Here’s The Latest with My Boutique Hotel Development in East Nashville (Salt Ranch)
In this discussion with Jacob Kromhout, my project manager from Bentwood Construction, we'll share the latest construction updates at Salt Ranch, my boutique hotel in East Nashville. We'll cover site progress, including the completion of a new entrance and the beginning of grading, as well as updates on each of the motel buildings, with painted exteriors, tile work, and successful electrical and plumbing inspections. The main house is seeing structural improvements, with framing completed and masonry repairs underway. Additionally, we'll provide a look into the mockup room, where fixtures, flooring, and furniture selections are bringing our vision to life.
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Key Takeaways:
The Salt Ranch Hotel project in East Nashville was initially designed as a $17 million renovation, but had to be redesigned to a $10 million project to secure funding.
The permitting process took 18 months, which Tyler described as an "absolute nightmare" due to government regulations and unexpected costs, like having to re-engineer the storm water system.
Jacob Kromhout was brought on as the project manager to oversee construction, manage the budget and timeline, and serve as the communication link between Tyler and the general contractor.
The hotel features many historical elements like exposed brick walls, hand-carved casings, and tall original windows that the team is working to preserve and incorporate into the boutique design.
The project is currently making good progress, with exterior painting, tile installation, and framing/drywall work underway. Securing the site as the weather gets colder is a near-term priority.
Tyler and Jacob plan to provide monthly construction updates to share the progress on the project, which is aiming for a spring 2025 opening.
About Your Host:
Tyler Cauble, Founder & President of The Cauble Group, is a commercial real estate broker and investor based in East Nashville. He’s the best selling author of Open for Business: The Insider’s Guide to Leasing Commercial Real Estate and has focused his career on serving commercial real estate investors.
Episode Transcript:
Are you looking to take the next step toward investing in commercial real estate? But don't know where to go. Series central offers a comprehensive education and coaching platform designed to help you get started. Our online courses cover a wide range of topics, from the fundamentals to advanced strategies, ensuring you have the knowledge and skills needed to thrive in this competitive industry. As a member, you'll gain access to our exclusive online community and monthly group coaching calls, providing you with valuable networking opportunities and personalized guidance from experienced professionals, whether you're a beginner or looking to take your career to the next level, cre Central has the resources you need visit www.crecentral.com to learn more. Welcome back to the commercial real estate investor podcast live from the Cauble group Studios here in Nashville, Tennessee. And I'm here with my buddy Jacob cromhout from bentwood contractors, also known as construction in Nashville, if you're on Instagram, I was texted because he's got, if you, if you follow me on Instagram, my handle is at commercial in Nashville, so I can't believe construction in Nashville was still available. I think that's hilarious. I
definitely told you
I was going to do that a couple months. Great. I actually really like it a lot. Today, we're going to be diving into an update on salt Ranch, that is the boutique hotel that I am building here in East Nashville. We acquired it in 2021 so you're probably thinking, Tyler, what the hell has been going on with that project? And honestly, I'm in the same boat as you. I'm like, What the hell is going on with that project? Here's where we are and why we haven't had too many updates on it. It took us. I over designed the project from the very beginning, right? So that was on us. On the development side of things, we designed a $17 million total project. And to put that in perspective, I bought the project for 3 million and it's an existing hotel renovation. If you are following on YouTube, I will be doing some screen share here in a minute. So we'll be showing you guys some things as well. So I couldn't get a bank to lend us 14 million, not $14 million but enough money to do a $17 million project. And so I spoke to 50 lenders. Finally, it was like, Okay, it's clearly not just the lenders. It's the project. I got to go back to the drawing board. We redesigned it, turned it into a ten million hotel project. First thing I went to got my funding. So sometimes you just got to redo what you're doing with rules. I mean, look, so if it was $17 million in downtown Nashville, probably not a problem at all. I would have had to have paid that just for the building now. So that was fun. Then we went to Metro Nashville to get our permitting done, and that was an absolute nightmare. It took us 18 months to get permitting, which is crazy. This is a renovation, but I mean, this is, this is the problem in dealing in being a developer and dealing with government entities, whatever you think makes sense, is dumb in the government world. So you'd think that it would make sense for storm water for you to tear up asphalt, but by disturbing that soil, you now have to re engineer all of the storm water on