We're FINALLY Making Progress on This Hotel

In this episode of the Commercial Real Estate Investor Podcast, I sit down with Jacob Kromhout, my project manager from Bentwood Construction, for the latest updates on Salt Ranch, our boutique hotel renovation project in East Nashville. From historic challenges to design choices, we cover it all: Site Progress: Updates on sewer and drainage installations, the addition of a new retaining wall, and smoothing out outdoor areas for guest amenities. Main House: Structural improvements, tuckpointing, and new window installations for the 1856 historic building. Guest Rooms: Primer coats applied, luxury vinyl plank floors installed, and stylish tile work completed in the bathrooms. Pool and Bar Designs: Debating layouts, cabana placement, and planning guest-only spaces to enhance the hotel experience. Historic Preservation: Challenges of adaptive reuse with nods to the building’s storied past, like preserving original window designs and casing details. We also dive into the unexpected surprises and budget hurdles that come with renovating a historic property while maintaining its unique charm. Tune in for a transparent look at the ups and downs of hotel development and to hear our future plans for Salt Ranch!

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Key Takeaways:

• The hotel renovation project is facing several challenges, including dealing with the historic nature of the building, unexpected issues like water leaks and structural problems, and high costs for things like the pool and electrical work.

• The team is working to preserve the character of the historic building while also modernizing it and making it functional for a boutique hotel.

• There are a lot of details and coordination required for a project like this, from managing contractors, to dealing with inspectors, to planning out the layout and amenities like the pool and bar.

• The project is over budget in some areas, like the pool, which is costing $400,000, which is about 10% of the total $5 million budget.

• Overall, the conversation highlights the complexities and challenges of renovating an older, historic building into a modern boutique hotel.

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:

Tyler Cauble 0:00

This episode of the commercial real estate investor podcast is brought to you by my cre accelerator mastermind, where you'll get access to my step by step investment blueprint, essentially a library of resources on how to invest in commercial real estate. You'll get connected to a supportive community of other commercial real estate investors that are doing projects just like you. You'll get personalized coaching and feedback from me every step of the way go to www dot cre central.com to learn more. We are in the middle of renovating a boutique hotel in East Nashville, and today I'm sitting down again with Jacob, my project manager from bitwin contracting, to discuss what we have been up to over the past month. What is going on at this 48 key boutique hotel in East Nashville, the surprises, the fun, the broken hearts, all of it because we got a little bit of everything. Jacob is also my part time Instagram girlfriend. Yeah, we're talking about that. I

Speaker 1 1:01

just learned that today, actually, yep, it's official.

Tyler Cauble 1:04

It's official. And so if you all don't know, this is the second episode of a series that we're doing where we're diving into the construction. I'll be sharing photos with you. We'll be diving into everything behind, renovating this boutique hotel. It was a roadside motel. It was originally constructed in the 1950s the central building was built in 1856 that has been Jacob's most fun building to ever deal with,

Speaker 1 1:29

big, big history guy, yes, Big History gets come with its challenges, for sure, but it's definitely been interesting to to see that building and how it was built, and we've got some pictures to share. It's only, like,

Tyler Cauble 1:41

150 years old man, come on. I mean, the fun thing is, like, when you get into these, these adaptive reuse projects, a lot of people think like, oh, let's just keep the building. It's gonna be a lot cheaper, a lot easier than, you know, tearing it down and doing something new. I can almost guarantee you, it is all always easier to just tear it down and build something new, but the problem is, you don't get the character out of it. So today we're gonna dive into some of the updates that we've got, some of the things that we were able to accomplish while I was out of town over Thanksgiving, ignoring all of Jacob's text messages.

Unknown Speaker 2:18

Five unread.

Tyler Cauble 2:20

Five on red. Yeah. Well, you know, that was a I was busy behind Turkey,

Unknown Speaker 2:25

some Instagram girlfriend.

Tyler Cauble 2:28

All right, let's get this shared. Oh, that's not doing it. That'll do it right there, rock and roll. So here's some of the pictures. If you're listening on the podcast, I'll do my best to describe what's going on here. But Jacob, tell us what we're looking at.

Speaker 1 2:42

So what we're looking at right here is the back side of the building where they have put the roof drain pipe and run a run a completely new pipe on the back side of the building that will eventually drain into our main sewer. And this is another so I think we have three or four different drain lines that'll connect on the back of the building. This is actually a sewer line. So whenever we were opening up the back of the building, searching for the new sewer line, it was a four inch line, and so Old Hickory essentially came in and ran a new six inch line for us on the back of the building there, in order to get us what we needed for the size of building and for the size of project for 48 keys. And then obviously on the left where Tyler's pointing there, we've got the grease trap covered up as well.

Tyler Cauble 3:37

Yeah. I mean, for those of y'all that follow me on Instagram, you saw Jake. I mean, that's why we call Jacob my Instagram girlfriend. He took a phenomenal picture of me laying at the bottom of the grease trap. Because when you see it from this perspective, it doesn't look that big. But the thing was, what, 10 feet

Speaker 1 3:51

deep, eight feet deep? I mean, it was, I honestly think it was like 12, yeah.

Tyler Cauble 3:55

I mean, it was, it's pretty deep and it's pretty big. I mean, it was, what a 1500 gallon grease trap. I think 2000 2000 I mean, why not go for overkill? It seems like everything on this project, every time I turn around, I'm like, that is really oversized. And like, no, that's what the engineer specked out. I'm like, All right, well, I posted a picture yesterday on Instagram of of the electrical box on the main building I was do we have a picture of that? I've got one. Okay, we'll get to that here in a minute. A minute. I mean, damn if it is not the biggest electrical box you've ever seen in your life. I'm like, I think we could power a 737, with the amount of energy coming out of this box. It's insane. What is this here?

Speaker 1 4:32

Is this? So this new electrical conduit that was ran out to where we where we anticipate to have the pool bar, actually. So that's, that's what was run out there and covered up. The inspector came by yesterday, and luckily, the inspector knows the people who installed it, because he didn't see it when it was uncovered. Oh, nice. He came out and looked at it and was like, I know them. They did a good job everything. Looks good. Luckily, we had some pictures to show them. So every you know, everything got signed off. Yeah,

Tyler Cauble 5:05

that always makes that always makes big difference. It's nice to have an inspector that actually knows what they're doing. Guys, by the way, if you're joining us live question of the day, are you planning on doing any value add projects in 2025 jump in the live chat. Let me know. I'm curious, right? Because a lot of people have actually been on pause for projects. I'm closing on the first deal that I have bought in two years in the next 27 days. I love closings at the end of the year, by the way, it's always the best time, like, right after Christmas, when you really don't want to be doing anything, deal with Title work and like, it's fun. Right

Speaker 1 5:40

before you go on your your little sabbatical, you know, while I'm on sabbatical, Oh, perfect. You timed it up correctly. Nice. Yeah.

Tyler Cauble 5:48

Well, I had a had a seller that was very worried about the presidential election, and he said they're going to take my they're going to raise my taxes. I was like, buddy, if we close in January, they can't back tax. You. That's not some people just have no idea how this stuff works. It's really interesting. Anyway. Okay, so we got electrical there, part of what we'll be talking about today. And actually, maybe I'll just go ahead and bring this up. We are, we are actually talking about moving the pool bar. So let me pull up these renderings that we had the this is not what the the architects did, this is actually what the pool guy did. So what you're looking at right here, that's not the right one. What you're looking at right here is facing the same direction. So that is to the left, right over here in this area, right, because the street is going to be back over here. What we're looking at is the pool right now, with way too many cabanas. But man, does it look like a party?

