Podcast: How the “Steel Toe Stiletto” Is Turning Shanties Into Showhomes
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Join Dallas Dirt host Candy Evans in a captivating interview with Tam Pham, the visionary founder of “Steel Toe Stiletto.” In this episode, we delve into the intricate world of historic home preservation, exploring the challenges and triumphs that come with restoring Dallas’ architectural gems.
Tam Pham, a seasoned general contractor, shares insights into the art and science of preserving historic homes, especially those with unique challenges.
“I’ve proven over and over that I can take a shanty and turn it into a show house,” Pham says.
RELATED: See the complete transformation
From navigating stringent preservation guidelines to overcoming structural intricacies, Pham’s expertise shines as she discusses the delicate dance between preserving the past and embracing modern functionality.
“I think every old home deserves to be saved,” Pham says.
About the podcast: Dallas Dirt is a weekly audio and video podcast hosted by Candy Evans. Listeners and viewers are invited to share their comments and suggestions at [email protected]. Dallas Dirt is accepting pitches for local Dallas and Texas-based podcast guests. PR requests and guest submissions may be emailed to [email protected]. Advertising and episode sponsorship opportunities are available. Contact [email protected] to inquire.
Episode Transcript:
Note: these transcripts are auto-generated from the podcast audio and may contain slight transcription errors.
00:08
Welcome to Dallas Dirt. I’m so excited to welcome our first guest today, the beautiful Tam Pham, who is a general contractor and the founder of Steel Toe Stiletto. Yep, that’s the name of her company and we’re gonna talk to you about how that all came to be. It’s very exciting. Tam, welcome to the show. Isn’t this great to have you here? Yes, thank you so much. I’m super honored. And thank you for the drive over. Speaking of drives, tell us a little bit.
00:36
about your very interesting journey into founding your company, which specializes in restoration and preservation of beautiful homes in Dallas, right? Yes. All right. Oh, I love it. Thank you. Thanks. Well, and interestingly, I had a very long outside sales career with Fortune 40 companies, very different industries, but very robust companies. And I learned quite a bit.
01:04
but I was actually restoring homes on the side. And… This is a passion. I mean, if you do this on the side, it’s something you’re passionate about, yes. It truly is. I mean, it is a labor of love and it is something I’m absolutely passionate about. I think at one point someone asked me, if you won the lottery, what would you do? And I was like, I would probably go to a kind of a declining neighborhood.
01:31
and buy as many homes as I could to restore them. So more work, right? Not leisure, not the sale around the world. No sitting on the beach. Well, I mean, I’d love to sit on the beach for some of that. Seriously, you love, you kind of love getting dirty. Like getting into, like you are perfect for CandysDirt because here you are, you Dallas Dirt, CandysDirt, you’re getting dirty with all this stuff because it’s a messy process, correct?
01:58
It is. Yes, yes. I mean, it is. I usually start with the worst of the worst and houses that people have said are irreparable or that they want to tear down or that there’s only one option to tear down. And I’ve proven over and over that I can take a shanty and turn it into a showhouse. From a shanty to a showhouse. We have to have a headline like that.
02:27
Yeah, and some of them have been on home tours. Oh, yeah. Including one of the ones that I thought I was going to show you some images on. But you talked about this project, you said right before the show started, you said, this is like the worst. Oh, it was. Why is it the worst? I mean, how old was the home? Was it like very old? Was it not cared for that long? So it was a.
02:55
It was an estate and the heirs did not continue to make payments and then the taxes continued to accrue. So it sat vacant for quite some time. That’s bad. Homes should never stay vacant. Correct. Yes. I have a…
03:17
I tell people all the times, homes need to be lived in, cars need to be driven, boats need to be driven. I think homes are like pets. You’ve got to water them, take care of them. Literally, you have to water the foundation. I mean, that’s literally, you have to take care of them like pets. Truly. I mean, and it’s an interesting phenomena when you walk into a home that has been abandoned for quite some time. There’s a distinctive smell.
03:43
Right? And then once you open the doors and air it out, people are in there, then that disappears. Right. And so, yes. I mean, there’s a physical element to a home being lived in or being occupied. How bad was bad? Oh, so I’ve done some pretty, really pretty awful homes. I’ve started in some, what’s the word? I mean, just.
