Hey everyone, it's Andy Pease In Balance Green
Consulting. We're here at the Los Robles house out in beautiful San Luis Obispo and
we're here today to talk to Mike Horgan, our builder, about a mock-up and the wall
assembly so let's turn it over to Mike. So Mike, tell us first why you do a mock-up and
then I'm hoping you can just kind of quickly walk us through the pieces of the wall assembly.
Yeah so why do we do a mock-up? Well we have a a few different crews working on this project
and I feel like carpenters and builders are very kinetic learners so as opposed to putting things
on paper- architects love to put things on paper-a lot gets lost in transition. If there's ever
a question about anything we can just point right to it. Most everybody will be able to
will be able to walk right over to it and say oh that's how it's supposed to look okay.
Okay so Mike can you go ahead and just like walk us through the layers of what this
wall assembly is going to be made up of. Yep. Sure. So it's a fairly
conventional wall assembly. A few things look a little bit different
but we've got two by six doug fur framing. That will eventually get filled with a blown-in
cellulose on the inside cavity. After that we have our, we went with CDX wood sheathing versus
OSB. OSB is actually a little bit more expensive than CDX right now which is very unusual.
Outside of the CDX we went with a self-adhered WRB. That's our weather resistant barrier.
There are many different WRBs in the market. We went with this one for a few different reasons:
We'll have a whole series on that afterwards. It's a peel and stick self-adhesive Hannah and I
wrapped this whole house in probably a total of six or eight hours with a bunch of goofing around
in between. So we have our WRB. Outside the WRB we have our wood fiber insulation. So we're trying
to be really conscious of our carbon footprint, our bodies, as well as our operating, so instead
of foam we're going to use a wood fiber here. We have the flashing system that I've outlined.
We have furring strips on the outside of our wood fiber insulation to give us a continuous
half-inch air gap. That gap will run from the sill all the way through the roof actually and exit out
the high point of the roofs and then on top of our furring strips we are going with a redwood siding.
This is going to be T&G. This is just a straight 1x6 right now. So that is our wall mock-up. And
then can you just point to the taping up at the underside there. So you're trying to-you're
getting a continuous air seal for this thing. Yeah so a big reason for doing mock-ups like this
is to show the crews the transition points. So sill plate to the wall, walls to windows, windows
to roofs. So this one is particularly valuable to us so that the framers can see how we've built in
a continuous air gap that's going to go behind our blocking. It'll come -they'll have a sill vent
in our eaves and then our air will flow behind our blocking and up through which you can feel
and they can see a two by four air gap that we're going to build on top of the roof membrane.
Awesome. Thank you.
