CRAPPY ATTICS are Standard in America! Here’s how to BUILD - DECENT or AWESOME

on the build share of today addicts crappy decent and awesome you know it's honestly not that big a deal to go from crappy to decent I'm going to show you how and it's this this is a little bit building science training a little bit rant so buckle up for that and then as we get a little towards the end I'm going to show you how to go from a decent attic to a pretty awesome attic and again it's not that heavy of a lift if you have the knowledge it is more money but it's a much much better awesome today's builds your all about addicts let's get going okay y'all got a little uh presentation of my iPad which is mainly photos let's go into a typical attic you know you go through that attic door whether it's a pull down stair or a door and what do you find up there in these attics we find this this happens to be uh I don't know 60s or 70s house uh you've got the insulation right on top of the wall board the Sheep Rock whatever your ceiling is and then fast forward to another decade or two maybe we've got a Radiant Barrier like you're seeing here on the roof but it's basically all the same thing now when I started building houses in 1995 this is actually a house that I was building back then I I digitized this photo that's why it's so tiny here uh but you know this is how I was building gosh almost 30 years ago now 1995 believe it I was 30 years ago I'm getting old this house same technology same attic same air barrier which is the ceiling drywall and then blown in being built uh 10 miles from my studio here in Austin Texas it's crazy to me how we've hardly changed the way we build attics in literally decades now check this out this is a production Builder house and the way that you know this is a ventaid attic is see these right here these are Air Hawks is typically what they're referred to as and there's some type of soffit vent that you really can't see here that's allowing airflow in here and then it's exhausting out of that Air Hawk so this is a ventilated attic meaning it's just like you saw in those photos prior where you've got the fluffy stuff up there and then there's some ventilation in that attic space now there are a couple things going for ventilated addicts and that's why they're honestly still really common today the biggest thing going of course for them though this is the least cost way to build a house it's also frankly a pretty durable way though I mean if you think about that house with the Air Hawks here if water were to leak in that Air Hawk or we had a you know storm and a roof leak happened as long as it's a small amount of water that gets in actually that that attic can probably dry and not have any problems the crazy part to me though is that we would buy a brand new awesome car and yet what if I had the same exact technology in that car was built the way it was 50 years ago this is the part that that really gets me to go all right just because it still works does that mean it's the best way and should we be building that way uh here's actually my old house this is a 1970s house that I remodeled and here's what it looked like uh for many years where I lived in that house uh now you're going to notice in this attic this is a southern house and in fact most of my photos here are going to be Texas this video is actually a little more um interesting to Southern U.S Builders because what you're seeing here is there's attic duct work there's there's AC and heat ducts up in that attic space now below that attic space in a multitude of houses that you and I are seeing what do we have we've got all kinds of things we've got can lights just pockmarked everywhere in houses maybe smoke detectors and of course we've got AC registers as well and that may be coming from that duct which is in that attic space so what do we do to kind of make that a air barrier downstairs inside the house we cocked those Ducks you know we're using some Big Stretch in this photo this is actually at my house we're caulking those so that there isn't any communication between that vented hot attic space and the space below but why do we even have ducks to begin with up there it's because of this right here most Texas houses are slab on grade meaning we don't have basements like you Northerners do to put your AC equipment and because we're slab on grade all of our equipment instead of being down in the basement is up in the attic that's really the only space we typically have to run these or at least that's the easy space that we have so that's where we've run our ductwork and most Texas addicts Southern addicts they look like this just duct work everywhere spidering all through this space let's take a look at a line drawing of a house and let's think about what what is it about this space and does this kind of building science make sense for us so here we go typical house this is your air barrier right here for the house this is where you live and we're doing everything we can to kind of seal up this condition space the house on the other hand this space up here in the Attic this is unconditioned space and Texas addicts believe it or not do often get to that those crazy numbers up there 130 degrees is a pretty average summertime attic temperature it's also typically pretty dang humid up in attics especially if it's humid outside what else do we have going on we've got the sun's radiation heating that space and making that hotter and then this is the part that drives me crazy is now we've got our AC right here this is our air conditioner making cold air and then sending that cold air through our duct system which happens to be running through that crazy hot space and then pulling a return out of that space bringing that air back up in and we've got this kind of of flow going and all our air is pumping through that crazy hot oven of an attic and what else happens when that air pumps through there we have some loss these little sweet lines are meant to to kind of represent duct loss even a really good modern install with a good crew is going to see an average of five percent duct loss older houses have 20 or 30 percent duct loss and I suspect production Builder type houses are between five and ten percent duct loss which means that air that I've paid money to cool