04:12
absolute… Like, it just… I mean, was it in an area of beautiful homes and this one was just really rotting? So it was actually within our historic district, Junius Heights. Oh, I love it. Yes. And it was on everyone’s radar because it had been sitting vacant for so long and it was in a serious level of deterioration. And there’s beautiful homes around there that everyone is, you know, restoring and keeping up. That’s a…
04:41
beautiful, a prideful neighborhood, Junius Heights is, yes. It’s down, if you’re not familiar with that, it’s down in kind of southeast. Yeah. East Dallas. Kind of near Lakewood and kind of in between Lakewood and Baylor. Right, we’re looking kind of.
04:57
And what era are the homes from down there? The 20s? No, actually, early 10s. Early 10s? So, better, yes. And so, this particular home, again, was on everybody’s radar because it had fallen into disrepair and it was then on the city Office of Preservation’s radar. So, the person who purchased it probably did not do their due diligence because…
05:25
They didn’t realize they bought in a historic neighborhood. They were wanting to tear it down. Tear it down and build a new. Yes. And a stocko box. Oops. A McBox. A McBox, right. So unfortunately, it took quite a while, and the city did have to take action on this particular home, which is it usually does not get to a point where the city attorney’s office gets involved. Pretty bad. It’s very bad.
05:53
And the receiver in this particular situation hired me to do the restoration. So they brought you in to save the house. Correct. I love it. Yes. And it was hard work. I mean, this one probably, this took the longest that I’ve ever had to do on a restoration of that scale. I mean, I’ve done plenty of ground up, you know, everything from the foundation all the way up to the roof, right?
06:22
So, and that’s usually, that’s kind of my MO, but this one was in very bad shape. There was, you know, squatters had been in there. Of course they come in. They had been to these homes when they’re neglected and they’re empty. Same thing happened to one of my old homes. A squatter lived in there for a few weeks and, you know, the owner told me, and I was so shocked. He lived in the laundry room apparently, which I had added on, so.
06:50
So you’re kind of like both a house whisperer and a house saver. What was, when you first walked into that house, what went through your head? Well, probably a few expletives. But I mean, it was just like, oh, wow, this is really bad because all the windows had been boarded up. Well, at least you get new windows, right? Well, yeah.
07:16
Well, it’s a historic district, and it did actually have most of its original windows behind the plywood that was covering up all the holes. But they were in very bad shape. And so we literally tore off an addition that somebody had scabbed on long ago. The remodeling, I hate that, where they just throw crap up. It’s not even remodeling. It’s like DIY. We can do this in two days.
07:46
It was not yes, I mean it was sitting on the ground there was no foundation So it was very very structurally unsound and it was completely dark. There were holes in the floor I mean it was with wood floors and there were but The roof had been leaking for probably a decade. So, you know most of that was with a termite At one point there was there was but we when we got there I think that
08:14
it had been treated. So we did have to replace some of the wood that was completely eaten through. You’ve got me so excited to see this project now. I think our readers are going to love it too. So what did you see that you thought would just could be saved? Moldings or ceiling height or something that you said, oh my God, we will save this. Yes. Well, I mean, I think every old home really deserves to be
08:41
saved. And I feel like it’s been standing for over 100 years. And I think with a little TLC, it can stand for another 100 years. Absolutely. So for me, people ask that question all the time. It’s like, what did you see in that property or how did you get it to this place? But for me, I always see that property in its highest and best view. Because you have vision.
09:11
You have the vision. What would you tell a couple who’s looking at a home and they’re kind of trying to decide, oh my gosh, should we renovate it? I’ve got one. In fact, I can invite you to the event there tomorrow night with preservation dolls. Should I renovate it or should I just tear it down? Because so many builders will say, oh my God, just tear it down. It’s going to cost more. It’s going to be so much more work. What would you tell them? I mean, it’s my personal opinion.
09:41
built over years of doing this that I think it’s better to rehab a home and add to it because one, it’s going to match or really have, it’ll blend into that street. The neighborhood. When you have a block face that has a few small homes and some very modern large homes, it actually isn’t.
10:06
It’s startling. It’s startling and it’s not great for the home values every time in the neighborhood. I just wonder what these white boxes are going to look like in 10 or 20 years. I mean, I’m going to be running around with my camera and the patron going, oh, we told you so. Yes. Well, yes, white is very hard to keep clean. It looks really crisp at the very beginning. Then give it a year or two and the elements.
