5 Construction Tips & Upgrades from a Firefighter

[Music] build shows on the road today coming to you from Florence Alabama I'm Matt Reisinger I'm will King and will if you didn't know is a former firefighter he spent a decade in the fire service he also has a paramedic license am I saying that right I used to I actually Let It Go but for 10 years I was also a medic so got it so Will is building this house and right here we've got five tips for you from a firefighter on how to build your next house let's get going all right Matt so tip number ones down here in the basement so let's talk about safe rooms you know this is a big deal to me because I can't tell you the amount of like tornadoes big events we had to go to in the fire service and they people didn't have anywhere safe to go and depending on if they were in the heart of a tornado or even on the outskirts they could be you know a disaster for your family especially where we live I don't know about out in Austin how many tornadoes you guys get but I guess that they happen yeah so they double so it's also security for valuables it's also a Panic Room that you needed it but we're standing underneath the front porch so yeah so we decided a few years ago you know we're always building uh basements here on the lake that's very common and everybody wants a concrete front porch so if you're having poured concrete walls on the foundation like the one in front of me here yep you know it's like how do you build that and so one thing that we had done for a while was start using CMU block and trying to tie those together which is terrible by the way yeah and then you're filling this huge hole in with gravel and then you're pouring a slab and then the slab cracks and then everybody's aggravated so we decided Well heck let's just step the basement walls out make a doorway we'll waterproof the top and then we have you know it's a full Vault I mean not only do you have a basement but now we're inside of a full concrete enclosure so that's what we're standing in here and of course you can tell by the door it's a little intense yeah steel door three dead bolts with a bunch of just manual deadbolts so you can lock it when you get inside that's right you could have put a vault door in here too this could be a you know Gun Room or some other valuables closet if you wanted to but with four deadbolts and a key it's gonna be pretty safe anyway that's right yeah I mean I think like Liberty and some of the gun safe manufacturers make some huge Vault doors that are nice that's a you know 1200 door it's it's not a crazy expense which is pretty cool the other thing I want to mention here too is I've noticed your crawl space on most of the house but you excavated for this space I think a lot of people that have crawl spaces could spend a little bit extra money excavate this kind of mini basement spot like you've done here I've seen our friend Jake do that in Missouri it gives you a space of your Mechanicals to put a safe room in like this yeah so this is really really smart yep you know we'll also do them like garages above grade you know you can do them that way we try to especially after all the tornadoes we've had here it's a very big request and one quick thing about this notice the in-swing door ah in swing door important because in the event of a collapse of the house you could still get your door open and start digging your way out all it takes is one two by four in front of the door if it was Out Swinging you could get out so that's the reason they're always insulin so smart cool all right Matt so tip number two for you is water shut-offs you know I can't tell you how many houses I've been to that don't have a water shut off isn't that frustrating and if you don't have that in the house you're running out to the street to get the meter and this house could be like 200 yards away right if you're like me you're never you're never going to be home when that happens and it's like hey honey can you go 400 feet and grab a wrench and turn my water meter I guess yeah it's never going to happen so installing a water a water shut off for the main inside your house I feel like it's a great tip and sometimes everybody should consider doing and this is just a quarter turn ball valve but what is this in front of it I've never seen that before so we did take it a step further um this house is control for automated home so the way this guy works is that it actually integrates with sensors or pucks so you can put them under your kitchen sink or your laundry room and if it detects a leak it's going to notify your phone for one but if you don't respond or even if you do it gives you the ability to cut the water off and so you hit that button right there and then it sends a signal yep and so then that's going to cut the ball valve off which kills the whole house that's so great yeah and that's uh these don't and the reason that I like this option is because this is an inch and a half pipe which is a little it's big well yeah that's not a small customer yeah but it doesn't restrict water flow and that's my big thing full flow ball valve not putting any appliances in line that are going to restrict water flow because that's a big problem when you're building a house like this super smart so accessible spot before you're shut off so Matt tip number three let's talk about fire safety oh that's a good one from a firefighter yeah it's kind of the obvious choice for me right so everybody thinks about fireplaces so this is a good spot to talk about this yep so obviously you know we got Hearth non-combustible concrete and steel Hearth and then the whole masonry fireplace we got fiber cement overlaid for our Stone and this