your side and add about 150,000 your side and add about $150,000 to your budget. So guess who ended up not touching the asphalt on site? This guy, I'm not going to do that. It doesn't make any sense at all. It's like dude being Come on, tearing up asphalt, going back with grass, having permeable pavers should make it much more absorbative. It will absorb much more absorbent. Absorbent. Yeah, it'll absorb more water. So it's like, you know, just things like that question of the day, by the way, if you're joining us live, want to hear your thoughts on this, do you prefer to stay in an Airbnb or a boutique hotel when you travel? My friends all stay at boutique hotels. They used to all. We all used to be on the Airbnb train, but Airbnbs have gotten too expensive. And it's like, you know, we're gonna penalize you if you don't do the dishes, if you don't take the trash out. It's like, well, what the hell am I paying a $300 cleaning fee? I was about
to say there will be a cleaning fee on top of that as well. And you know, my my wife and I are in the exact same page. We used to love going to stay at Airbnbs and they I think what ended up happening was people were overpaying for them. Market got too saturated. People just found bad deals over the last couple of years. And, you know, they're just passing the cost on to us, unfortunately. And so, yeah, we've, we've made the switch as well, just like you know, you have, yeah, it's
just, it's just too expensive. Boutique hotels offer a really cool experience. So yeah, jump in the live chat. I want to hear what your thoughts are when it comes to boutique hotels versus Airbnbs. So today, Jacob, his buddy of mine, he has taken over. The project management for this development of ours, which means that he's not the general contractor on the project. He is the project manager. Those are two very different positions. The reason, I mean Jacob, actually, why don't we do this? Why don't you tell us what a project manager does compared to a general contractor? Yeah,
of course, especially from, you know, from jumping into this. This is the first time that I've represented a developer rather than somebody who is a general contractor. And so one of the differences that I've noticed is I need to, you know, keep an eye on the budget, make sure our time is, is we're lining things up correctly. I need to make sure that you know our GC is on top of everything, and communicating with Tyler as the developer, all of the things that he needs to know on a weekly basis and sometimes even a daily basis, and step in whenever, whenever I have a connection that I feel I can bring to the table for the project as well. You know, one of the things that I'm not doing is doing any sort of design as a project. You know, project manager for a developer, but using the skills and the knowledge that I've built up in the construction world, and I'm able to walk on site and have the conversations that I need to with the GC, as well as his project manager, so that we're speaking the same language. We're having efficient conversations. We're figuring out how to get stuff done. And then I can go back to Tyler and say, Hey, here's what the cost is looking like, here's what our budget's looking like, here's the time it's going to take. And here's how I think we're going to be able to get this thing done in the, you know, the time span that we want it done in. That's
exactly right. So, you know, a project manager is really the owner's rep that's going to step in and be my advocate when I'm not necessarily there. And look, there's, I've developed plenty of deals I don't know every single thing about construction, right? So it helps to have somebody that also has his GC license that doesn't have a financial benefit from increasing the cost on the project. I'm not saying that my GC would do that, but it's good to just have that third party in there that is helping you oversee items like that. It's a smart move to do you know whether you're experienced or not, and so you know that's that's what Jacob is here for. Jacob, today, we're gonna be diving into some construction updates. Catch everybody up. If you're not familiar with the salt ranch hotel project, I'm gonna go ahead and share my screen here so that you can see it. This is it. It's at 2914 Dickerson pike here in East Nashville. It's on an emerging corridor. It's this beautiful. I can't believe they painted it that sky blue. Anyway, it's a five building property on about two and a half acres, and it's, it's 48 rooms. That's not a good view. It's 48 rooms. And the main building was built in 1856 the additional rooms were built in the 1950s it used to be the Mabel Manor. There used to be a pool out here on the front. This is a major corridor right major thoroughfare. You can see, even from Google Street View right here, we can see the Nashville skyline, pretty cool. So we're going to be coming in and putting up a massive fence around the property, really, turning this into a resort, really a, what I'm calling, you know, Palm Springs meets Nashville, like Southern hospitality, right? That's great because, you know, it's, I mean, there's a lot of hotels out there that I just don't feel like are authentically Nashville. We wanted something that was authentically Nashville, but with a little, you know, California, Palm Springs, desert flare. So, yeah, a little more pizzazz. Cooler colors. Get rid of this ridiculous blue. I mean, come on, what is that?
