then can populate that area with their life. So I think it’s definitely worthwhile. Just gotta find that right balance.
Joe Raboine: So as a closing question, one of the things that I ask my guests are, you know, what is the most fulfilling thing that, that you do as part of your career?
Chayce Wilson: You know, not to sound cliche, it would probably somewhere it would be somewhere in the realm of the before and after. I mean, just that, that tangible difference that usually in construction you can enjoy daily. Like when you leave the job site, you can look at a thing and go, all right, it looked like that this morning, and now it looks like this.
So in a broader perspective, at the end of a project, that’s the total feeling of, wow, this whole area was this. And then now it’s this. So for us, it, you know, simply is that it’s that tangible feeling of accomplishing a thing. And an extra benefit for us is now, since we live here, we get to live here, we get to continue to enjoy it, and Hannah and I just had our first child.
So that just makes it even more special as we can enjoy it with her as a family. So yeah, I would say that’s probably it.
Joe Raboine: Yeah. And you know, I was a contractor for a long time and I think you and I have had this conversation, but that is the one thing that I do miss is that and it, and if you’re actually out building and you’re, you know, getting your hands dirty, you get that feeling every day, right? That there’s something that you’ve taken from nothing and created something new, which is pretty powerful. And, and the fact that you get to enjoy it now is even more powerful, right? I mean, you get to experience that firsthand which is incredible. So awesome. Well, thank you for that and again, appreciate your time and look forward to staying in touch and seeing this project.
Yes. Same to you. Thanks, Joe.
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