is being lost to my attic what else does that mean that means that my house is under a negative pressure meaning when I lose air up here to this attic space from leakage Air's got to come back into the house from somewhere where does it come in it may come in and underneath my bottom plate of my framing it may leak in through my windows it also May leak in around my ductwork you shot you saw that photo earlier of trying to caulk and seal that space but a lot of houses don't have that sealed so it's coming in there I've seen a bunch of houses that have whole house attic fans those are crazy leaky this house is under negative pressure because the HVAC system is in an unconditioned space outside of the envelope what can we do about that of course I said earlier we can seal those ducts but there's all kinds of problems we find with ducks that are outside of the conditioned space Here's just one example we pulled that register off and look at all the mold growth around there because that register is getting uh moisture condensation on it because it's a hot space the other thing we find up in typical attics is this this is me taking a picture on my phone one day looking down on my boots like oh boy what are those we all know what we're looking at right here some Victor rat traps and that ductwork is going through this crazy hot space with maybe rats running around here let's fast forward to this um I bought a house across the street from my current house this is now three years ago and built a new house over there but when I was figuring out what this what shape this 70s house was in I popped up into the attic with my home Performance Contractor this is Sean Harris with positive energy let's cut to that footage all right Sean how's it how's it look there buddy uh it's looking hot at the moment man I'm looking around it uh some gray mylar flecks up here there's a cut on that cheese box what's up with that yeah I some obviously some previous person came in to inspect and they didn't seal it back this is terrible duck leakage basically you've got cold air coming out of these unsealed seams and that's going to cause all sorts of issues not to mention humidity so it's so humid up here right now 80 90 degree dew points and all that moisture is going to go straight in here and then you can get moldy Ducks okay so ridiculously hot but Sean in that uh corner of the uh of the cheese box found this to come check this out man that sounds bad not great what do you got so it looks like some uh some rat droppings and maybe some some liquid in there oh man the rats are running the Ducks aren't they they are oh look at that duck board it's stained in there yeah that's disgusting oh dude I've got ducks in the I've got rats in these ducks don't I yeah it looks that way man I can't Salvage these I gotta rip these out and here's a photo of that this house 70s house very typical for Texas uh at one point had major rats all over and that was my experience across the street as well I got roof rats in and it was really hard for me to get them out I did all kinds of solutions to get them out here's another example from my old house as well it's not just small furry animals it's big furry animals I had a family of lemurs get in my attic uh and they nested above my master bath and I made a video about replacing my roof and putting an attic baffles that I didn't have on the 70s house but check this out those lemurs got in and chewed up the ductwork around the AC boot coming into my master bathroom and I could hear him when I'd get up in the middle of the night if I went to the bathroom they were scratching and chewing they were smart enough to tear up that duct and it's a little hard to tell here but there was a big hole in that duct right here and they had AC blowing right into their wonderful little Nest space for their new babies for their new baby lemurs and that tight that attic was so tight that I had to get a hole cut out of the attic luckily I was re-roofing to get Jeff my AC guy in there to redo the Ducks and fix that and then put those baffles in as you can see Jeff's above the top of the trusses that's where the plywood would go so that was not easy why are we doing it that way let's take a step back and let's look at the science behind how houses are built there's really three things that houses uh do for us they provide structure right and most structure in American houses is wood framed there's some amount of control that house does and the control layer is outside of the structure and we've thought when we thought about control layers in the past we're thinking about house wraps in particular water control and then on top of that is some type of cladding which serves the protection function really the cladding's main purpose is just to keep water off the structure and typically UV rays off those control layers but what do our houses need to control Beyond just rain our houses really need to control air as well because remember anytime air leaks into a house it's going to have bad things leaking in with it it's going to have potentially pollen and mold spores and whatever else is in the outdoor air and it's also going to bring a lot of humidity into our houses I should have put this slide in but this morning I was super hot when I got up from my workout this morning and I took a little photo screenshot of the outdoor air and check this out Austin Texas this morning it was 74 degrees but it was 92 percent humidity the dew point this morning was 72 degrees so any surface that was 72 degrees would have Dew forming on it now think about if my house was built a little bit leaky and I had air leaking in under my bottom plates if I had air leaking around my windows around my electrical outlets it's very likely that the drywall in my house would be 72 degrees that's where I keep my thermostat actually keep it below that often 71 or 70 which means that that hot humid air hitting that dew point would form condensation and that's how we get a lot of mold growth on the back of our drywall in our houses is by that air leaking in so it's not just rain that needs to be controlled on the outside it's air this is the part that's a little bit of an epiphany to me I was visiting with Steve basic this week and Steve said something that I knew already but but