It's got a purple tinge to it. When you're up close to it's really, it's really not all
that great, if we're being honest with ourselves. So let me, let me pull up some construction photos from when we, like, first started things, and kind of walk you guys through. I mean, so as it exists, well, maybe you're going to see some very unsexy here's some tile. Here's material. Oh, man, look at that. Okay, so this is one of the showers in the original units. What we're doing is we're, we've fully gutted all of these units, right? And and we're building them back. I want this to be a really nice boutique hotel. It used to be like where the crackheads would stay. Funny enough, stone cold. Steve Austin used to actually live there. We covered that one of the Yeah, it's pretty cool. I'm gonna try and get him. I'm gonna try and get him to show up for the grand opening. Probably not going to happen. But why not? A boy can dream. So anyway, these showers were not properly waterproofed whatsoever, which is what you're seeing here. A lot of it's rot, some of it's termite damage, but all of that had to be ripped out. This shower had to come out, I mean, just to absolutely hit each. Can See, here's another photo of what it looks like once all that tile was demoed out, we ended up having to sod cut a lot of the concrete, get all of that gone. I mean, you can just see, like, man, these buildings were tired as hell, and they still function like that's the interesting thing about construction is that despite the framing being rotted, despite the, yeah, despite the plumbing. Like, looking at as bad as it does, right here, still function. And,
I mean, just looking at, like the bottom of the shower panel, your tile was on the wrong slope too. Oh, it wasn't sloped in so like, how
is that trained for? Yeah,
that's asking for water problems right there, the fact that it's still working, here's
a window that was just painted over, like, entirely painted over. Looks like somebody
sprayed drywall mud.
Oh yeah, yeah, probably, probably, I mean, if we're being honest. So this was, like, the first week of demolition. Is what's going on here. And that's the interesting thing about these renovations. You never know what you're going to get in and find you have no idea, right? Because you're going to start ripping open walls that, in this case, hadn't been opened in 70 years, right? I mean, this was built in the 50s. The main building was built in the in the 1856, yeah. So, like, you think about that. I mean, we were talking about this in our construction walk through yesterday. Just the different like you can see where brick has been patched and repaired for the last, like 100 years of this thing. And you
can really interesting the original brick on the house compared to whenever there was an addition done as well. I went through and looked at that, and the original footprint is obviously smaller than after the addition was done, but even that break there's, there's a drastic difference.
Yeah, it's just, it's, it's gorgeous. It's kind of cool to see the story that it tells. So here's, here's the main hotel rooms. You can see here. At this point, we had demoed everything out. We'd exposed the ceiling, which, by the way, when we did that, we realized, like, Oh no, we're gonna have to go back and redo all of the electrical, which we did not have in the budget. I had not initially planned to do that, but you know what? It's going to prevent the building from catching on fire, hopefully. So that's an upgrade a
couple of spots where I believe it had sparked a couple of times, yeah, probably
you'll see, like these rafters up here. They're all spray painted like a metallic silver that is a fireproofing that they used to use back in the day. But here it is, you know, basically, I mean to call this to the studs, is very generous, because it was a it's a block building, which is nice that will help with insulation, that will help with noise transfer. We did decide to go back with an extra thick layer of material, both insulation and this like rubber material to help soundproof the units a little bit more, because, you know, it's a hotel like people are just going to be loud. They're going to make noise. They're going to be upset that they hear somebody else, even though you're living in a or not living but you're staying the night in a 48 room hotel,
not to mention, you know, right outside of these rooms as the pool, oh yeah, there's going to be people loud at the pool. Dickerson Pike is a very, very busy street. It's busy that connects to 65 and goes straight to downtown. So I can only imagine the traffic that's that's coming through there. I actually also saw somebody run into the liquor store with their truck on Tuesday as well. So
yeah, to clarify, they didn't pull up to the liquor store and run inside. They ran into the
liquor store with their truck, took out some brick veneer.
Yeah, you know, fun stuff, but yeah, so that that the noise actually led to so, like, there's a couple of things that we're doing, right? The boutique hotel is on a major corridor. There's a lot of traffic, which is a good thing, right? We're, like, six, seven minutes from downtown Nashville. But you also want to make sure that it's nice and pleasant quiet when you're on site. So the the privacy fence is going to help with that. The landscaping is going to help with that. We're going to have either, like, some water features around the site, or some kind of noise machines, like white noise machines, that will help with that the rooms are doubly insulated. And then we actually decided, last week or two weeks ago, to go ahead and replace the old windows. So these are single pane older Windows, like, I mean, you can hear somebody breathing on the other side of them. That is how thin these things are, but having the double pane insulated windows is going to help significantly.