Unknown Speaker 6:51

It does like a good time. Yeah,

Tyler Cauble 6:53

looks like a great time, a nice, nice little tanning deck. I mean, here's the thing, the pool, we're only going with about a four foot deep pool, because you like, if you're doing a pool at a hotel, nobody wants a deep pool. Nobody wants to actually swim. They just want to get in the water, cool down, have a drink, hang out. That's why we've we've got the sunning ledge there. Actually, this side will probably remain cabanas. This side will just be open chairs. The reason that I'm doing that is because the cabanas will be open to the guests, but they will also be open to the public. If you wanted to rent a cabana by the day, that's totally fine. Over here, we're gonna have reserved seating for guests only. That's one thing that I have noticed in other hotels in Nashville that allow people that are not necessarily guests who to come enjoy the pool. Sometimes it gets way overcrowded. And I'm going to be honest with you, if I'm paying $300 a night to stay at a hotel, and some you know, group of teenagers can pay 20 bucks to come wreak havoc at the pool, I'm not going to be very happy about it, especially if I can't let a seat. So that's that's why we're going to do that. We're going to reserve this exclusively for guests of the hotel. Let's see. That's a little aerial view. So this is the pool bar right here. We've been talking about actually moving it over here. The main house is on this side, moving it right here, really for functionality, because if you're running drinks from the actual bar, which is over here, all the way, you know, across the pool, that kind of becomes a pain. You wanted to talk about this, because we haven't had a chance to have a conversation about, what are your thoughts on that

Speaker 1 8:29

I did. So one other thing, well, actually, there's two things with this. So the first thing, I think, is just for the sake of appeal, I think whenever you walk out of the front door of the hotel bar, or, excuse me, the the main hotel I think you're going to want to look at the pool and look across the pool at the bar, rather than the back of the bar. Now, one thing that that I was kind of brainstorming about was if we could get a really, really cool mural on the back of that so that you're looking at that I'm, you know, I'm a little more open to it. And then the other thing was being that the pool bar right now will back up to the street. If we flip it to the other side and move the pool to the to the street side. One of the issues that we'll run into is that the pool needs to be at least 25 feet away from the power lines, and so I'm afraid it's going to cut down on the amount of volume that we're able to have with with the pool at that point too. That's

Tyler Cauble 9:33

pretty cool. This is what the pool look like at night. Yeah. I mean, so my my initial thoughts on doing the on moving this over here is that it would actually be probably right here, facing this way, so wouldn't impede the entrance, and hopefully wouldn't it was really, it's really pure functionality. This is probably better. I would even probably say it needs to be moved. Sorry, guys. Keeps zooming in because of my mouse, I would say this actually needs to be moved back further, like up against the fence. And maybe we have a back entrance over there, I don't know, because, like, that way somebody could actually go all the way around the pool and deliver drinks to the back without having to go through the pool area. These are all things that you have to think about when you're doing a hotel, right? That I've never really planned on before, because if you're a guest and somebody's bringing in a wheelbarrow full of beer cans and they're going through the pool area, it kind of disrupts the vibe, whereas if you're going around, you know, it's seamless, people never see it. A lot of the stuff that you do in the hotel industry is the stuff that people don't notice, and you guys spend a lot of time on it to make sure that they don't notice. You don't want people to have to see, you know, more ice being brought up there, or whatever it is. So, yeah, I mean it, it really kind of comes down to code, right? I mean, if we can't move the pool close enough to make it make sense over here, then it, then it just doesn't make sense.

Speaker 1 10:59

Well, you know, the other thing that I was thinking about was, whenever you say bringing drinks out, you know what you what you are generally referring to is them bringing ice and, like, bottles of liquor and beer cans like bar backing, right? So a bar back is probably going to use a dolly in order to bring stuff out anyway. So if we can stick some sort of side door or back door on it, you know, it's truly, I don't feel like it's going to add too much of a pain in the butt for them. So, you know, I just feel like, as far as esthetics go, having it, having it backed up to the street is, is a better look, especially since there's going to be a fence around the entire perimeter of the property.

Tyler Cauble 11:48

Yeah, let's talk about, let's talk about that too, because these renderings, man, this fence is like 10 feet tall, yeah, obviously that's going to be like four feet when it's actually done. So, so it'll be, you know, probably come up basically waist height or a little bit higher per code, right? You have to have, I think this is a, is it a federal law, or is it a state of Tennessee law that you have to have a fence around a pool? I

Unknown Speaker 12:12

think it's an international code. Yeah,

Tyler Cauble 12:14

it could. It could just be a national building code thing, because obviously you don't want children to just be able to walk into a pool area and fall into a pool, right? So that's that's why you have to have a fence. We technically like the property is fenced in, so we technically could say that is the fence that we're gonna go with. The problem is, then we would have to maintain gates closed at all times and all this kind of stuff. And obviously we don't want to get into that, so we can just make a nice looking fence. I'm kind of

Speaker 1 12:42

around it. You're gonna make me start bringing my codes books in order to start looking,

Tyler Cauble 12:47

dude, you don't, yeah, you want to make this podcast really thrilling. Let's whip out the codes book and just start going through international building codes. So, yeah, I mean, that's, that's the pool. I think it's, I think it's gonna be pretty cool. It's about, you know what? 1/3 of it is a is a tanning ledge. The rest of it's just kind of a hangout area, little seating inside of it, you know, we'll have, I don't know, six or seven cabanas, and the rest open seating. And, you know, I mean, hell, we got the quote back yesterday, and it was $400,000

Unknown Speaker 13:17

I kind of had sticker shock. I'm not gonna lie.

Tyler Cauble 13:19

I mean, I had to, like, take a deep breath, because I'm also, you know, it's like, okay, well, I know that they're coming in, they're doing the fence, they're doing the bar, they're doing the equipment room, they're doing, you know, all of this other stuff. But I'm like, the pool should cost, like, this isn't a crazy pool. I'm not doing a crazy pool. That pool is probably 100 120,000, so I'm like, How is the rest of this 300 grand?

Speaker 1 13:46

I don't know. I will have to look at that quote a little more.

Tyler Cauble 13:50

I'm like, I'm like, this close to just going to Walmart and getting an above ground pool sand, screw it. Let's just, let's really lean into this. Man. We're gonna have

Unknown Speaker 14:00

to talk about my fee going up

Tyler Cauble 14:05

to change the name to trash ranch. Just, you know, get trashy

Speaker 1 14:12

and see, the problem is, you know, this was going to be one of the main features, if not the main feature, that's

Tyler Cauble 14:17

the main feature. So you got to spend the money on it. Yeah, you know, I mean, that's the that's the tough part about it. It's

Speaker 1 14:22

a huge draw, and it will be, you know, one of the biggest draws in all of Nashville. It's very unique bar that only a couple of hotels have, yeah, especially

Tyler Cauble 14:32

with this much land, yep. I mean, and here, here's the thing, 400,000 may not seem like a crazy amount. Our entire budget for this project, including FF and E, is 5 million. So that's basically, I mean, if you take out FF and E, which is basically a million, we're spending like 800,000 or a million dollars on furniture. Insane. That's 10% of our budget is going towards this pool for 48 rooms with two bars and all this kind of stuff. 10% of our budgets go into the pool. With a pool bar. Yeah. So it's, it's a lot. We got to get it right. That's always fun. Looks like we got more, more drains, more drainage dishing going around. So I

Speaker 1 15:13

don't know if you saw, but there was actually a leak in the foundation on this front corner here. So we went through and dug everything up, waterproof the bottom, and then obviously put a drain line in. I did

Tyler Cauble 15:25

not see the leak. I guess they were trying to hide that from me. Probably don't blame them. I don't want to see it.

Speaker 1 15:29

That's my job, though. I'm here to inform you that's right on everything.

Tyler Cauble 15:33

That's right if you don't, if you don't want to have to see all the bad stuff all the time, get it. Jacob, more trenching. I mean, we've got a lot of water and sewer lines. I mean, here's the thing, like, again, it probably would have been easier to just tear everything down and start over. But again, we wanted to keep the character. We wanted to keep the historic aspect of it. When we're having to go in here and trench and do all these new electrical lines, all these new water lines, all these new sewer lines. I mean, it just adds up. And you're kind of having to work within these tight spaces, like you can see how close they had to dig. I mean, you're running the plumbing under the building, which means you have to dig up to the building, and sometimes that either means a lot of man hours of guys hanging out with shovels, or you got to be very careful with some, you know, semi sized machinery to get in there. Make it happen?

Speaker 1 16:23

Yeah. I mean, you can see the electrical conduit there. You can see the sewer drain line. The sewer line right up, runs right up along to the edge. Those two rooms are going to be pool, pool bathrooms. And obviously they're they're putting the water line in on the side of the building there.

Tyler Cauble 16:43

That's right. So this, this space right here. Actually, it like this wall used to be completely connected. There were no doors right here. This used to be, you'd come around on the side over here, and it was like, I don't know if you've ever been to like, a cannabis dispensary or a bank, you know how they have, like, a vault room you basically walk into where the the teller is sitting behind, like, six inches of Plexiglas so that you can't rob the bank. That's like, what the check in for this hotel was. That's how sketchy this thing was. And that's

Speaker 1 17:12

behind on the other side of it, there's a center block wall back there too.

Tyler Cauble 17:16

Oh, it was a serious thing. They didn't want anybody to be able to get through there. So, I mean, it was, it was locked down. Man, that's for sure. So

Speaker 1 17:24

there's, there's your interior plumbing. Obviously, we've got the rough framing done, rough plumbing done. I don't think the electricians have made it in in there just yet. But yeah, I just wanted to include that. Obviously, they had to cut that concrete slab in order to run that stuff in there.