the way he said it just really changed my thinking you know on typical houses like this one that I showed earlier the air barrier is right here at the ceiling line and then everything in the Attic we're trying to seal out what if our air barrier though was here and then transferred up to our roof line we should be stopping the air and the water at that outside furthest envelope of the house and if we did that we'd be so much better off than using for instance the drywall as our air bear on the inside of our houses now let's move from crappy to decent we've been doing crappie far too long to get to a decent attic it's really not that hard we just need to change one thing instead of that insulation going right here at that ceiling line and being in this plane right there we just need to instead put that insulation actually let me switch to red here right here at our roof line and there's one really easy way to do that and I'm gonna show you that in a second but here's what it does for us it means that our air conditioning equipment now is within the air-conditioned space and this attic may be slightly hotter because of the stack effect because heat tends to rise but in general over the years that I've been doing condition addicts now for 15 years I don't find my addicts hotter than maybe three or four degrees up here compared to the rest of the house which also means if these ducts are leaking some air here why do we care because it's being leaked into the conditioned space and I'm not putting my house in a position where the house goes negative right this is all in the same pressure boundary on the house that is really cool easiest way to do that is with uh open cell spray foam if you're in the South now if you're in the north you want to think about using closer but in the South this is how it gets done all day long expensive Builders not very expensive Builders even production Builders these days are moving to this I've been doing this for 15 years and I would consider this a decent attic the HVAC equipment is in that space we don't see as much Critter activity as a unconditioned attic space although we have to be a little cautious we also really want to do a blower door test to make sure that we've gotten it open cell foam is pretty darn affordable in most places but it's not perfect and here's an example of that here's a house I built five six years ago when I was still using traditional house wraps and traditional house wraps work great I built lots and lots of houses with it and I have had no problems with them it really manages water well but let's look at this area right here this is a front porch area where these Rafters on this porch roof are penetrating the envelope let's zoom in a little bit oh before I do that I do want to mention in that carport space you can start to see we've got other areas that that house wrap doesn't need water protection but how am I going to get that airflow stopped through these spaces okay now back to the porch here's the porch check this out my frame Carpenter did an awesome job of cutting that house wrap too thinning in I'm not sure that he necessarily needed to do that considering we had a nice big overhang here and a giant overhang here we're well protected from water but what is that house wrap not do for me it doesn't protect me from Air so now if I'm using closed cell foam on the inside that closed cell foam is going to seal up these areas right well prior to this house I've done another house where I didn't do any kind of prep or pre-work I let the open cell foam contractor come in and spray foam the whole house and you know what I found I found that it worked but it didn't work as awesome as I was expecting that the air tightness level just wasn't there I want to say that house blue something around uh 2.5 or 2.7 ACH 50 which meets code even in the north and certainly meets code in the South but wasn't all that great so open cell foam and even closed cell foam we have to be cautious because it is a little bit of mixing chemistry on site and small imperfections in the application meaning that sometimes it'll shrink back from the uh from the studs that it's sticking to the other thing is open cell foam I wish I had an example of it here if if I were to push my hand into open cell phone it would go right in and I could pull a chunk out no problem so think about if you are a mouse or a rat or or even a a cockroach and you get a space right here that's filled with open cell foam which is not even as durable as a kitchen sponge it's a really easy material you could tunnel through it you could burrow through it you could chew through it pretty darn easily and that blower door score of 2.7 that I had on a house similar to this one with full envelope open cell foam got me thinking I need to pay attention to these details and think about not just relying on the spray foam to seal but I need to do some other pre-work and the best time to visit the house is when it's bright sunlight outside because you can see these cracks on the inside from a mile away when it's bright sunlight don't visit at the end of the day or beginning the morning you want to come when it's real bright Sun preferably angling towards those cracks as much as possible here's what I've gone to for the houses that I do with open cell phone I've gone to a pre-foam routine what you're seeing here this black stuff this is canned uh foam you know the kind that you're going to buy at the Home Center or at uh you know they sell it at the counter at Builders First Source where I shop uh that foam anytime you find foam in a can is closed cell foam much more durable you can't put your finger into it as easily you can still damage it don't get me wrong but it's much more durable and I I try to get a different color than the spray foam as well so this happens to be black you can't always do that but what you're seeing here is we've gone through and pre-foam now this this piece up here is actually unnecessary I don't know if I did this or someone else did but that wasn't necessary here I wouldn't say but these areas picture framing inside that entire Bay right here with with foam getting that whole area all pre-phoned that's really important because now I I've got in that gap which in this case was something like a half inch or so