- Welcome back to Houzz TV Live,
I'm Rick Spence, and joining me today
is Jenny and Matt Sneller from Sneller Custom Homes
in Spring, Texas.
Now Matt and Jenny, I haven't seen you guys since IBS 2015,
how are things going out there?
- Yeah, projects are still rolling in.
I think the size of projects is gonna shift a little bit
over the next year or so, but overall, good!
- Well thanks for inviting us into your home,
can't wait to see a couple of the spaces you guys did.
Top of mind right now for a lot of people is,
how do I make multiuse of a space, right?
If you're in a home, you're locked down,
you're either looking to maybe isolate from your children,
or your roommate, or whoever,
to maybe work from home a little bit.
You guys are gonna share with us two multi-use spaces,
one is your office, and then one I understand,
is sort of a kid's room, playroom, game room kinda thing.
Which one do you wanna start with?
- Let's start with the game room?
- Yeah, let's do it.
- So, we live in a 1974 ranch style.
It was a single story home when we bought it,
and we've basically, over the years,
slowly remodeled every single part,
kind of in different phases.
I think we realized this last one we did
was number seven or eight in remodels.
- We can't stop (laughs).
- I mean ones of your own personal remodels,
that you're living in?
- Yeah.
- So it's a good way to practice, right?
- (laughs) Exactly, yeah.
If I can keep Jenny happy,
then I probably keep pretty much any homeowner happy.
- And there you go.
- So, great practice.
So yeah, because it's a single story,
all we had was a big family room space for us as a family,
and for our three kids.
So we kind of realized, hey, it'd be great
to have a big game room place
that we can just send the kids upstairs.
And because of the size of our lot and everything,
we had to go vertical with it,
and so we decided,
"Hey, let's build up over the garage and guest suite."
And we ended up adding close to 1,000 square feet up here.
- [Rick] When you first did the addition on top the garage,
was it like, "Okay, this gonna be multi-use space,
"or was it gonna, okay place for the kids to get away,
"an office, was it strategic the way you did it initially?"
- Yeah, even from the very beginning,
we were thinking,
this has to serve a whole lot of functions for us.
We didn't wanna be locked in to one thing.
So, we knew from the beginning,
this is gonna be used for kid's sleepovers,
for play area, for entertaining both kids and adults.
It may be used for workout space.
So, one of many thing we kinda thought through was,
we can't do a pool table,
because it just takes up too much room.
So if we do a ping pong table, we can fold it up,
we'll make a little divot in the wall
and be able to slide it out of the way.
So, we were thinking about those things
even from the beginning.
I was doing ideabooks on Houzz
of every single feature I liked,
and then we just tried to see
how many things can we incorporate into this one room.
And then now, during quarantine, we've added
(laughs) a rowing machine-- - Home office. (laughs)
- And a home office.
And it's become a lot things.
But we're just glad that we had that forethought
at the beginning, so that we can use it for really anything.
- Tell me about your choices,
and what you were going for, design wise with the space.
- Yeah, so we work with a lot of great interior designers
on all of our projects, and we worked with Sarah Herndon,
from Herndon Design Group on this one specifically,
and she helped us tremendously with the selections.
- [Jenny] And we wanted it to feel
a little bit industrial up here, with the exposed beams
and the brick and we did a lot of clean lines.
So, we wanted it to have kind of that different feel
than maybe downstairs is a little bit cozier,
and up here it's a little bit more industrial.
- [Rick] Tell me a bit more about the bar.
So, are there two bars?
Am I seeing two bars in this?
- [Matt] Right behind us right here, is a sink
and kind of a, technically a wet bar.
But it's basically just a bunch of built in cabinetry
on one side, it's got drawers for all the kid's DVDs,
and then games up above that.
And then we've also got the live edge kind of bar top,
it's a floating live edge
up against the other wall, over here.
- So what would be some advice you would give to someone
who wants to tackle sort of a multi-use space?
What are the key components of creating a multi-use space,
in a family situation?
- I think the main thing
is not locking yourself in to one thing.
So, if you're gonna build a media room,
build it in such a way, that if you decided in a year
that you don't want a media room any more,
you're not gonna have to tear the whole room apart,
you may have to just replace furniture
and kinda reorganize the space.
But the things that are hard to move,
I would say, try to be as flexible with those as you can.
In this space,
we could move things around however we wanted to
without costing ourselves a lot of money,
because the things that can't be changed are very versatile.
And then the other thing I think is just, trying to foresee
what you might possibly want to use it for.
And everybody knows,
Houzz has all the pictures you could ever want.
And so, doing a bunch of searches
and trying to find what are other people doing?
What are cool things that we could incorporate
into this space that could serve different purposes?
- Just list everything out, and then once you find a pro
that's a good match for you,
they can help you kind of decide,
"Hey, you've got ten things that you want this room to be,
"we can make eight of them happen pretty easily,
"all in the same space.
"The other two are probably going to be a little too tricky,
but we can get eight out of ten."
That's pretty awesome, if you can do that.
- Yeah, what are we actually gonna do here?
I know a lot of people who are happy
they have treadmills right now,
but I also know there's a lot of rooms
that were made for dedicated treadmills,
that never got a lot of use, right?
With the TV hanging in front of the treadmill
and all (laughs) right?
So, I really love that advice about keeping it versatile
and really thinking about that, that's great advice.
Did you have to do separate heating and cooling I imagine?
And how did you think about that?