Tyler Cauble 17:44

Yeah, that's always a fun job getting out there with a concrete saw and cutting these stitches. Yeah, the these bathrooms are in the main house, and they are they're accessed from the exterior only, so we're actually going to have to have them on timed locks so that after certain hours, or something like that, or maybe you just have to have a key card to open them up, or, you know, Bluetooth access code, because we're doing a lot of like Bluetooth access for your room, right? It's like automatic check in, just like Airbnb. So you hold up your phone to it, and it's opened by Bluetooth, because obviously, we just don't want the bathrooms accessible 24/7 to anybody. But when you're doing a pool, like you gotta have bathrooms outside, right? That's stuff you gotta think through. Because we were, you know, you're doing this main house, you're doing this pool, it's like, oh yeah, we can't have people running through in wet bathing suits, going to the back of the house, where the other bathrooms are on, dragging 100 year old wood floor, oh my gosh, on these beautiful wood floors, ruining my building. Yeah, we can't have them. Oh my gosh. There it is. Look at how big that thing is. Look this is the electrical meter that I was telling you guys about. This looks like, like something that Homer Simpson would have worked on in a nuclear power plant. That is the electrical meter right next to it. Look how small that thing looks, compared to this, like, compared

Speaker 1 19:03

to the panel. Yeah, the panel was huge. I honestly, I walked around the corner and I was like, Good god, what? What else are we building out here?

Tyler Cauble 19:12

Yeah. I was like, is there an underground bunker that I was not aware of, that we were sending power to? And I brought it up to the contractor, and he was like, Well, I mean, this is powering the building, this is powering the bar, this is powering the pool. Like, man, I get it, but that just seems it's crazy. It's it's really, really ridiculous. The electrical service for the main building alone was like $150,000

Unknown Speaker 19:34

yeah, I think it was a little bit more, actually, shut your

Tyler Cauble 19:36

mouth, all right. I mean, 150 grade,

Unknown Speaker 19:42

sure, Tyler was 100

Tyler Cauble 19:46

Yes, sir, yeah, it was, it was, actually, was probably 120 Yeah, I man, that's high. It's one building. It's like 2000 feet. Man, yeah. But, you know, I get it, it's serving the pool. It's serving this. And that the other This has got to be, like, the world's most expensive pool. And it's, I'm obviously exaggerating, because I'm like, now I'm thinking of buildings in downtown Nashville that put pools on the top floor, like, oh my gosh, I would have a heart attack having to do that. Oh, there you go. Here's some of the history. This is, this is in the in the basement. This is the foundation. It's built on rock and dirt, just like what they used to and you could see some of the old timber right there. What were you gonna show here? Well,

Speaker 1 20:27

that was actually what I wanted people to see. Oh, cool. You know, the rock foundation that it was built, built on. I'm sure they cut that stone out of a quarry, yeah, somewhere local, and then brought it there, probably on horseback, if I had to guess, and started laying out the foundation, yeah, in order to to build the building. And, you know, 150 years later, it still looks as good as ever. It's unreal. It's,

Tyler Cauble 20:53

it's, it's amazing how well these buildings used to be constructed. I mean, yeah, come on. I mean, it would be super expensive to do this today, which is obviously why people don't do it. But it's, it's amazing. I had a conversation with Nashville historian David Ewing about this property, and there was a family in Nashville, obviously, very wealthy, that this used to be their country home, really, which is kind of wild to think about, right? Because it's not that far outside of Nashville, but, but back in the day, five minutes from downtown, that's right, it's like five minutes five minutes from downtown. But if you think about it, in the 1850s I mean, if you were gonna ride a horse from here to downtown, even on the roads that we have now, it take you 20 or 30 minutes at least. And back then, we definitely didn't have one

Speaker 1 21:36

roads like that. Even still, they took carts back then too. That's right. So, you know, if a family was was going, not everyone was on a horseback, that's right, they would take a cart, which would take even longer,

Tyler Cauble 21:48

yeah. So apparently it was, it was the family summer home. Wealthy people would use that to escape smelly downtowns. I'm not really surprised by you had the new half slaughterhouse right downtown on the river. I can't even imagine how bad the river used to smell. Used to smell. I would need a summer house five minutes outside of downtown, too. Oh my gosh, that thing is carrying some load. What are we looking at? So

Speaker 1 22:13

right here is the new wall that they ended up building underneath of the backside. Let's see where was that? I think that was underneath of the office manager and the storage room, so

Tyler Cauble 22:27

on the north side of the building right here. Yeah. So

Speaker 1 22:32

obviously we've got the block wall that sits back behind it. But unfortunately, you know, as as time goes on, some of that wood, some of your wood joists needed some more support so you can see, you mean, you mean,

Tyler Cauble 22:44

my tree stumps weren't holding up.

Speaker 1 22:47

I have pictures of those. Yeah. I took pictures of those. Yeah. Okay, there's your door to nowhere, yeah? So what they ended up doing was they ended up running a couple of new joists alongside basically every single floor joists. And then they ended up putting a nice load bearing beam in there, in order to just give it a little extra support, kind of get the sag out of it, and make sure it's solid for, you know, the the load that it's going to be carrying, having, having people walking through the back, having stuff stored back there.

Tyler Cauble 23:19

I mean, are we going to be parading elephants through this thing that looks like it could carry the load of a skyscraper? Yes, it does. That is a giant lvl by the way. If you've never done construction before, or if you're newer to construction, lvls are great. They're basically a laminated beam. So like back in the day, you used to just get one beam right? You would cut a single tree down, cue it up, and that would be your beam. Well, there's inherently issues with that. I mean, one, it's incredibly expensive and tough to do, but two, it can warp right? I mean, one piece of wood can warp over time. So the way that they do these lvls is they take a bunch of different sheets of wood and they glue them together, and they compress it. And so wood glue is actually stronger than wood. A lot of people don't know that. Five times, I believe, yeah, it's like, significantly stronger, and it seeps into the end of the wood. So, like, this lvl is infinitely stronger than a wooden beam of the same size.

Speaker 1 24:19

And believe it or not, they actually stuck another lvl on the other side of this exact same room along the the back wall

Tyler Cauble 24:27

of the building, perfect. So I can go up another 3000 stories. Okay, so these are the rafters. This is actually exposed in the in the the wine room. So we're gonna have like, a wine by the bottle retail shop, at least, that's the plan. Now I may wake up and change my mind tomorrow. The door that you're looking at that's a door to nowhere that actually used to be, that used to have a floor. So we're looking at floor joists that are now just rafters, and those, those four. Always carry the floor, but when we were looking at it, I was like, You know what? Let's take that entire floor out. I don't need this room. There's a window up there that can kind of diffuse light down. So if we do end up doing a bottle shop, we're not going to have any direct sunlight on wine bottles. Obviously, that's a problem, because it can ruin the wine. So now we have a door to nowhere. And one day, I was up there looking at it and inspecting it. And Jacob was walking around on site, and I slowly opened up the door to just kind of peek out and see kind of what was going on out there. And I walked downstairs, and Jacob was like, was that you opening the door? I was like, What do you mean? I don't know if I couldn't even remember. So I was like, I don't think I opened any doors. He's like, we've got a ghost man, something's opening up doors up here. He was standing downstairs in the room. Didn't see me, and just watch the door slowly open and then slowly close. I

Speaker 1 25:48

told Tyler afterwards, we need to lock that door. I was like, we have to lock that thing.

Tyler Cauble 25:53

Oh, 100% I mean, yeah, it's it's definitely a lot, a bit of a liability, but nobody's gonna be able to access the upstairs anyway. It's not open to the public, but we are still gonna have to take the safety precaution of putting some sort of locking on it, because I don't want to block it up. I still want access to it in case we want to do a new chandelier up there or whatever. There's my tree stump, yeah.

Speaker 1 26:13

So they would just cut, cut pieces of or cut stumps out of old trees in order to use them as piers. Yeah, so you've got your your load bearing wall sitting on the brick there, and they, they had a floor joist sitting right next to it, and so they just stuck a couple, I think there's three of them used as piers underneath of that concrete or that block, excuse me, and then we ended up going and building a new wall right in front of it as well. It's always

Tyler Cauble 26:46

funny, like getting into these older houses, because this is actually relatively common in Tennessee. You open up the basement, or you go into the crawl space, and you will see literally just a tree, like a log holding up the house. And they actually they, I mean, if you think about it like that's all that a four by four is they just cut off the rounded edges of the outside of a four by four, or a six by six, post, whatever it is. So why not just leave it natural? Why do all of the extra work? Because it's not gets going to change it structurally. I wonder if

Speaker 1 27:16

the bark actually ends up encasing the wood and protecting it more. I wonder if that's why these hold up so much better than four by fours. I would imagine that's why. Yeah.