Yeah, that. And, you know, that's one of the things as a project manager, speaking with a general contractor versus speaking to a developer. You know, speaking with a general contractor, what I need to figure out is how much it's going to cost and how quickly he can get it in, if it's going to hold us up any having that conversation with Tyler, turning around and speaking with him about it. What I'm telling Tyler is, hey, we have a whole lot of single pane windows. We're going to have a whole lot of energy inefficiency as well as noise issues, which could cause potential one star reviews. Or potential, you know, complaints that the management company just doesn't want to hear and deal with. And so I, you know, I have to be able to navigate those conversations with the two of them in order to get them both on the same page. Pitch them this idea and then implement it, obviously, if it's cost effective and makes sense? Yeah, that's exactly
right. Because, I mean, the biggest thing is a developer and an investor, to me, is like, is it going to add time, and how much is it going to increase our budget? Well, it's like, well, we had some money already budgeted for scraping all of the paint off of those exterior windows, sprucing them up a bit, and then painting them back and replacing, re glazing some of the panes, right? So, like, it actually wasn't a huge budget upgrade for us to just switch to new windows, and it'll be a nice thing to have anyway, but it was something that I hadn't initially wanted to do, because I was like, I kind of like the character of these windows, but when you start to add in that, yeah, it's going to be loud, it's going to be energy and efficient, those things start to add up. And I'm like, okay, I can see the value, especially
with a concrete slab and then center block walls. I mean, as insulate as it's going to be, we've had weeks here in Nashville within the last few years that, you know, we're getting down into the single digits, oh yeah, for a while. And so your HVAC is just going to be running and running and running constantly, which is just going to keep pulling power. And obviously, you know, over the course of a year or two, these windows could pay for themselves just from the the electrical bill of the HVAC alone. Yep,
that's exactly right, yeah. So it's, you know, hey, that increases our noi, which therefore, in turn, increases the value of the property, which is all what I am all about when it comes to my own projects, when it comes to any project. You can see here, this is pretty interesting. This is inside some of the rooms. This little catwalk that's actually up in the attic. You do have to be able to access it because, I mean, think about it, unless you're going to put an access port, which I think we did decide to do, we're putting an access port in every
room. So we did on buildings one and two, on the front two buildings, because the back building, we didn't have two buildings we fire, did not require us to do that perfect. Yeah,
so this catwalk helps if somebody's got to get up there redo any electrical, you know, or just access the roof for whatever reason, little things like that you want to think about, because you don't want to necessarily have to disturb every single room, if you've got to, you know, take a room down or something like that, as you're going through the process. I mean, hey, it's my first hotel. I'm learning a lot. Let's see. That's probably it for those photos. Let's see what else we've got going on here. That was, that was a few months ago. This is beginning of September. Oh, the main building, how beautiful is that? So in the main building, we actually ended up the room that we're looking at right now is what I'm I believe will become the wine shop I really want to have, like a high end boutique wine shop on site. I just think that it adds to the overall, you know, luxury feel of this hotel, and one of the decisions that we decided to make. So when we first started demo, we exposed all of these beautiful brick walls. We had no idea that they were I mean, we had an idea that they were there, but we didn't know what shape they were going to be in, what they might look like. The good thing is, they were in pretty good shape, and the ceilings were significantly taller than what we had anticipated. We knew that gap was there, but you just never know what it's going to look like. And so you can see here we exposed the rafters from the floor above. And if we're doing a bottle shop, you don't want direct sunlight from Windows falling on the bottles, right? It's going to ruin the wine. So I started thinking, well, we have this room above that we're not really using. Might be interesting if we just remove that floor and let the window up there kind of diffuse natural light down, instead of having it directly on anything. So that's kind of what y'all are seeing there. Pretty excited for where that's going to go. We were initially going to cover up some of this with drywall, but after, you know, Jacob and I took a look at it, we're like, actually, I think that we can kind of leave this exposed. And again, you can see, like, this is the repair that we made. This is the original this was a repair that somebody else made, like, decades ago. So it's really interesting to just kind of see the story that the brick
tells. Yeah, we were, we were actually able to get some more space for the retail person as well, yeah, and leave a nice space behind that room and storage in order for them to have storage, yeah. So Tyler will have more rentable space in that area, more rentable square footage. And then, obviously, you don't want all of your all of your materials, to be sitting out inside of the main retail room. And so, you know, having that conversation with the HVAC team of asking them how much space they're going to need behind this room. You know, they came back and told me, hey. All the plans call for everything going, going underneath. And so before even, you know, being able to have that conversation with Tyler, was like, Hey, let's leave a door here before breaking everything off, so that way we can have some storage space and some more rentable square footage. And just making that call. Because I know, again, Tyler's best thing is bottom line, that's what he's looking for as a developer. And so even though it's a small footprint, it is still going to help both parties mutually. That's
right. Let me see if I can find a picture of what that might look like. I mean, you can kind of see it in this one right here, but we've got this opening right here, and there's actually a whole room right here. It's not big. I mean, it's probably four or five feet wide by maybe 10 so it's small, but we were initially going to break that up completely and have it as exterior access only for the mechanical closet. And you know, when Jacob started looking at the plans, he was like, actually, all the mechanicals going in the basement, so we don't need anything in here. And so, I mean, yeah, gaining that back as storage is phenomenal. It's awesome. I mean, it just, it adds so much y'all. If y'all have been following me for a few years, you know that when I did Newell tower in Chattanooga, it had this giant glass block wall, and that was, that was, I was the happiest clam. I was happy as a clam when we tore that thing out. I can't stand glass block. I don't understand what was going on in the 1980s when everybody thought that that was a cool look, but it went out the window with with, you know, the cocaine chic development of that time, in my opinion. So gladly, tore this out. But this is really cool. So this is, like, this room that we're looking at right now will become the library. So it's kind of the cool little hangout spot. If you're waiting on friends to go grab drinks or dinner or whatever, you can kind of hang out here. Instead of, like, having a library, we're gonna a lobby. We're doing a library.