now I've got some closed cell foam so that when the foam contractor comes with the open cell foam we're going to have a much much better air seal and this has become routine for us where we pre-foam whenever we're going to be using open cell foam whether it's stud Bays whether it's rafter Bays or whatever and this leads ultimately to a pretty darn decent attic without that much expense just a little bit more thought I mean ultimately the framing on this house is no different than the standard framed house that anybody's building it is a little bit more money in this case to use for instance open cell foam and to do that pre-filming routine but you're yielding much much better benefits this this is a really decent attic a little better uh bordering on awesome uh is closed cell phone closed cell foam by its very nature of being closed cell rigid much higher r value per inch I consider this a tool in my toolbox that helps me wherever wherever I've got problem areas for instance you know this attic right here with these random knee walls on the left that would have been really hard to insulate with let's say standard bat insulation these wide 24 inch on Center truss Bays these would have been hard to do with you know rock wool or some other insulation so I'm trying to upgrade wherever possible in my condition addicts from open cell to closed cell that's really my new standard it makes for a really really decent uh bordering on awesome you want to talk awesome though let's go to the next level up and again this isn't that much more expensive it is more but there's definitely more thought involved that's where we're really taking seriously this air Bearer on the outside of the building and there's lots of ways to do it we could use a full peel and stick like I did in this house this act actually happens to be a sips construction house that I did a couple years ago and we used peel and stick from dorkin this is their Delta vent sa standing for self-adhering uh if you like oh by the way that was uh OSB sheathing which which works great if you like plywood uh which I do often on my modern builds uh I'll sheath the house in plywood and again I'll use a peel and stick but especially on Modern builds where I have no overhangs I really like to kick it up a notch and go to the most bomber uh water and air Bearer that I've found now remember this is a southern U.S thing this is climate zones one two and three this is Aluma flash uh by polyguard I want to say they called Olympus Plus or something like that now these are some old photos of it but this is a uh very thick I want to say 40 mil thick peel and stick that has an aluminum facer on the outside you can see here it'll stick even to soffit areas right here you're seeing that stick underneath upside down because we use a primer it's also sticking to metal like on these metal columns it's a it's really an incredible bra product and they've got a fluid applied oops I scrolled past it they've got a fluid applied that goes with it I should switch to Blue here since we're talking about blue barrier and you can see where that peel and stick came up to those Rafters unlike that house wrap that I couldn't seal to the rafters fluid applies won't stick to standard house wrap this blue barrier sticks perfectly to the aluminum on the aluminum facer of The saluma Flash it's also sticking perfectly to the wood so we've gone around and picture framed and stitched the seams on the whole outside and now before I do anything on the inside this is a really really tight house this is a great way to go uh and there's the there's the same house on the back side let's talk about my house though when we think about awesome when we go to that how could we get this even better here's how to do it and I've made several videos on my house under construction check out my videos called Monopoly framing I'm going to spend a minute or two on that but my house looks like a pretty you know traditional house I've got Hardy plank I've got brick I've got a Sheffield metal roof with uh two foot overhangs but I built my house a little bit differently and this this is the part where thought needs to come in ahead of time this isn't just hire a different installation crew and instead of doing blown and do spray in this is really thought I was trying to avoid uh spray foam in my house as much as possible I also wanted the tightest seal possible I didn't want lemurs in my attic I didn't want rats I did not want cockroaches like I had in my old house and I didn't want my pest control guy up in my attic every 60 days spraying or dusting or doing whatever that happens all over Texas so I said look I'm going to really pay attention to the water and air seal at my house and as a result by the way I've had an amazing bug seal I haven't seen a single bug inside my house in 18 months don't sell your clients on that because they can still get in somehow but what I did was I went to the nth degree to make sure that I didn't have that problem so here's my house under construction same houses as here this portion right here on my house is one story and this portion is two-story so with that being said let me show you what that looks like so here's that same one story portion now I framed this traditionally you could use trusses we use a lot of BFS trusses on our jobs too but I do like standard Rafters so you're seeing these Rafters here are bearing from the outside wall here to this ridge beam and what do you notice on the edge of these Rafters they're all clipped right here they're clipped at the wall line and on this picture of my upper attic up here same thing this rafter coming down is clipped and then my framer ran my Zip system sheathing all the way to the top and this piece of zip isn't on yet but you can see here this will be able to run past that double top plate and run to the very tip or top of that rafter what does that buy us that buys us in incredible uh water and air and Vapor Barrier on the outside of my house where I spent a fair amount of time and effort sealing at the base of the house uh we're not quite done here you can see not all the tapes on but we also were able to just simply use some Zip system sheathing tape between the wall sheathing right here and the roof sheathing where they touched which means that I have