is a gas fireplace by the way so not as big of a risk yep but what you can't see in this living room and in this whole house is the complete enclosure and safe and sound like from Rockwell so smart yeah I'm a big believer in controlling fire to compartments there's one way to save lives in property it's controlling the fire so I even like talked to my my kids especially and my wife about if there's ever a fire like shut the door right so and the point of that is to isolate fire smart if you leave your door open and you're just feeding an oxygen before the fire department gets there your house is going to be toast yeah um so so not only do we have that conversation station but containing it to a compartment is really how you're going to save a life so in between floors like there's living space above us right here you know we have safe and sound over the top and the walls there's a bedroom beside us with the idea being that you could help isolate it to give the occupants longer to get out and give the fire department more time to respond so and one common I'd make on that is you know you and I use a lot of engineered floor joists I joists or engineered trusses let's say and a comment I've gotten for years from the firefighter community on my videos is those aren't as safe as solid saw and lumber right because because if a fire happened on a floor Truss It Could fail quicker for a firefighter upstairs so having that safe and sound in between those packed in there means that that fire is going to have a harder time reaching those metal connectors uh the let's say the OSB webbing on an ijoice all that kind of thing and it also is a great acoustical block too which is a good help in a house like this to help try to isolate some sound to give it a little more at my house in this situation where I did the same thing above me yeah I have a hard time yelling at my kids to come to dinner upstairs so it's a double-edged sword you got to be careful I don't hear them but they also don't necessarily hear me when I tell them it's time for dinner I actually text my family sometimes in my own house hey come down for dinner kids that's how you know you have a well-built house that's right all right let's move on to tip number four all right Matt so let's talk about man-made disasters we talked about things happening from the outside and I guess unexpected disasters but let's talk about something that happens on the inside of your house right so like Steve basic says water's number one killer buildings that's for sure so I've seen that from even in the fire department like when the house catches on fire it's typically not the fire that causes the most damage it's all the water we caught in and spraying your house and flooded out so so let's talk about today in a mechanical room so if you're like me you've had your fair share of uh air handlers leaking condensation oh yeah that's right and it can make a huge mess something like getting a phone call from a client on Thanksgiving and hey I got water coming through my ceiling so check out what you've done here walk me through this yeah so you know we've done a lot of recessed um showers so I say recess really Zero Entry so we recess our floor trusses we build the base up and then it you know it's a curbless Zero Entry so the same thought process here on a mechanical Rim that's not in a basement or on a slab is we recessed it we put down schluter's Kerdi System brought it up the wall about four inches as if it's going to be a hall basically prepping for a shower is all what we're doing and then that's just um Schluter has a new drain out now that's flush it's made just for a floor drains that's what that is specifically and then the the black mat you're seeing is just the stall mat from Tractor Supply so yeah you could have tiled it if you wanted to but why do that because all you're doing is just protecting the Kirby which is your waterproof membrane which is only going to see water in a catastrophe event yeah so if you're in here doing service work and drop a pair air pliers you don't want to you know puncture a hole in that in that Kerdi but yeah I mean with an air handler in here and a water heater yeah you got Urban Eye right above it too so if anything ever happened to the pipes coming in the Rinnai the condensate you've got of course a compensate pan and an alarm but this is belt and suspenders it is being a second home for a client I don't want it to be you know something starts leaking and you're not here for two weeks you come home and it's a complete mess and that's happened before Oh man yeah yeah and even servicing the water heater I mean you're going to have a little bit of water dripping and potentially if you're not paying attention you could have a little bit of a amount of water yeah if you did your annual flush and you spilled the bucket so it still can cause it done we have that um you know just a recessed area for a mechanical room it's an easy tip it's not very expensive and it and it gives a lot of protection for the clients so I absolutely love this this is my favorite of all the tips and I would tell you this is the thing that makes me really appreciate you being a smart Builder because not only is the house beautiful we all have seen beautiful houses but this shows me this house is incredibly well built oh will check it out you put those Thermo tracks in on this garage door this little track has an s in it which pushes the garage door closed so now the air conditioning in your garage is going to leak out because this is pushing the door against the weather stripping but what does this have to do with disasters yeah so you know we're part of the Fortified program that's something