And the really cool thing is, we left the windows up above the glass block, yep. And so those are, you know, more original windows are going to stay there and get refreshened up in order to add to the appeal of the overall library.
That's right, yeah, those are like, semi original windows, give or take. At some point they built this, this block wall, which actually was covered up when we bought the building, so we didn't know that we were going to find that in the wall. That's how many renovations have taken place. I mean, that was just put there in the 80s, and it was already covered up. So these windows here really cool. We're gonna clean them up. We're actually gonna have them covered up from the outside. So they're not gonna be exterior facing windows, but it'll be kind of like a decoration piece inside, which wound up being pretty cool. Just some new framing going on in the main building. We ripped out some. We had four rooms in the main building. So it was originally 52 units. But we were like, Who the hell would want to stay in the main building? Right? It's got to be loud. There's gonna be a lot going on, people in and out. And, you know, we need offices. We need maids quarters, you know, backup editorial droplet. Yeah, exactly. So we're just like, let's just tear all that out and just do that. So that's, that's what you are seeing here. I know it's kind of tough to see, but, I mean, look at how tall that room is. This is where the bar is going to go. When we exposed that ceiling and I saw those rafters and all that brick, I was like, We are not touching any of this. It is staying in all of its glory. I mean, look at these windows up here that you can see. And again, I'm sorry for those of y'all that are listening on the podcast, but hopefully I can be descriptive enough, but it looks like, you know, these are those kind of be 12 foot tall doors that we found. They're huge. They're really, really huge,
massive casings. And they are some of the most beautiful things I think I've ever
seen. The amount of money that you have to spend on casing like that today. Today is insane, crazy. So we're like, Okay, well, we gotta, we gotta keep that. I mean, originally during here's the thing, when you get into a project like this, you have to, like, live on site during demo, because people will just start tearing everything out. It is. They do not care at all about what, what looks good or not. They're just there to swing hammers and tear stuff up. So you gotta be very careful. So we ended up exposing there's actually a window up here at the top. And since it was built in 1856 the reason that the rooms are so tall is because heat would rise right and so those windows actually have a chain on them to where you can open the window up and let air, the hot air at the top of the room flow out of the room. So it's really interesting how they used to kind of handle AC back in the day.
I mean, how cool are those hand carved casings, too. Oh, dude, I
hope we've got to have some pictures of them in here somewhere. That's wild. So there's some really massive cased openings in the main building that were all hand carved. So it's kind of remarkable to see here we're looking at the back of one of the hotel buildings we bricked in around some old windows where we're putting in the P TECH units, the little mini HVAC units. This yard that we're standing in right now is the side yard. A pretty good size, and part of that will get fenced in, and then it'll actually become our dog run. So we are going to be dog friendly. You can see here, we've got some drywall going up. This was about a month ago, so Jacob and I will get here. Get to the latest and greatest here in a second. You can kind of see, you know, just what the framing looks like. We've got all the electrical in. You can see all the fireproofing there, right? They've got to spray this foam in between all the cavities to make sure that fire can't spread. You know, between the space, more the yard, more the framing. Here's the bathroom. Yeah,
we actually have tile completely up and grouted at this point. And three out of four of the buildings, everything is painted in three out of the four of the building. So unfortunately, that's on me. I dropped the ball and didn't take as many pictures as Tyler wanted me to. We've got the block cut at the bottom of the house here for the two bathrooms that are going to be for the pool. Those have been framed up. That's
right. So we needed exterior bathrooms to serve the pool. That way you aren't running through the house wet. So so we actually turned what used to be the this was like a holding area, because it was, well, it was such a bad Hotel. Then, like, they, you would go into this room, and then it was, like, it had, like, it was like a bank teller. They were like, Okay, who are you and what do you want? And then they would, like, drop the keys, you know what? I mean, like, it was just that, that, like, they were that protective of what was going on there. Well,
Dickerson pike hasn't always had 10s of millions of dollars going into it either.
