Welcome 2023! It’s a new year, a new podcast. The two-legged ladder, Reuben and Tessa, host the show.
Tessa shares her journey with Structure Talk and leaves the company after 7 years. She shares about her new adventure.
Reuben talks about how the new show will go. He highlights that there will be shorter episodes and shares exciting topics in the coming weeks.
Check out our recent blog at structuretech.com and show notes at https://structuretech.com/podcast-structure-talk/.
Whatever platform you’re listening from, rate us and give us a review! Send your feedback, suggestions, and questions to podcast@structuretech.com.
TRANSCRIPTION
The following is a transcription from an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it may be slightly incomplete or contain minor inaccuracies due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.
Reuben Saltzman: Welcome to my house. Welcome to the Structure Talk Podcast, a production of Structure Tech Home Inspections. My name is Reuben Saltzman. I’m your host alongside building science geek, Tessa Murray. We help home inspectors up their game through education and we help homeowners to be better stewards of their houses. We’ve been keeping it real since 2019 and we’re also the number one home inspection podcast in the world, according to my mom.
Tessa Murray: Thank you, Patty Saltzman.
RS: Thank you, mom. Yes. Appreciate it. Appreciate your vote of confidence.
TM: Ruben, I love that new intro. Welcome to 2023.
RS: Welcome to 2023. It’s a new year. It’s a new podcast, new arrangement with who’s hosting this. We don’t have Bill on the show anymore.
TM: People have asked us what’s gonna happen to the three-legged stool when you lose a leg and what are we telling them?
RS: Well, it’s now a home inspection tool. It’s the two-legged ladder.
TM: The two-legged ladder.
RS: Super easy.
TM: There’s a lot of changes and we’ll talk about that coming up on what we’re thinking for the Structure Talk Podcast in 2023 ’cause there are definitely changes, but there’s also some changes in my world too, my personal life. Should I talk about that right now?
RS: Let’s get into it. Yeah.
TM: Okay. Well, for those of you that don’t know, we’re actually recording this show at the end of 2022. It’s actually December 22nd today. When this airs, it’ll be 2023 and I will no longer be an employee of Structure Tech, which is very sad. Obviously, that was not an easy decision for me to make and Reuben knows it. Structure Tech has become a family to me and I have learned and grown so much over the last… What is it? Has it been seven years? I think it’s been seven years.
RS: That’s sounds about right. I think it’s seven years. Yeah.
TM: I am so grateful for all the opportunities that Structure Tech has given me and Reuben, the faith and the trust you had in me to let me evolve within this company too. And Structure Tech will always be a part of my heart. But the last few years, a lot has changed in my life and I am in this place right now where I am ready for something new, something different, a new adventure and I’m not exactly sure what that looks like yet, but I’m ready for something different. You’ve been super supportive to me too, Reuben, and I’m gonna continue doing this podcast with you and I’m super excited about that, but I will no longer be working at Structure Tech.
RS: Well, you have committed a ton of your time, your energy, your mental resources. You’ve brought so much to our team over such a long period of time and we are a far better company because of you. We all appreciate all you’ve brought to the table. It’s been great. And I kinda knew from the minute I hired you that it would be. I thought you’d be bringing a lot to this table and I always told my wife, she’ll joke about this, from the first time you agreed to take this position, I told her, she’s awesome, but I don’t think she’s gonna be here forever. She’s got big wings. She’s got places to go. I’m gonna enjoy working with her as long as this lasts and it’s been a great seven years, but I still get to see you every week on this podcast here and I’m thankful for that.
TM: Me too. Right back at you, Reuben. Thank you so much. And it has been magical working with you and all the projects we’ve done, all the things we’ve created. It’s been wonderful. Thank you so much for that.
RS: Absolutely. What’s going on next, Tess? Do you know?
TM: I don’t know. I’ll keep you guys posted as things unfold. Yeah, it’s going to be a big adventure. I’m looking forward to taking some time for myself, hopefully doing some traveling and exploring maybe some different things. I still am passionate about houses and helping people so we’ll see what happens.
RS: What about short term? What you got going on for the holidays? For Christmas, New Year’s, you traveling anywhere? What’s going on?
TM: Well, this year, I decided to just stay home and I’m gonna be celebrating it with my immediate family, which is really nice. Also in the Midwest, well where we are, there’s this big storm that’s coming too, major blizzard. I’m glad I don’t have any travel plans because if I did, it would be a nightmare trying to navigate that right now.
RS: Oh yeah. No doubt.
TM: It’s gonna be low-key. It’s gonna be nice. Pretty simple. How about you? What are you planning on doing?
RS: Okay. Good. Just hanging out with the family. Kids are off school. They got off school yesterday. It really felt like a Friday night and all of a sudden I realized, wait, I still got work tomorrow. If you hear screaming in the background, that’s my kids. They’re off school for the next week and a half or whatever. And it’s fun. This is definitely my favorite time of year. It’s the most wonderful time of the year.
TM: Well, yes. It is for some people. I understand it can be a really difficult time for other people too, but I know that the Saltzmans, usually you guys all get together, don’t you? Do you go up to the cabin?
RS: There is always a get together. Sometimes we’ll go to the cabin. This year, no, there’s no plans to do that. But after the new year, hopefully we’re gonna have a little bit of a trip to the cabin, inviting some people from Structure Tech to go up there, go spend a day doing some snowmobiling and board games and things like that. Should be fun. As long as the snow holds out and I don’t see this snow melting this time.