that we've kind of made the standard of how we're doing construction now so you know we talk about fortified as a whole the program there's kind of there's three different levels so there's fortified Roof then there's silver then there's a gold level okay but the goal is going to be more like Coastal structural engineer everything has to be strapped you can do it Inland but but the roof and the silver is what we're doing so the roof to start with is the sealed roof deck is the big part and there's things like better fasteners like ring shank nails and then a sealed roof deck which we accomplished that by Zip system that's the easy way to do it meaning if your shingles blow off the Zip system tape on all the sheathing means that you're not gonna have a ton of water running into the house especially studies that they've done it shows like in the event of a roof failure like that and a high wind it can keep like 95 percent of water out of your house compared to unsealed roof deck that's crazy dumps hundreds of gallons so if the if the wind doesn't hurt you the water is going to flood your house out so so that's a big deal we actually hung sheetrock in this house before we put our metal roof on so with just that sealed roof deck in place awesome so that that part works but then when you take it to a step farther the um the Fortified silver it you know Inland we have a lower wind speed here but we're looking at windows and doors and specifically garage doors so they have to have the wind rating so you had to just get with your um you know like basically your fortified inspector get the win rating talk to your garage door company most doors have the ability to meet the wind speed and the pressure rating and then also the tracks and the way they're attached it has to be torqued right the number of Fasteners hold that door in place so and that's uh you know it just makes for a you know I guess a better protected house overall could you think about it Matt if you lose a garage door and doesn't have a window and and you know if you've seen any tornado damage or highly hurricane stuff once this big opening fails man your house just gets pressurized from the inside out and it's just like pops it I mean I've seen it where walls will be bowed out eight inches and the window is pushed out because the of a failure like this and you get pressure in the house so that's a big part of the program is to have this the win rate of pressure rated doors that's cool man what we did here very smart all right Matt so one more bonus thing that I wanted to bring in we didn't really get to it inside the house but I want to tell you about access and talking through that as an old paramedic so you know one thing that we had to do as a paramedic A Lot was to go in and get people out of their house in a medical emergency not just fires and collapses and all the Glorious stuff but you know there's difficulty breathing calls at 3am that we ran all the time and I can't tell you the patience that we've had to get out of houses that were you know let's just say two three four five hundred pounds and you can't get in you can't get a stretcher down their hallway or into their doorway or even into the house without going up say eight steps yeah so in my mind as a builder when I'm looking at all our plans especially doing the design build I'm always looking at how to better access or better have access in the event an emergency because you know they might be young and healthy now but at some point that's going to change that's right and we we try to make sure we have good access and you can see on this house we even have a nice ramp and a very small step coming to the house so that's going to make things like that easier in the event that it happens now you're always going to have a 3-0 front door by code right but you're saying also let's be thinking about not just two eight or two sex doors but 300 if you're into the master bedroom into the master bath all those main spaces yeah at least have a path of 3-0 doors to go from the front door or their garage all the way to the master bathroom because you know if somebody gets on a walker or somebody's in a wheelchair they want to make sure they can get to their bathroom not just in their house they gotta be able to go to the bathroom too so great step my friend guys gorgeous house amazing Builder if you're not familiar with high cotton homes they're building right here in Florence and within some of these surrounding communities and this is just one example of The Gorgeous work these guys do but if you're not familiar will is shooting videos over on buildshownetwork.com almost everything we talked about today on these five tips he shot something on these things as well from this house under construction during the construction phase he's just wrapping this one up so you should be looking for a link in the description to sign up for our newsletter because every week my team is going to send you a newsletter that says hey here's what's new from Will on buildshodenetwork.com as well as our other 12 contributors and by the way he's also posting videos all the time from his high cotton feed on Instagram and will King builds which is his personal Builder feed on Instagram so go follow him on those guys if you're not currently a subscriber hit that subscribe button below we've got new content here every Tuesday and every Friday follow us on Tick Tock or Instagram otherwise I'll see you next time on build show foreign [Music]

Channel: Matt Risinger

Views: 44,378

Keywords: Matt Risinger, Build Show Network, The Build Show, Build

Id: fD34rYGgmoE

Length: 15min 21sec (921 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 02 2023