Okay, so I don't think that I've shared this on the YouTube channel or the podcast yet, but when we when we first bought this property, it was they had a book, and one of my former employees ran off with this damn book, and I wish I still had it, but they had this book on site of like, all of the all of the people that they would never rent a room to again. And this is a slight exaggeration, but not really. There was a there was a little note in there, a little diary entry, if you will. That was like Angel, middle aged woman jumped off the roof, stabbed her boyfriend and ran naked down Dickerson pike like, yeah, I don't think I'd want to rip the angel either
with Stone Cold Steve Austin in that book.
Oh no. I'm sure they would gladly accept him back. He'd make great security. This is one of the back buildings. We had to redo this retaining wall right here. That was fun. Uh, whoever had built that retaining wall before did not do it properly at all. It was just standing straight up. The only anchor was in the ground, which, like, I don't know if you know how walls work, but you could basically just push that over if it's not deep enough. So this is more of the room that we were talking about earlier with the storage. It was mechanical. Now it's going to be storage. You can kind of just see again how beautiful that brick is. So really cool. We got an exposed steel I beam here. Yeah,
so we left the I beam after taking a look at it, and all of the brick has been repaired. You can kind of see on the right side of the second door, there used to be a chimney there that got taken out, and so all of that brick got repaired. And then we closed up the right side door, but we left all the lentils in because we felt that it added a good amount of character. So you've got these on the left side, you've got this massive, like, eight or 10 inch concrete lintel that's stuck in there. Yeah, it's really cool again. So cool, yeah,
you look at it and you're like, that's really interesting, that they did it that way. Yeah, you know, yeah, because, because oftentimes, like, those lentils are done out of, out of, like, steel, or you can even see timber sometimes, but like, for just a big concrete block. It's like, Man, I wonder how they lifted that into place, really. I mean, look how beautiful that is. Gonna be so cool when that's actually a wine shop. That's the library. You can see we started the demo in this picture of that glass block. Wouldn't you love to be the guy with a sledgehammer going after that? I hope you wear your glasses. Side building, building three, yeah, dry walls, basically done. So we that dry walls and good. This is one of the mock up rooms. So we actually painted one of the accent walls in there, just to kind of see what that would look like. This is the exterior of the mock up room. So this is what I mean. We haven't painted the building. Obviously we haven't replaced the windows. We can kind of see what the case to openings are going to look like. We again, wanted to create another moment. Let me pull this up. Show you the website, because we've got a like this orange, pink color. That I think is really cool. If you just go to salt ranch hotel.com you can kind of see kind of the vibe that we're going for with this boutique hotel. Branding has been a big piece of what we've been working on behind the scenes. You kind of haven't really seen a whole lot of but you can see this kind of pink, pinkish orangish color. I think that would look really great on these doors, right? Because this is, we're kind of going with, like, a it's a slightly off white with a darker brown, like window sill. I mean, it's kind of like a gray brown. I don't know, calling it a darker brown doesn't really do it justice.
I would, I definitely, I would consider that a darker brown. It's not a dark brown, but it's, yeah, you've
got a couple of guys here trying to figure out what a color is. It's like a brown, my girlfriend would like, rattle off like four words. It's actually, it's this kind of khaki like, that sounds great. Leave that to the architect. I can't see as many colors as you can. Oh, there it is. Okay. So here it's this white, right here, and it's, it's that brown, gray, dark gray, brown. It looks gray in this photo, but I swear it's not
gray. It's brown whenever you see it in person, for sure. That's funny.
This is the main entry. So, like, these are the that's the original staircase. Like, how cool is that codes is telling us that they want us to tear it out, because it's not to code. And I think that that is insane, considering it is the original staircase. The building is not on the historic national register. That's a pro and a con. I intend to put it on the National Historic Register as soon as we're done. Did not want to do that before we started construction. It'll get construction, yeah. Like, of like, we're already going to have it a hard time, like hitting our construction budget with how inflation has impacted construction. I don't need somebody coming in and telling me I need to pick a window that is five times the cost. There you go. There's
a good casing picture too. Yeah, yeah. I
didn't think about that. So here's one of the cased openings, and then here's another. I mean, look at that. It's just beautiful. I don't even know, like, you'd have a really hard time finding somebody today that could even machine that, to be honest. I mean, it's really, really intricate, and it's massive
that durability too. Yeah, and we'll be that case to opening.
How cool is that? So we're gonna come back with a door that has kind of a half moon on the top. That way, we just kind of keep that vibe going throughout the property. Just looks really good. This is the sun room that will overlook the pool. The pool will be going out front, kind of right here, out in that area, if you will. So, yeah. A lot of progress. We saved some of the timber, some of the timber that we pulled out for, you know, various reasons we ended up keeping. Because some of this is like a true two by six or a true two by eight, Which one means it's really old, because nobody does a true two by eight anymore. But fun fact, if you go get a two by eight, it's really like a one and a half by seven and a half.