10:33
mud when you’re having to hose off the mud off of this side, they stain my mold, they stain my patio. What do they do to that? You know that stucco, I can’t imagine. I do think that the value is retained if you can keep the original facade of the home and really make it look as if it had always been there. Right? Right. And I think that from…
11:00
From my experience, people, I think, see more value per square foot over time on something that they’ve remodeled versus something that was torn down and built new. Exactly. One of my favorite stories of all of all the writing that we’ve done for Candy Store, and I think I’ve written like 5,000 posts now or something, almost like I can’t believe it, is a home, a mid-century modern home in Preston Hollow, where the two families, the only two families that ever lived in that home. And they both…
11:30
The realtor got them together and filmed the family’s meeting and touring the home and talking about, oh, we used to play here. And did you guys know there was a hiding place there? Oh, yeah, but did you know there was a hiding place there? And the home has been maintained and is being remodeled. And I’m so excited to hopefully get to do a story on that someday. But I think that there is, I think Dallas is starting to appreciate its history and its historical homes too. I think so. Don’t you think so?
11:56
I do. I feel like there are certain groups that have been resistant to keeping buildings intact. I think those areas are starting to get some momentum with groups that are interested in preserving. I think I see a turn in that direction. One thing I was going to ask you too is that which type of home…
12:24
Are you seeing more likely to be preserved? Is it the mid-century modern from the 50s or is it the 1920s, 30s, kind of going back to the, what do you call those styles in the 20s and 30s? That would be Tudor. The Tudors in the Prairie Home. Yes. So craftsmen would have been- Craftsmen. Early 19s to late- And why do they call it craftsmen?
12:50
It’s because it was actually a clean style and it was really built from a simplification of materials and so, and it really was a craft that was built in there. So it was a change from… craftsmen actually created it. You are so smart. This woman knows everything. So tell us again what you think the future is going to be in remodeling and doing what you’re doing with SteelTel. SteelTel…
13:18
stiletto, which is a great name by the way. Can you imagine that? And why is it called steel toe stiletto? Let me hear this one. All right. We may have to censor some of this. No, never. When I was working on my first home, which is my personal home, I was working corporate, had never done any kind of remodeling. And I was looking for a cosmetic redo.
13:47
And it was in that hot market of, you know, 2006, ’07, and it was on fire. And I was trying to get something maybe in the M Streets, cosmetic paint a little bit, do a little bit of minimal things. And what I ended up not getting were any of those houses because everybody was fighting, clamoring over them. I mean, they were being like,
14:16
12, 15 offers everybody over asking and still happens. That’s like by summer. Yeah. Exactly. It was really, I mean, I was like, yep, here it is again. It happened. But so I do think that, so getting back to the steel toe stiletto. You had to kick some people in the shins. I did. Yeah, got it. Yes. I saw one of my subs out there.
14:44
He’s throwing up some lumber on the wall and I look at it. I’m like, that certainly does not look level. And I was like, hey, can you come here and take a look? And he’s like, yeah. And I was like, does that look level to you? Does that look derecho? And he was just like, no. And I was just like, do you have a level? He’s like, yeah. I was like, where is it? Can you use it? I was like, he’s like, it’s in the truck. And I was just like.
15:07
Don’t make me stick my stiletto up your butt. Go get that level and take that whole wall down and start over. So when I recant. I love you. So when my friend was asking me how it was going, I told her, I said, well, you know, she said, how’s it going? And I was like, well, man, if I didn’t have to threaten to stick my stiletto up everybody’s butt every other day. And she was like, steel toe stiletto, taking butt. You know.
15:36
Kicking butt and taking names, and I was like, oh, there it is, that’s it. That’s the name. And you can certainly read more about Tam’s work on CandysDirt.com as we’re going forward. I am just dying to write the story, the before and after of your home. It’s great. I so appreciate you coming today. I so appreciate everyone out there for watching and paying attention and being interested in homes and preservation, because I’m obsessed. And stay tuned, because we’re gonna have more Dallas Dirt. That does it for this episode of Dallas Dirt.
16:05
Join us the next time as we dig into DFW’s hottest real estate news with host Candy Evans. Be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or YouTube to receive every new episode. And if you like the episode, give it five stars and tell a friend. Thank you for listening and we look forward to seeing you the next time. This episode was recorded at the Real News Communications Network Studios in Dallas and is copyrighted by Dallas Dirt.