Tyler Cauble 27:27

I mean, if you think about it, you're, you're taking off the natural protective sheathing of a tree when you're when you're processing it. So, I mean, if you like, if you're watching this on YouTube, you could see, like, how, how naked these two by fours look compared to that wood like I can promise you this will outlast these two by fours, and they

Speaker 1 27:45

even treated lumber. I mean, obviously the the two by fours are not treated lumber, but even your green wood is not going to last as long as as these posts. So, I mean, you know, even even if, even if these posts were replaced at some point in time. I would imagine they probably stopped using those somewhere around 1950 if not before then. Yeah, I don't know if it's to code anymore. And so you, you know, you've got at least 70 plus years of these things. You know, show me a, show me a two by four. That's going to last you 70. Yeah, that's

Tyler Cauble 28:19

right, that's right. It won't. There's another view of the wine room in the rafters up there. You can see that how that window is all the way up there, and it's just kind of diffusing, like, down right? Like this will be covered up, and that'll be a door. And one

Speaker 1 28:31

of the things that we talked about on the last episode was that we were going to leave a door in the in this wall in order for the merchandise room to have storage. And so this is actually the area that they closed up. So you can see the difference between the new and the old brick there that they're going to have to age a little bit. But we didn't have any pictures last time, unfortunately. And so I just wanted to have a good picture for you guys to see. You know, where they ended up closing it up. You know, you can see that, not the beam, the lintel that was up there at one point, and you can see the lintel on the other side. And I believe I got a picture of the door that we left in as well. Yeah.

Tyler Cauble 29:19

I mean, you can see, it's pretty cool looking at this brick, right? Because you can tell can tell, like, they patched that at some point. This is probably the original brick. This is a different this was added on at a different time, right? I mean, there's just so many different layers to this. It's kind of cool to look at it. You know, it's, it's like, when geologists look at, like, the rock formations, and you can see, like, oh, there's a different time periods and all that kind of stuff because of the different colors of the soil. It's kind of cool to see that the brick when actually,

Speaker 1 29:48

okay, so there's the door, yeah, there's the door that we ended up having them leave open. We were going to close that entire thing up because their mechanical was going to go in that back room, the MC. Mechanical company came back to me and said, Hey, we're gonna run everything underneath of the house. So you guys, can, you know, use that store that space however you you feel necessary. So, like I said last time, you know, Tyler's got a little bit more rentable square footage at that point for them to store a bunch of their junk that they don't want out and on display back in that room. And then obviously they can, they can put what they want on display in the main, main merchandise here. That's right.

Tyler Cauble 30:31

So like the main retail area, will just stay the main retail area, and then they'll have a little storage where they can, you know, additional goods, whatever, little office, whatever they need. There's another tree stump. Always cool to see those. And there's a case. Look at that casing. That's what we were that's original casing. Yep,

Speaker 1 30:47

we were talking about that last time I got a couple pictures of the casings.

Tyler Cauble 30:52

That's like, eight to 10 inches thick, by the way. Not, not thick wide, yeah, eight to 10 inches wide. Like it would be unbelievably expensive to have somebody do that today. And our contractor initially was like, Do you want me just tear it out? Hell no, absolutely not. Because, guess what, I'm not gonna pay you to come back and do it again. It just It looks so cool, especially like contrasted against the brick. Now, so much character. Yeah, unreal. It's pretty neat. You can kind of see this is like this is like this room that we're looking at right now is where the library is going to be. It's going to be kind of just like this, this little hangout spot for guests after they checked in, or whatever, you know, whatever, they're just hanging out. And this used to be that 1980s little block, glass block here. I hate glass block with a passion. I can't believe anybody ever thought that was a good idea. But apparently somebody did so much that they just put it everywhere. And I keep buying buildings that have glass blocking them. This is the second one. I can't

Speaker 1 31:46

believe you haven't gotten to the point where you go in and demo it yourself honestly.

Tyler Cauble 31:50

Here's the here's the thing. It makes me so mad I would forget to put glasses on, and that's like the worst thing to demo without glasses. Can you imagine? I

Speaker 1 32:01

don't know if you hate it that much. If you're not willing to go in there and demo it yourself,

Tyler Cauble 32:04

I hate it so much. I'm like, the godfather. I'm like, you put it down. It's not even worth my time. Here's some of the tile going in the bathroom. Yeah. So

Speaker 1 32:16

this is building four. So buildings one through three, we've got all of the tile completed and grouted. And building four they're working on right now. I think they're almost done installing tile. And then, you know, we'll wait a day or two before we go back and end up grouting everything. But, man, it's, it's coming together. It really is.

Tyler Cauble 32:36

Yeah, it looks great. So we went with this, this slate gray for the main area of the bathroom, and then this, like, almost hunter green, like the slate is very, oh, what's it? Colors like, not shiny at all, muted, flat, flat. Yeah, it's a flat gray. Gosh, I cannot think. Whereas the the hunter green, like they're they're skinnier but taller tiles in the shower, and they're shiny. So I think the contrast is really, really interesting to me. I like it a lot. Yeah, the rooms are smaller, so we were like, You know what? We've got to spend some money on making the bathrooms cool. And by the way, if you've never seen tile done before, these little you know, they kind of look like door openers or door holders, right? That you would put underneath the door to keep it open. Wedge, little wedge. They hold the tiles even with each other, right? So you actually click them in. It'll hold it in and make sure that everything is level that way. Don't start to get waves. Or, you know, one tile is slightly below another one and creates a little lip, which is a pretty ingenious little thing. And so what they'll do once, once everything is set and dry before they they grout it. They'll pull those wedges out, they'll break those little plastic tips off and just grout.

Speaker 1 33:54

It keeps everything in place and spaced out appropriately as well.

Tyler Cauble 33:57

That's right, yeah, because you want to make sure that obviously your grout lines are equidistant from one side of the tile to the other.

Unknown Speaker 34:04

We don't want quarter inch and half inch. Oh gosh,

Tyler Cauble 34:07

yeah. This isn't a mural. This isn't one of those mosaics. Not quite. There's another view of the the original casing on the place. I mean, just look at that. It's, it's absolutely gorgeous. Going through some signage iterations here, we're gonna have to change that to like hotel. It says hotel, restaurant, Pool Club. Right now have to be like hotel, really cool bar, pool club. Really cool hangout spot, Pool Club. We decided not to do the restaurant. If you're just now joining me for the first iteration. This is the second episode of this the first episode I kind of dove a little bit more into the history of our acquisition of the property, of what took us two years to get started. So we ended up not doing the restaurant because it was going to cost us about $500,000 just to do. The restaurant, piece of it. And so we were like, You know what, let's put that money into the pool instead, and we can always add a restaurant later. So we still went forward with the grease trap, you all saw that earlier, so that we could always add a restaurant in the future without significantly disrupting the entire site. And we could still do, like, finger bites and, you know, pool food. Like, you know, we're not going to be doing burgers, but we could still do charcuterie and small plates that you'd actually want to eat when you're sitting next next to the pool. Anyway. That's kind of the original iteration of what the signage looks like, yeah. And that's, that's based on the original sign, like there is still an original Congress in sign that's there,

Speaker 1 35:37

yeah? And so what we were going well, we were discussing was using the original sign, and, you know, taking down the Congress and portion of it, and rebranding it, versus putting a whole new sign. And I think we're going to end up just rebranding it, because I I believe that the the original is in really good shape still, truthfully, and it's grandfathered in, it's bigger than what we could really, yes, build back, especially for as close to the road as it is. Yeah, we had to get a variation. I guarantee you that they, you know, if you tried to change that, they would make you push it back too. Yeah.