So once you get over a two by six, it drops to three quarters of an inch. Yeah,
it's yeah. So seven and a quarter, come on. But these are like true two by six is two by eight. So they're beautiful old old growth lumber. Yeah, it's wild to see them. It's significantly stronger than any lumber you could get today, which is pretty interesting. There's, there's another example of those windows that I was telling you about that have the little chains you can kind of open up. So, yeah, fun stuff. Found this, this chimney in one of the back rooms that we decided not to build the kitchen out in. So I'm like, oh, maybe we should turn it's like, behind the bar, behind the bar prep space in the back corner of the house. I was like, oh, maybe we should turn this into, like a speakeasy. I
was gonna tell you, actually, you should turn it into, like a secret cigar lounge. Yeah, that's that would be the
amount of money would it have to spend on, on just scrubbers to keep it out of the house. But it would be cool.
It would be very cool. I'd be there once, once a month.
I do like that. Well, Jacob, update us on on what's been going on. So you came in, you stepped into the project about a month ago.
Yeah, take it over.
We are now fully in the swing of things, right? I mean, I feel like we've gotten more done in the last 30 days, for various reasons, than we have in the in the last six months. I mean, demo is just one of the just one of those things that it just takes forever, and it doesn't look, it doesn't feel like anything's ever getting done during demo. But, yeah, man, walk us through, you know, what you what you've been up to, what you got going on, and it's your your thoughts, your insights.
Yeah, of course. So apologize, I'm going to use my list for this, guys, because we've just had so much happen that it's very difficult to remember it all so exterior of buildings, one through three have all been painted. We have at least two coats on them. We've got the tile installed on building.
Let me, let me add to that, the reason that we've we've done two out of three COVID. COVID is because we haven't finished the site work. So obviously we're going to put the two coats on. Helps us understand what it's going to look like doing a site work is going to kick up a bunch of dust, lot
of dust that's already been kicked up from new sewer lines coming in. And so after we get done with all of the grading and all of the paving, we are going to go back and we're going to clean all the buildings, wipe them all down, and then put our final coat on. But getting those, those that brick prepped, and having a coat or two on it now also helps with curb appeal. Because what we really want to do is we want people to start seeing this project come along and get excited about it. So the more that we can get done on the exterior that people are able to see, the more publicity it's going to start drumming up for us. So we've got Tyler installed on buildings one and two, and actually, they just got done grouting buildings one and two this past weekend as well. Building three is going to be started. I believe this week, gutters have all been installed. We don't have any of the downspouts down. We're waiting for the grading to be completed in order to be able to put those on so that water can become, you know, drained off the property properly. I see your car there. Nice. Yeah,
that's me taking the drone photo. This is, like, I don't know, over a year ago. This is before any construction happened, just to kind of give people a nice background to look at what we're
talking so electrical and plumbing inspections have been completed on buildings one through four. We finally finished up the framing on building four that we had to raise that building, I believe, eight inches in some areas, and so there was a lot of framing, a lot of jacking that building up in order to get it ready for drywall, because it wouldn't have passed inspection. Obviously,
let's see, yeah, and I want to highlight on the electrical too. I mean, there's little things that that, you know, somebody like Jacob or, you know, I mean, hey, maybe you're, you're sophisticated enough to get out there and do this yourself, and spend all the time that is needed on a job, but catching specific locations of where things are being installed, right? Not everybody reads the plans, which is kind of a problem when you're doing a project like this, right?
Not everybody is capable of reading the plans, either. Yeah, that's the other thing I've noticed that's a
big problem. So very early on in the project, we had an electrician, different one that went same crew, but different one than the one that ended up really finishing this job. And he he kept putting, he was cutting into our two by four studs to put his box in this location. He was literally going by the plans, which is, you know, commendable, at least. He was reading them. You can't cut into a two by four to put an electrical box in, because you're starting to compromise the structural integrity of the two by four. That is a support wall, and we had to have him come back out, replace all of those studs and move it, I mean, at their cost, because that's on the electrician. Like you can't. You can't just go in and start cutting into things to put stuff. If you've got a question, you ask the general contractor, I guess he just wanted to get the job done, which created twice as much work.