TM: I was gonna say snow is not a problem this year. We have a bunch of it.
RS: No, no. We got plenty of it. Just as long as we got some temps that are reasonable. Once it’s about negative 10, negative 15, it starts to get really uncomfortable snowmobiling. You get cold really fast in those temps.
TM: Like you can get… What can you… You can get frostbite in, what is it, 10 minutes of exposed skin with the temps being like they are right now.
RS: That’s what I just read too.
TM: It’s actually dangerous. It’s pretty dangerous. Well, that sounds like a good way to spend the holidays.
RS: I think so. I think so. Fun hanging out with family, co-workers, all that stuff. But we’re sticking around town, not going anywhere.
TM: Should we talk about the podcast and what we envision for the podcast now that we’re a ladder instead of a three-legged stool for 2023?
RS: Yeah. Well, during our last, I think it was our last episode, we had talked about how we’re gonna be changing this podcast significantly and probably going to maybe one podcast a month. But after you and I did a lot of chatting about this, we decided we’re not gonna do that. We are gonna stick with, we’re gonna try to stick with one a week. No promises. Before it was pretty much like clockwork. We had a new podcast every Monday, but we’re gonna try to keep up with that, but they’re not gonna be the long format shows. Usually our shows were somewhere in the neighborhood of about 45 minutes a piece on average. And I think it’s gonna be closer to about 15 minutes a piece, like today’s. This is surely gonna be a much shorter episode and we’re gonna have a lot more episodes that are a lot shorter. Occasionally we might have an hour long show. We might have a good guest on, but we’re not gonna be trying so hard to get guests to just fill up an hour of talking.
RS: It’s… We’ll discuss a little bit more recent blog posts with just about every blog post I do. I do a video to go along with it. I try to keep those videos nice and tight somewhere around five to seven minutes, just a summary for people who don’t like to read. But they are kind of tight and there’s a lot of little nuances, little things that I wanna talk about in the video, but I don’t want to go down rabbit holes, but podcasts are the perfect platform to do that. So I’m thinking we could spend a lot more time talking about home inspection topics and getting into some of those nitty-gritty details. I mean, just yesterday morning we did an internal CE class for Structure Tech home inspectors on electrical and I feel like we could have gone down so many rabbit holes. I mean, we could have done nothing but that. We could have spent five minutes on content and 55 minutes on different inspection techniques. So I think this will give us a chance to kind of discuss a little bit more of those, some more of those details.
TM: Yeah. Yeah. I think that’ll be fun. For anybody that listens to this podcast, a lot of times you write a blog about whatever topic we’re gonna discuss and we’re going to try and try and keep that kind of similar format, but shorten it up a little bit and still have fun with it. So…
RS: Yeah, exactly. Although next week’s guest, hopefully, as long as it turns out, everybody will get to hear it. If it doesn’t, it won’t air. Not all of our…
TM: Sometimes that happens.
RS: Yeah. Not all of our guests make it onto the air so we won’t say who it is, but as long as it turns out, we’ll be talking about technology, internet of things, home security, home tech topics, making your house a little bit more advanced. I think it sounds fascinating. So hopefully that’s a good show next week.
TM: Something I don’t know anything about.
RS: Yeah. I’m an amateur. I dabble in that stuff and I think I know more than the average person, but when it comes to somebody who actually knows what they’re doing, I know nothing.
TM: Yeah. Yeah. Well, that’s good.
RS: All right. Well, Tess, this is a great intro to 2023. I do want to say, check out the blog. Last week’s blog post is always my favorite blog post of the year. It’s where we take all of our favorite photos that we posted on Facebook and Instagram, all the ones that you like the most and we put them into a compilation. It’s our top 20 Home Inspection photos for 2022. Always my favorite one. Always everybody’s favorite. So check it out. If you haven’t seen it already, we will put a link to that in the show notes. And just for anybody who’s not aware of the show notes, you can get them on our website. If you go to structuretalk.com. We have a special URL that takes you to the podcast. Go to structuretalk.com and you can see all of our show notes. If there’s links for the show, any of that, that’s where you get them. And we will put a link to that blog post, the top 20 Home Inspection photos. We’ll put a link to that in the show notes as well.
TM: That’s good. And if people have questions, we welcome them and we really, we appreciate your questions and your comments. How do they get ahold of us Reuben, if they want to reach us?
RS: You can email us podcast@structuretech.com.
TM: Great. Also, are we putting out a video of this podcast too, if people prefer to watch it?
RS: I think we are. We’re gonna try it on this one. This is a nice short one, so we’ll give it a shot.
TM: Okay. We’ll see how it goes. Yeah. Let us know if you appreciate watching these podcasts instead of listening to them. And then one last thing too, to all of you listeners out there, we really appreciate you taking the time to listen to this podcast. We do this for you because we love talking about houses and inspections and all this geeky stuff, but we only do it because there’s someone listening and someone interested. So let us know that you like this podcast. We would really appreciate your feedback and your reviews, whether it’s on iTunes or Spotify or Google or whatever platform you use. Please rate us and give us a review. We really appreciate that. It’ll help other people find this podcast.
RS: Yes. Yes. Thank you, Tess. Well, happy new year and thank you everyone. You’ve been listening to Structure Talk, a production of Structure Tech Home Inspections. I’m Reuben Saltzman for Tessa Murray saying Godspeed.
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