Tyler Cauble 36:14

So we had to get a variance to keep it there, because we were going through the process initially and dealing with sidewalks, we had to get a variance to have the sidewalk reroute around this because the sidewalk, the way the city initially wanted, it was supposed to go through the middle of the sign, which meant we'd have to tear it down. They ended up granting us that variance, but then we also ended up not having to do sidewalks. So that was a it was a beautiful waste of time. Sometimes that happens on developments? You you just spend three months working on something with the city, and then the rules change, and it doesn't matter. Well, I was gonna

Speaker 1 36:46

say could have been worse. You know, I could have caught a couple 100 grand in order to to do all that concrete and redo that sign. Yeah,

Tyler Cauble 36:55

no kidding. This is the, this is the shot of the grease trap where it was dropped in so you can see how deep. I mean, gosh, it doesn't look that deep, no. But like, when I was standing up, my head probably came up to, like, right here, I don't even know if you're maybe not even that. I mean, to put it in perspective, I had to jump up to get back to this point. Yeah, sell

Unknown Speaker 37:14

back. I was crying laughing. It had rained a little

Tyler Cauble 37:17

bit. Definitely not because I'm I was off balance. Good

Speaker 1 37:21

Instagram, good Instagram. Girlfriend, I am an athlete. Oh, I actually haven't gotten a chance to tell you about this, so Wow, that was great. Originally, we had all the dirt from the construction entrance that was put in, and, you know, Tyler had come to me and said, Hey, can we reuse some of this dirt on the backside of the buildings? And, you know, unfortunately, because of how much concrete, there was just giant chunks, huge chunks that they had pulled out of concrete. You know, I told him that, unfortunately, it just wouldn't be time and cost effective in order to try and get that spread across the back. But this is such a small area and needs, needed such little dirt. One of the things that I was thinking about was possibly putting some lawn chairs out there in the summer, so that people are able to sit outside and hang out, not necessarily by the pool. And so I asked the guys to the excavation guys, to grab some of the dirt, come through, and spread it give us a nice, even surface. And they did a great job.

Tyler Cauble 38:23

Yeah, those really good. And, you know, the plan is to have like, a little fire pit here, a little spot for people to hang out. I mean, hell, as fun as it is now, we should probably put like, horseshoes up or something, you know, have a little game area, maybe bocce yard games. Yeah, that'd be awesome. That's a great idea, absolutely. Let's see. We got some questions coming in. Andrew. Andrew, what's going on? Man? Andrew, he's in Siri accelerator. Andrew actually has his own boutique hotel up in Louisville, which is pretty badass. Nice. Check it out, the swepson. He said this place was so cool when we when we visited it in October. I can't wait to stay overnight when it's finished. Keep up the amazing creative work. The stories these old buildings tell are always so interesting. Could agree more. Man, he also did a renovation of an old building in downtown Louisville. And yeah, it's fun, man, I'm glad everybody got to come visit it in October, and I can't wait to have everybody out once it's done, it's gonna be nice, nice to celebrate. You

Speaker 1 39:19

know, I'm really glad that you are one of the people who's preserved some of the history of Nashville. I think it matters, as great as it is to see all of the money flooding to Nashville and people wanting to be here and businesses wanting to be here. Unfortunately, a lot of the old brick buildings in the downtown area have just been completely demolished for new glass towers. And so we're losing a lot of the character that Nashville has had for, you know, a couple 100 years now, I think it's sad. It is, it is, I don't like it.

Tyler Cauble 39:50

I mean, if you think through, like, a lot of the adaptive reuse projects that are even available in Nashville, like they're all gone now they are, like, the major ones, yeah, like new hop has done, uh, worth and lofts, you. Uh, the trolley barns. But outside of that, like, there weren't a lot of, like, I know there's some here and there, right? Like, in terms of, like, notable projects, the only outside of Broadway one.

Speaker 1 40:12

And, you know, who wants to believe that where it is, you know, one of the things that really bugged me was where, not necessarily Amazon, but in that area where Amazon built their towers, they're beautiful old brick buildings with the old pictures painted on the side of them. Yeah, super cool. Gone. Gone. Super

Tyler Cauble 40:33

cool. I don't know, Nashville has not done a very good job of preserving anything. So, yeah, I appreciate it. Happy. Happy to do my my part where I can MS is saying, Hello, what's the projected ADR and occupancy rate for this hotel? That's a good question. I would have to go back and look. We just got an updated pro forma from our hotel management company, because our original one was, like, I don't know, two years old at this point, the ADR is, is between 202 25 and I think I underwrote it originally at about 175 a night was pretty low, right? Like, I mean, hell if we're getting it. So here's the thing, if we get 175 a night, we do fine. Nashville hotels are unbelievably expensive. Yes, I mean, the cop that we've got down the street had an ADR of like $309 a night, I believe,

Unknown Speaker 41:26

on Dickerson pike. Oh,

Tyler Cauble 41:29

yeah, yeah. Now you know the sleep in, like next door is get, like, at the time was getting like 170 175 so I was like, Okay, if we can do just better than the sleep in I think we'll be fine. I mean, let's be honest, if we can't beat the sleep ad that we've got bigger problems, we're gonna have to find you a new career. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. And I think the occupancy rate is somewhere between 70 and 80% and I'm happy to pull that up and give you guys some actual numbers. But while we're waiting on that, let's see what else we've got in here, because Jacob can talk about it while, while going on. So

Speaker 1 42:06

this is our new sewer line that we we have ready to go. We've got two bathrooms on the backside of the building as well for, I believe, for staff, but we're having a conversation for bar patrons as well, with the people who will be running the bar, the company that'll be running the bar, and so we've got that ready to be hooked up as soon as we get rough plumbing installed. You know, obviously they're working on the front but two pool bar or pool bathrooms, and they've got all that plumbing done, and they've got it tied in, as you guys saw. But on the backside, we're, you know, we're working through as slowly still because we're still waiting on a couple of drawings to be done for the bar, which is, you know, to no fault of the company that's doing it. It's, you know, slowing down the electrical and the plumbing rough ends that we're going to be able to get done. We've got rough framing done and ready. So you know, really, it's just getting those pooled or bar drawings done in order for us to go through the rest of the house, in order to put in the rough electrical and rough plumbing, which we will tie in right here. Is it this one? Yep. So there's a grease trap after it was installed, 2000 gallon grease trap. Ain't she a beauty? It is a wonderful piece of equipment, expensive. But, I mean,

Tyler Cauble 43:34

you look at that, you're like, man, that looks like a styrofoam box in the ground, and it was, what, 25 grand, at least, probably more, yeah, I

Unknown Speaker 43:43

think the actual thing itself, yeah, no,

Tyler Cauble 43:45

no, I'm just talking about, like, the box, yeah, yeah. That doesn't include the excavating, the plumbing. That's like, literally just the box.

Speaker 1 43:51

So, you know, a lot of what I do is, is tenant build out. So I don't really deal with a whole lot of exterior work. I don't deal with a whole lot of excavation, so this is actually my first time seeing how they install that and seeing how they plug it up and then flood it for the inspector to come through to make sure there's no leaks. And then obviously, they unplug it, they pump it out, and then get it covered up. And that was a really quick process. Old Hickory construction did.

Tyler Cauble 44:20

Yeah, they knocked it out. They went really fast, phenomenal. It's good experience for you to have, because if you're, even if you're, you know, just focused on tenant build outs. I mean, a lot of what you're going to be building, you could have a restaurant conversion, right? Which means you're going to have to add a grease trap. For those of you all who have never seen concrete boxes and big things like this installed on site before. You'll see, when they pour the concrete, they put these giant rebar hooks in here, and that's how they actually move it around. They put tie straps or chains to it, and then hook that up to a giant, I mean, a crane or probably a. In the excavator to actually pick it up and move it around, because those things are heavy, really heavy. Okay, so pulling up the numbers 2026, our first stabilized year, we're looking at $207 a night, ADR, at a 71.6% occupancy. We're gonna work our way up towards, I don't know, 77 78% over the next two years, occupancy and of course, ADR will continue to go up. But at 207 a night, ADR, with a 71.6% occupancy rate, that will bring in total revenue, gross revenue of about four and a half million of the hotel. So some rough numbers for y'all. Let's see what else we got here. That's one of the back buildings. That is the back building. So right here is what Jacob just put a bunch of dirt on top of and smoothed out so you can tell kind of what it looked like before. It's a little bit almost U shaped, so the water didn't quite drain off the wall over here, the hump of like the swell kind of was in the middle of the land. So the water would come back over here. Water would come back over here. And that's actually part of the problem. Like you can see, we had a completely new retaining wall built right here. That's part of the problem as to why we had to build a new retaining wall. That water goes in behind this wall, and that's fine if your wall is built for that. The wall that the previous owners had built was not built for that. First of all, it didn't have anything going into the ground to actually hold it there. It was just basically its own weight being stacked on top of itself, which is crazy, which means that, you know, Jacob and I could have run over there, grabbed two different parts of it and pulled the thing down. And then was so once the hydrostatic pressure, once all this water builds up behind it, it's going to start slowly pushing that wall out. And you could, you could very easily see it. So this one, this wall, has actually been designed to make sure that the water releases out of it so that hydrostatic pressure does not build up. And I

Speaker 1 47:03

was about to say, you know, this was before I came on to the project, but I believe there's a drain pipe running behind the wall as well. Is there not That's

Tyler Cauble 47:11

right? Yeah, yeah, like a French drain? Yep. Beautiful little sidewalk handles. You gotta keep those. It's just nostalgia. Honestly, nostalgia

Speaker 1 47:23

adds character to the property. This is what we were talking about when we were talking about preserving history. Yeah, really, it really says,

Tyler Cauble 47:28

like, 1980s you know, public park in New York. That's kind of the vibe it's given. Me definitely gonna keep that more the grease trap. You know what, Jacob, I'm gonna need you to start taking a banana with you out there so that we can have a banana for scale. Whenever I take these photos, got

Unknown Speaker 47:49

it. I will keep one in the truck,

Tyler Cauble 47:53

because, like, you can't tell this thing is huge. This is probably what, 12 to 15 feet long, maybe 20. It's big.