Because, you get enough people up there,
the air is really...
you've gotta have some serious circulation,
and it's elevated, right?
So it probably gets a little hotter,
you're in Texas, how do you keep that cool?
- Exactly.
Yeah, so we knew out HVAC system
was maxed out on the main house,
you can't go any bigger on a residential system.
So what we ended up doing was mini split system up here.
So we've got the condenser outside,
we've got the cassette here,
it's actually kind of up above the brick wall,
on the wall up there.
And it works great.
I mean, it's a remote control unit to where
we kinda keep it at 75, 76 at all times.
And then if we come up here
and we know we're gonna be working out
or playing ping pong separate, we're gonna get kinda sweaty,
we'll just crank it down to 68 or 70.
And you can push like a powerful setting on it
to where it'll go kinda full blast for a few minutes.
So that's worked out really, really well.
- So another space you had is the office,
I love the little book nook thing.
Tell me about this space, that is so cool.
Now you built that out, the house didn't come like that.
- The house didn't come with that.
So that was actually a part of the same addition
that we did the upstairs
that used to be a just a patio area.
And for years and years,
we talked about doing the upstairs space,
and we could never figure out how to do the staircase
we're like, there's just not a good place for
and finally we realized, well wait,
if we take in that patio,
that portion of it could be the staircase
and then the rest of it could be,
at that time we didn't even know,
we're like the rest of it can just be a room,
whatever we want it to be; a sunroom, whatever.
And then as we drew up plans, and as it started to evolve,
it was like, "Hey, that could be that could be a nice space
for Jenny to have an office," cause she on a normal basis
non quarantine COVID,
she works from home a lot more than I do.
- That was book nook has been like in my dreams for years.
We had built a couple for customers over the years
and every time we built one I was like,
"Why can't we do one in our house?"
There just wasn't a space 'cause you really do have
to have a little cavity in the wall to put it in.
And so as soon as those stairs were going in, I was like,
"This is it, this is our chance."
So we built that little book nook
and put in a bunch of books storage and the mattress,
I think, Sarah, our designer kinda helped us walk through
what that would look like 'cause doing custom cushions
and all those things can be super expensive.
So we just did a twin mattress and had a cover made for that
and some cool lighting in there.
I mean that space gets used so much,
there's always kids in there reading, doing homework.
Some of us like to take next Sunday afternoon naps there.
- It might be a favorite napping place.
- Oh that's the hideaway,
that's the hideaway nap spot right there.
- Exactly.
- Nothing better.
That's really awesome space.
What else did you do there, anything else special
in sort of, in that room that you did
in terms of setting it up for an office.
- We put a lot of thought into the finishes in there,
just because it was kind of thought through to be my office
and so we wanted to do some kind of dynamic wallpaper
that would be noticeable and a little bit more feminine.
The light fixtures obviously are a little bit more bling
than the rest of our house.
And then we did the shiplap on the walls.
I think storage again is big, kind of like in the game room,
we were always thinking about storage.
So we wanted deep drawers
and we wanted them to kinda be hidden.
So those those big drawers, they blend into the shiplap
they're just flush with the wall.
So the only thing you can really see
is kind of the gold hardware, yeah sticking out
but there's a ton of storage in there
it can be used for files or in our case
it turned into kind of dog storage when we got a dog.
(laughs)
- When that space was designed, we did not have a dog
and so once we did get a puppy, it was like,
"Okay, where are we going to keep the kennel?"
- [Rick] And he's happy there.
- [Matt] He is.
- [Rick] Right, I see him lying in there,
look at he's totally happy.
He's digging it.
- Exactly, Jenny used to complain
that oh, the dog stole my office,
but she kinda likes having him in there now.
- Yeah, he's my buddy.
- Two great amazing rooms, guys, I really love it.
- [Jenny] Thank you.
- I hope to see more of the space.
And come visit you in Texas
and do a story on one of your homes.
By the way I wanted to ask you about your experience with,
you did like a multiuse dance space
for Mario Lopez's sister.
- [Matt] That's right.
- Right, tell me, what was that experience like?
- So we've always dreamed of doing kind of a remodel project
where there's the big reveal at the end
and the client hasn't really seen the project throughout.
And so, 'cause most of our projects like, they're huge.
And the clients are there on a daily basis,
weekly basis, whatever it is.
And so that was really fun to be able to surprise them
with that, in the video watching them in my house
and seeing them come around the corner
and come up the staircase,
and the kids are just jumping all over the place
and freaking out.
So it was a lot of fun.
- [Rick] We got to see all the dance moves.
- [Matt] Exactly. (laughs) - [Jenny] Oh, exactly.
- [Rick] I didn't see your dance moves.
- Yeah, we didn't wanna break the camera. (laughs)
- You don't break the dance moves on (laughs).
Jenny, how's his dance moves?
What's it like?
(Jenny and Matt laughing)
All right, we'll agree on that, yeah.
- Its best if you don't know on camera. (laughs)
- (laughs) That's awesome.
Congratulations on that.
I think that was a really nice project,
made that family really happy.
Well, thank you, Matt and Jenny,
really appreciate you taking the time.
I know things are busy and crazy right now
and there's just a lot going on
and really enjoyed seeing your home
and look forward to seeing some future projects.
- Absolutely. - Awesome.
- It's our pleasure.
Thanks so much for joining us and next time you're in Texas,
come to Houston and you've got a place to stay man.
- You got it.
All right, see you guys.
Take care.
- All right. - All right, thanks.
- Bye bye.