Well, I know from my experience taking my general contracting exam, I was tested on how much of a two by four or a two by six can be cut out in order, in a load bearing wall and a non load bearing wall. I don't know if the electrical contractors have to go through the exact same quiz or not, but probably not. It kind of seems like not just so everybody knows I was not on this project at that time, so that one's not on me. But let's see. So we've got buildings one through three completely dry walled. They've been finished. Obviously, insulation went underneath of it. Building four now has insulation. And then buildings one through three have paint completely done on the interior as well. Buildings one through four all have doors on the front. We're still working on the locking in order to keep people out of them as we start to get colder here in Nashville. But yeah, so we've got doors on everything, so we'll be able to go through and get everything locked up and then eventually get all those doors painted. Yeah. I mean,
that's something that you've got to think about when you're under construction on something like this, because it's starting to get cold, people are going to start seeking shelter, and we're at a very vulnerable spot because the rooms are now insulated, they're dry walled, they're painted, they look nice, but they're not completely secured, right? And we don't want to go spend 3040, 50 bucks just to get the doors locked for. 48 rooms. So that was part of what we were having to we were talking to our general contractor about yesterday, is what are you going to do to start securing these rooms? Because it's really on the GC right to make sure that the site is secured, and we'll see what it comes up with.
I don't know that we came up with a good solution yesterday, but we're still waiting on the main, main locking system for the key cards to to come in. And I believe we're actually waiting on that quote still, too, in order to be able to get that system installed. So we won't have that available to us, so it's kind of on us at this point in order to get that completely figured out. Yeah, that sounds about right.
It always says,
let's see. We've got rough framing done on the main house. We also added load bearing framing in the basement. In order to make it more secure. I'll have to find a I'll have to find a picture and take or take a picture of it down in the basement of this house, one of the creepiest places I think I've ever been into but they used old trees. They just cut pieces two foot, three foot pieces of trees that just stuck them under the load bearing walls for supports. And that's been left there since the 1850s
which what you're saying is it works. It does. Yeah. I mean, that basement is creepy as hell, dude, it is,
and it seems to go on forever. It's
a little too long.
Somebody told me that it was used as the house was used as a civil war hospital. Is that? I
mean that, look, if anything from the 1850s that is still in in Nashville today, was probably used as a civil war hospital. I think, I think that it actually was, but, yeah, when we first bought it, I had, you know, Ghost Hunters reaching out because, like, apparently it sounded like, you know, most haunted places in America, which I just think is so ridiculous. I'm like, Dude, you know, obviously I don't believe in ghosts, but that doesn't mean that doesn't mean that the basement's not creepy
as hell. Well, that's kind of awkward, because I was asked, gonna ask you to go ghost hunting.
Sorry, man, gonna have to cancel that date night.
So let's see we got the brick completely fixed in the main house. You know, we kind of went through where all those areas that we had bricked out, but there were other areas that needed mortar filled in where we had some cracks running through, and so we've got the the mortar completely filled so that way there's, there's not, you know, decent sized cracks in the wall. Let's see AT and T and NES came out and removed all the unnecessary electrical poles. Let's see rough electrical has begun in the main house. We've got our grading permit issued, and so this was at the end of October that I put this list together, but we actually had the grading permit issued. We put in the new sewer line and got everything done on the main road of the what is that side street? I apologize, I don't remember what that is. I think it's Lorraine. Maybe that sounds right, so we'll call it Lorraine. So we've got everything approved, inspected and approved within a week that needed to be done out there. And they have started working on to the property with the sewer in order to get the god grease trap, grease trap, yeah, in order to install the grease trap. So we're at a really, really good place with grading, the fact that they've gotten so much done in a week and inspected in a week is wonderful, and we're going to be able to keep rolling through. They're going to get done, they said, within 30 days. So hopefully by the end of November, the grading will be completely done and we'll be ready to go back and get those rooms finished up.
Yeah, it'll be exciting. So Jake, appreciate you joining me. Guys. We'll be coming at you all probably every 30 days from here on out with a construction update, pretty much until we're done, which we're planning on opening this spring. I think it'll be a lot of fun. If you enjoyed this construction update, shoot me a like, give me a subscribe. Leave me a comment. Let me know what your favorite part is, or which room you want to book out as soon as the hotel is done, looking forward to it, we'll catch you all in the next one. Thank you. Are you looking to take the next step toward investing in commercial real estate? But don't know where to go? Siri central offers a comprehensive education and coaching platform designed to help you get started. Our online courses cover a wide range of topics, from the fundamentals to advanced strategies, ensuring you have the knowledge and skills needed to thrive in this competitive industry. As a member, you'll gain access to our exclusive online community and monthly group coaching calls, providing you with valuable networking opportunities and personalized guidance from experienced professionals. Whether you're a beginner or looking to take your career to the next level, cre Central has the resources you need. Visit www dot cre central.com to learn more you.
In an upcoming discussion with Jacob Kromhout, my project manager from Bentwood Construction, we'll share the latest construction updates at Salt Ranch, my boutique hotel in East Nashville.