Speaker 1 48:01

We should have gotten you inside of there. I know we did one picture with you on the ground before it was, no, actually, yeah, we should have made you get in there, yeah. I mean, that would, uh, I would

Tyler Cauble 48:13

easily fit through that hole. Yeah, that's how big that is, yeah. Here's the front doing, doing some more trenching there. The pool is actually gonna go right here. I

Speaker 1 48:21

believe this was sewer. Was it not? I think it was sewer. I think it was that was

Tyler Cauble 48:26

when they were doing all them, yep. And it's funny, you probably can't see it right here, but we found the old pool. See that rebar? This is where the old pool was. They had just filled it with dirt, which I actually appreciate. Sometimes you'll find these jackasses. We'll just fill poles with concrete. And you're like, Why in the world would you do I mean, back in the day, I guess concrete used to be cheap, so they would just do it. Fortunately, they filled it with dirt, because guess what? You could scoop that out very easily. Yeah, dude, can you imagine a concrete pool six feet deep? I wouldn't want to be around when they were estimating it. I would just leave it. You know what? Our pool is not really, we've got a pool. It's not usable, but we've got a pool. We really don't

Speaker 1 49:04

need to build a new pool. So this is building for the back building. This was after they got it primed in order to, you know, get the first go to primer, or get the first coat, which was primer on it, and this is, I believe, after drywall has been installed as well.

Tyler Cauble 49:28

Yeah, probably the so when, when you're, when you're painting these buildings, you want to make sure, because we're obviously doing site work at the same time as we're doing the interiors of these, these buildings, typically in a new construction project, you're going to do all of the site work first, and then you're going to do all of the building work after that. Here, obviously we already have buildings, so we're having to work do the site work kind of around the existing buildings, but I wanted to make sure that we're staying on time with just getting the buildings finished. And so we've got the first coat like, like Jacob said, we got the first coat of. Primer on these buildings. We're not going to finalize the paint until we're done with all of the site work. The reason being, it's Nashville, and honestly, this will probably happen anywhere. But the ground will get dried out. These machines are going to push dirt over the site. You can just see how much dirt is everywhere. It will get all over the paint, which means somebody would have to come out and basically wash all of the buildings anyway. So by putting that first coat of primer on there, you know, it means it's not going to mess up the final coat sealed up

Speaker 1 50:29

a little bit. That's right, you know, ready to go for whenever we do get them cleaned off.

Tyler Cauble 50:34

This was a pole that we had to get removed for whatever reason they thought, You know what? Let's just put this electrical pole in the middle of the road in the back.

Speaker 1 50:43

The craziest thing about it is the pole was actually anchored to, you can barely see the anchor in order to hold it up upright, but I think it was actually anchored to the building. It's

Tyler Cauble 50:56

anchored to the building that's not, that is not an electrical wire. That is a structural wire, and what the hell that's all I have to say about that. That's kind of crazy. But, you know, hey, if it keeps the pull up right, it keeps the pull up right. Usually people just make sure that the pole is deep enough to where it's not going to move. But you know, not here, not these guys. These guys cowboys.

Speaker 1 51:21

Anchor it to brick veneer. That's right, something's not structural.

Tyler Cauble 51:25

I mean, if anything hit this, it's ripping that out anyway. So, you know, probably

Unknown Speaker 51:30

take the whole back wall with it. People are interesting,

Tyler Cauble 51:32

yeah, who knows the things that I've seen on job sites before? Okay, look, this is where that grease trap was going, this is the sewer line trench that's going to the grease trap. So this isn't nearly as deep. That is a dude's head.

Speaker 1 51:46

That guy is actually six foot seven. That guy is

Tyler Cauble 51:49

now he's nine feet tall. Yeah, that's funny. More of building three. Got a little water feature going here. I

Speaker 1 52:02

like this. I'm glad, I'm glad I captured that. Yeah, thanks for doing that.

Tyler Cauble 52:08

This, this is, this is my favorite thing with contractors. Just throw stuff in the parking lot. I apologize that

Unknown Speaker 52:15

wasn't supposed to

Tyler Cauble 52:19

go. Jacob knows how much I hate a dirty job site.

Speaker 1 52:22

I actually use that picture to send to the contractor to ask if we could get a new dumpster. To be like,

Tyler Cauble 52:26

Hey, what the hell are you doing If Tyler sees us? You missed

Speaker 1 52:29

that Tuesday. You weren't there that Tuesday. So I was like, Hey, can we get this shit cleaned up before next week, before Tyler? Yeah,

Tyler Cauble 52:37

there's nothing that I can't stand more than a dirty job site, because I'm like, guys one, we can't get vehicles in and out. There's probably screws in here, which means that I'm going to run over it and, you know, pop a tie, or somebody else is going to it. Just like when you start to just let people throw trash, then they'll pile it up. Yeah. So anytime I see this kind of stuff, I immediately go to the subway, like, you guys are cleaning that up today.

Speaker 1 53:01

Well, and that's all dry, absolutely, not absolutely dry, ball screws in there. 100% 100% 100%

Tyler Cauble 53:07

I mean, hell, we can probably find some. Let's play I spy. But you've got that. I mean, you've got some HVAC equipment. I mean, clearly they're doing, you know, something on some saw horses over here. I mean, yeah, the dumpster is full, yeah, right. So it's like, well, yeah, they can't really put it anywhere else. So yeah. I mean, it's like, yeah, get that thing turned over. We can't. I mean, obviously I would not rather the demo guys just stop doing what they're doing, because I don't want stuff on the ground. But you know, if it's out there for a day, fine, any longer than a day, and everybody's just being lazy. Because here's the thing, if this sits here for like, 48 hours, the drywall guys are going to forget that it's drywall. They're gonna be like, That's not mine. We didn't do that. And you're like, I watched you for a week pull drywall out of these units. How is that not yours? Every time, every time, like, oh, it's not mine. We finally painted the main building, which is the thumbnail for this YouTube video. Oh my gosh, the original for whatever reason. It like it used to be white. A few years back, I remember looking at a photo from like the 60s, and it was white for whatever reason. Well, so, so for whatever reason, within the last like five or six years. Oh, okay, so, like, before the pandemic, maybe around the pandemic, yeah, the owners of it painted it this ugly ass blue,

Speaker 1 54:28

ugly blue, purple tinge to it. It was

Tyler Cauble 54:32

just like, it wasn't a cool blue. Like, I mean, my, my company logo is blue. Like, I like blue, not that blue, whatever it was. So, so bad. And so finally, getting the primer coat on this, you know, this building was built in 1856 so you can imagine, with this brick, we've got a lot, I mean, you can just kind of see some of the, you know, we've had to patch some stuff in here. There's a lot of tuck pointing going on. There's a lot of caulking going on, just making sure. That the brick is actually still structurally stable, because the brick will last forever. The mortar, you know, maybe 50 years, maybe 100 years. But after that, it's going to have to start getting replaced. Yeah, a lot of

Speaker 1 55:12

that mortar was was, well, not on this specific building, but around the property. Some of the mortar was starting to just turn to dust. That's right, whenever you picked it up, it

Tyler Cauble 55:22

literally turns to sand, yeah. So you have to, you have to, it's called tuck pointing. You basically just go in, scrape it out, put some new, some new mortar in there.

Speaker 1 55:33

And we've, we're getting new windows on the building this, no, excuse me, next week, next week, yeah, next week. Windows are being delivered, so all the windows will be in. I believe they did a little bit to the chimneys as well. Fix the chimneys up a little bit they were, they were leaning pretty hard. This one was really leaning. And then, you know, like Tyler said, they they have literally gone through every square inch of this building and filled every single hole in order to make sure we don't have any water getting behind that brick veneer. Yeah,

Tyler Cauble 56:08

this the contractor wanted to come back with with rectangular windows. And I was like, No, absolutely not man, because like, this adds, like, just having that rounded top, that crown, especially with the brick going around it, it just like, I know it's more expensive. We got to get custom windows. I get it. I don't want to spend the money either. They're like, damn, does that have this really cool look. It's

Speaker 1 56:36

so it's so beautiful. You know, it's and one of the things that you and I had talked about, as well as over top of the doors for the bathrooms and the windows. Yeah, these right here. We had talked about doing some sort of trim piece in order to give those a more rounded look as well, in order to match the front of the building a little bit better. That's

Tyler Cauble 56:56

right, because you can see, like, the original door here was a lot bigger, yeah, like the main door to the entrance, and then it clearly had this, like, transom, probably, class panel, yeah, glass panel up top to let sunlight in, yep. And so, yeah, I kind of went the same. We

Speaker 1 57:12

we should. I definitely think going back and matching it some way in order to make it just look a lot cleaner with the rest of the building, yeah,

Tyler Cauble 57:21

because that's the thing. Like, if you look at these windows, it's going to look kind of funny to have these really cool, classy looking windows and then just have square cut off. Yes, square cut off, agreed. And you can kind of see in here, like, you know, where the windows are going to be. And here's the thing, like, you don't necessarily have to do custom windows for that. You can, you know, like Jacob said, you could just cut a piece of trim that goes over the window right to give it that look without having to buy, you know, custom glass for it. Unfortunately, these are like, that is literally, you know, bricked in. So we have to have rounded glass when

Speaker 1 57:54

you don't like you said, you don't want to get rid of that vertical brick either. Oh, gosh, it was so

Tyler Cauble 57:59

beautiful. You don't do that stuff anymore. Man, yeah, it's annoying. I get that. It's expensive. So Jacob made me replace all the windows.

Speaker 1 58:11

So last all the units. Last time we were trying to decide what color this was, yeah, so I showed my wife a picture, and I was told that this is called taupe. We were trying to decide Brown. What the hell is taupe? I don't know. I'm just repeating what I was told.

Tyler Cauble 58:29

Don't ever come on my podcast and say taupe again. How about that? You can tell, oh, man, I can see, like five colors. I don't need to know what taupe is. That's Brown. Man, I

Speaker 1 58:42

agree. Listen, we're on the same page. It's so funny.

Tyler Cauble 58:49

This is the the threshold going up, by the way, you know, let's talk about this. I love this color, by the way, for the trim, we're doing this on the on the window sills to kind of, you know, just trim it out, give it a little bit of pop of color. And so it'll be like the walls are painted this with just, you know, it's not like a crazy like, oh, bright red pop. We're going with more muted, earthy tones on the exterior of the facade. And I think that just having, you know, this, this color here, is really going to kind of accent the windows in the right

Speaker 1 59:19

way. And I know what you guys are thinking, Yes, we are leaving those windows. Yeah, 100%

Tyler Cauble 59:25

it's gonna stay. So the thresholds for the doors going into the rooms is it's all gonna be trimmed out with cedar wood. And you can tell right here, this joint is not done, right? So I already had a conversation with the contractor about it. What's funny is the joint immediately behind it is actually done, right? This one is not so, no, it's not structural, so it doesn't matter. But you can see that this, this top piece. What is that called? The top piece? Is that the king the header? Yeah. So it actually butts up to the exterior of the other piece and doesn't sit on top of it. And the problem is, if it doesn't sit on top of it, eventually it's going to come loose and it's going to start to hang unless you like, put some serious screws in there. I mean, even if you have glue, it'll eventually sag. It's supposed to sit on top of it right there, because then it's just naturally held up. So

Speaker 1 1:00:25

that was actually something that I didn't get a chance to talk to you about over the last couple weeks, so I had a conversation with them on site, and every single one of the ones that they can fix, they are fixing, but there are a couple where you have three different lentils. What at three different heights, unacceptable that were originally installed with the brick and with the center block that's underneath. Why they use two different lentils for the block? I don't know. I can

Tyler Cauble 1:00:56

tell you why. Because, why not. Why not? I feel like, seriously? The guy like, why not? I mean, they were like, This is 30 years ago. They're like, You know what? Somebody's getting really pissed about this one day, and I'm gonna laugh about it. That guy's probably giggling, you know?

Speaker 1 1:01:08

If the crazy thing is, is that on building one, none of them are the exact same, either, what? So some of them, you have two lentils. Some of them you have three lentils. Some of them, they're sitting at different heights. Some of them, they're even and so the the reason that they were doing that was because if you've got three different lentils at three different heights, you're not able to attach into anything so you can attach your header into the block, and it wasn't because it's at two different heights. You don't have a place where you can glue it on in order to get your your side pieces up underneath that,

Tyler Cauble 1:01:44

that shouldn't prevent them from having this, you know, three quarters of an inch longer on either side and sitting on top of this wood piece, right? Yeah. But

Speaker 1 1:01:50

do you really want it just sitting there without any support? I mean, the first time somebody's carrying something in that thing's just going to get knocked out.

Tyler Cauble 1:01:57

We mean, it would have support. Well, it would

Speaker 1 1:02:00

just be push up, but it's not going to have anything holding it onto your lentils or to your

Tyler Cauble 1:02:05

Yeah, what's holding it right now?

Speaker 1 1:02:09

Right now? What they did was, I ran your side pieces all the way up to the top lentils, and then they nailed it. They shot nails into the sides in order to hold it from the side. Okay, so that way there actually is something supporting it, but there, unless you use concrete anchors, you're not going to be able to to attach those to anything. The

Tyler Cauble 1:02:36

joys of renovations, boys and girls, you'll you'll hear that many times throughout this series as we dive further into the construction on Salt Range. But, I mean, come on, things that you wouldn't have to deal with if you were building this new construction, like, Yeah, three different lentils, okay, and none of them on the main building are the same, yeah,

Speaker 1 1:02:55

doesn't make any sense. Just wild. So wanted to get a picture of the floors installed. So floors are installed on buildings one through four now they look

Tyler Cauble 1:03:04

good with this, kind of, like, not quite blonde. It's almost like a reddish blonde, maybe kind of like a maybe it's like a taupe. I don't know. It's like a light, darker tannish. Clearly, I don't know colors. That's fine, but it's, it's wood colored LVP, and we did that for the durability. We thought about coming in with, like, regular hardwoods. The problem is the amount of traffic and wear and tear. People don't care about hotel rooms. They will drag beds and they'll do this and that and the other and just tear everything up. They don't care, yeah, and so we're like, Well, it'd be a lot easier to just replace one of these if we have to, than it would be to have to, you know, get in there, rip out old hardwood, refinish it this and the other so they,

Speaker 1 1:03:52

they turned out really well. They're very, very sturdy, too. It

Tyler Cauble 1:03:56

actually looks good. Like, I'm not a big fan of LVP. I'm not this, this, whatever this one is, does because, like, a lot of the times it looks like a digital print, right? Like, it just looks like garbage. This one's actually textured. It looks

Unknown Speaker 1:04:09

like, uh, flipper on a house, the

Tyler Cauble 1:04:14

HGTV special, yeah,

Speaker 1 1:04:15

yep, landlord special. You

Tyler Cauble 1:04:19

know that? Oh, there's the sign, yeah. So that's the sign. As it says today, you can see, can see how giant it is like, of course, that's grandfathered in. So, you know, we'll keep pretty, you know, a lot of this, we're just gonna replace kind of that. Yes, I think we should keep these lights. I wonder if we can get them to turn back on. That's kind of cool. That would be kind of cool. Kind of leave it a little retro. Yeah, you know, if you're if you're listening on the podcast, these are red, white and blue light bulbs just running across the top of the portion of the site that says, nice, clean rooms, low weekly rates, which like, if I'm ever renting a hotel and I see that I'm like, That's the spot for. I bet they have nice, clean rooms and

Speaker 1 1:05:02

refrigerators and microwaves. I mean, what else do you need? What? Nothing.

Tyler Cauble 1:05:07

Maybe HBO, everyone that used to be like a big thing. I used to have a sign that was right here that said color TV, and somebody came and took it, and if I figure out who, yeah, if I figure out who you are, we'll hunt you down. That

Speaker 1 1:05:20

would have been so cool to keep up to, yeah, that would have been kind of funny on it,

Tyler Cauble 1:05:26

yeah, make me feel make me feel worse about it.

Unknown Speaker 1:05:30

Great. It's my job.

Tyler Cauble 1:05:33

There's the there's some of the bathroom towel as it's grouted in, kind of, see, I mean, I don't know. I think the bathrooms look really good. Obviously, not done. Needs to be cleaned up. Toilet installed, and then the drywall finish on the walls. There's one of the rooms we're gonna leave it like that. I figured, you know what? We're gonna give you, the new construction experience. We're

Unknown Speaker 1:05:54

gonna give your kids crayons. Oh

Tyler Cauble 1:05:59

gosh, miserable. Who's a new one of the new units? Are we still putting cases over these?

Speaker 1 1:06:07

I know they're going around the outside. Okay, I don't know. I don't believe we're putting any cases on the inside. We talked

Tyler Cauble 1:06:13

at one point about putting cases over them, because you can find some really cool, decorative cases. Maybe, maybe it's not in the budget. I'll have to talk to the boss, taupe. See, there's another angle of the wood floor like it looks. It actually looks good,

Speaker 1 1:06:32

and that's without people tracking, yeah, drywall, all of it,

Tyler Cauble 1:06:38

pocket doors in the bathroom. Yep, that saved us a lot of space. Those are really cool color too. And I like the paneling on them, you know, it just gives it character. Yep, that was, gosh, man, talk about, like, the detail you have to go into. Like, originally that we were just doing regular doors, and I was like, I don't like that, because it just takes up space. But it wasn't in the plans to tear out any of these walls until we open up one wall and we found how much rotted, dry, like rotted wood was in there from either water or termites. We're like, okay, great. Let's add a lot of money to this budget and blow it out of the water and replace all the walls. And then when we did that, we were like, Oh no, we've exposed the electrical, which is clearly not up to code, and it's probably going to set this building on fire. Let's redo all of the electrical again. Let's punch it out of the water.

Speaker 1 1:07:35

I'll be honest. I'm glad I came on after, after you guys uncovered

Tyler Cauble 1:07:39

all that stuff. You know what? I really don't get mad. It's just more of, like a damn it, you know what? I mean, just, it's a thing, yeah, there's a there's another view of the of the bathroom tile with some lighting in there. Yeah. I mean, what else? What else is going on? What else we have? I mean, in terms of like the November update from you, I mean just so that we can kind of run through bullet points, demolition, interior demo is completed for the electrical of the main house. In terms of site work, domestic water service is completely installed. Storm water system completely installed. Sanitary sewer completely installed. Construction entrance is completely installed, which is great, because now they're not having to come in off of the front of Dickerson anymore. They can actually go around the side. Retention pond is currently in progress. I'm super excited about that, because retention ponds are not nearly as cool as you they sound. Retention pond sounds cool. I can go fishing there. It's not No, no, not at all. Pools being planned because pool builders were out of budget. Is any pool builder in budget?

Speaker 1 1:08:54

Honestly, I don't know what we're gonna do about that. Man, I don't think so. It's insane.

Tyler Cauble 1:08:57

They're so damn expensive, I don't know what to do about it. Gabe, is saying awesome content. Tyler, appreciate you. Appreciate you. Gabe, Thanks for Thanks for tuning in. These things are fought out. I enjoy doing this stuff. And you're saying I think nice, clean rooms is a given at every hotel. It's not differentiating value. Andrew, you are overestimating hotels on Dickerson Pike, yeah. I mean, the fact that they had to be like, our rooms are nice and clean, like, yeah. I mean, he's like, yeah, it should be kind of a

Speaker 1 1:09:29

given nice and clean as, like, once a every two weeks, I think. I

Tyler Cauble 1:09:32

mean, that's like, operating under the assumption of, like, all hotels are dirty and awful rooms, but ours aren't

Speaker 1 1:09:39

ours, aren't we different, differentiated.

Tyler Cauble 1:09:43

We are different. Our blue ocean is having nice clean rooms. Oh man, let's see in terms of the main house, because I'm not going to update you guys on the on the rooms, because we kind of already covered a lot of that. But in terms of the main house, rough electrical is near income. Completion. There's no exciting photos there. Same with rough plumbing. The exterior sewer is ready to be tied into holes filled in the exterior masonry. Let's see, we covered a lot of this exterior. The building was primed, food and beverage coordination, ongoing bar equipment design and progress from meeting with the hospitality management company, or we met with them in early November and kind of ran through our plan. So that's kind of what I'm working on now, is getting the final designs for the bars, pulling the trigger on the furniture. I mean, that's, gosh, we had to change painful, dude. It's awful. We had to change manufacturers because of the Chinese New Year, things that I don't think about when, you know, hey, it's my first hotel. Learn from me so that you don't have to go through this. Just so, you know, don't ever plan to order furniture around this time of the year if it's coming from China, because they have a thing called the Chinese New Year in which nobody does anything for a month. Apparently, like, Man, I gotta move to China. Actually, I already do nothing for my I

Speaker 1 1:11:03

mean, you're about to do that. Yeah? You are celebrating the Chinese.

Tyler Cauble 1:11:07

I am celebrating the Chinese New Year. But I don't want, I don't want them celebrating it, because I need my furniture. Yeah? So every year, if you don't know this, December 15 to January 15, I go on sabbatical, and you won't hear from me, so we probably won't have any live streams for a bit. So just a little heads up, you know, I'm going to be out of office. We'll still have videos going out that I've pre recorded, but, you know, it's, it's all fun. David's saying, great to see the ups and downs of all this stuff live. Interested to see the bar design? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, here's the thing, like, you know, we're in the middle of the design of the bar. I'm like, the bar has already been designed. But then the management company is like, Well, yeah, but it's not designed to what we need it to be designed to. And I'm like, Okay, fine. You guys do whatever you want. They're like, well, but you've got to pay for us to redesign it. I'm like, you you pay to redesign it. I've already paid to design it, and it was already done with a hospitality like company consulting on it. Every time you turn around, as a developer, somebody's trying to throw a bill at you, it's just, you know, that

Speaker 1 1:12:08

was one of those text messages I did not get a response for like, Hey, did you sign the document so we can get the bar design done?

Tyler Cauble 1:12:15

I saw that text. I was like, Jacob, don't text me every time. I'm just not even gonna respond. I'm hunting in Texas. Leave me alone. I would love to get a text from you know what I will respond to next time you text me is, Hey, Tyler, I saved you some money on this. That'll be good. We could use that. Yeah. But yeah, there you go, ups and downs on going through the construction. I'm willing to be as transparent with you guys as you want me to be. So y'all jump in the comments. Let me know what you would like to see in the next iteration of this. It will be probably mid January, by the time we'll do the third episode of construction updates at Salt ranch. I will create a playlist for this as well so that you can just go back and listen to all of these in a row if you really want to. Other than that, I mean Jacob and I'll talk to you before then, which I know I will, hope so. Let's pretend like I won't. Merry Christmas.

Speaker 1 1:13:10

Merry Christmas. Happy, happy babying. Yeah, thank you. You have a baby on the way. We're at 39 weeks. She'll be here like any day yesterday, any day now. Yeah, I'm ready. I literally had it

Tyler Cauble 1:13:21

in my calendar. It was Jacob or baby question mark. Is that a no? If we were gonna be recording this? I didn't know if we were gonna be recording yes or not. So anyway, congrats. Thank you. Oh, we got one more comment from David saying, Tyler, can't say I'll save you money, but actually, have some ideas to make you a lot of money. We'll shoot an email on that. David, I'm gonna save you some time. Don't shoot me an email. I don't even check him. No, he doesn't. Jacob, give a

Speaker 1 1:13:47

Yeah? Calls, emails, text messages. Don't even bother. Yeah, just don't bother. Yeah. If you

Tyler Cauble 1:13:51

want to make me a lot of money, I'm always up for that. Shoot me a DM on Instagram. Happy to check that out. Appreciate you guys for joining. Join us in the next one. It'll probably be in like 45 days. So look for it and look for it in mid January. We'll see y'all then. Thank you. This episode of the commercial real estate investor podcast is brought to you by my cre accelerator mastermind, where you'll get access to my step by step investment blueprint, essentially a library of resources on how to invest in commercial real estate. You'll get connected to a supportive community of other commercial real estate investors that are doing projects just like you. You'll get personalized coaching and feedback from me every step of the way. Go to www.crecentral.com to learn more.