no ventilation in my attic I also didn't have to go through and take care of miles of cracks with canned foam or worry about whether it was going to get sealed with either open cell or closed cell my house once this framing was done and my windows were in was tight as a drone from an air perspective which by the way it means it's really tight from a bug perspective as well and then on the outside of my house here's where I spend a little extra time and effort I did two layers of um polyiso on my rooftop deck you can see here there's two layers of foam right there and then what I did was I put an over roof on I basically made a sips roof in the field where I used um these right here which happens to be a basically a two by four sized LVL which run way up onto the roof deck and then we're fastened down up there to create an overhang and then I've got two inches of polyiso in the walls and it's a little hard to see but I've got four inches right there on the roof deck and then I sheathed it with another layer of Zip system sheathing so when you look at this picture now this whole roof section here is basically a site built sips I put an umbrella on the house now you could have omitted that and check out my uh old videos on a house I call the perfect wall house which is what uh this this Monopoly framing was originally coined as by Joe stiebrick that house I didn't do the overhangs I didn't spend that on but I wanted my house to look more traditional and this leads to where we are today which is the awesome attic my attic has no spray foam in it I was able to frame the roof in a way that fit perfectly with my R30 bats from rockwool I've got our 30 bats on the inside and I've got uh four inches of foam times R7 I've got our 20-ish on the roof so I've got an R50 Roof System now for insulation purposes but I've also got just wonderful storage space this is uh here's the Pro Photo uh here's my photo this morning that I took we've got a little bit more junk in there don't judge me but again this is all in the conditioned space this is a wonderful wonderful attic of course I could have figured out a way to put drywall up there but I needed the storage again we're slab on grade so I don't have that basement this is in effect my basement it's just on the top of my house rather than under my house here's another one though this is being done by lots and lots of people uh the gun left there in the purple shirt is an architect in town who built his own house this is Trey farmer right here and I did a view with him a couple years ago at his awesome attic built the exact same way as mine all Rockwell on the inside amazing space for his top-notch Mechanicals he just did a great job on this house with that being said let's take a quick tour of the two attic spaces in my house so this door right here leads to uh really my son's Lego playroom I've got an 11 year old that I'm hoping will join me in the business he's really interested in Legos and so you're seeing a lot of those Legos in the foreground here but check out the space it's tiny you know that that pitch in that roof I wish was a little taller but it didn't quite work with the architecture but you can see all that equipment all that duct work same condition space that door leading to that space No Air seal on that door no insulation necessary and yes there's some of my family's junk up there but there's not rat droppings there's no rat traps there's no chance of raccoons or other things getting in here this is part of the conditioned space and the same goes for my attic uh you know my I do have have a super cool pull Downs there but you could use a really inexpensive pull down non-insulated stair to get to an attic like this and think how cool that would be for you or for your clients to have an awesome attic and not just a decent attic I've got no spray foam as I said earlier spray foam is a tool in my tool belt I use it when I need it but if I can avoid it and I can build better without it I think that's a better choice for me and as we think about the crappy attic versus the really awesome attic remember we said earlier was the crappy attic durable and cheap yes was it healthy no was it efficient no my house is the exact opposite my house has been really really healthy I have absolutely loved living there very efficient there's a couple things I do differently on the efficient front I'll save that for another video but the drywall in my house at the ceiling or on the walls is not the air barrier uh my air bear is on the outside of the house it's that Zip system sheeting and I really spent the time and effort on to make sure it was both water and airtight and for me that's made a giant difference for my family you know I didn't show all the pictures that I could have of crappy addicts uh but I've been in Crazy multi-million dollar houses in Austin Texas I've even been in a celebrity's house who lives here in Austin and they have crappy attics and I I can't fathom why we are not doing at least decent as a standard and awesome as an option or awesome all the time addicts it's really not that hard it's really not that expensive we have to think about it ahead of time we've talked to our architect we have to design it and we have to build it better but you know if you look at my house none of the materials were crazy I have yes I did use some cooler LDL studs but I could have very easily used standard lumber standard trusses all right out of the yard at Builders First Source Zip system sheathing which is available or I showed you some peel and stick options as well out there if you want to use something else all that's totally doable it's really about thought and Care ahead of time which led to a house that was insulated by a really you know straightforward Rockwell crew you know all my inside stud bays and my Rafters they did that whole installation job in one day uh with Rockwell which is a very inert normal product I also like that when I go up in my attic I'm not wearing a dust mask crappy addicts it doesn't take me very long at all in that attic to start hacking and once I get that in my lungs I feel it the whole rest of the day on the other hand my pull down stairs that you saw a second ago or my my automatic stairs I should say when those come down my addicts just like the rest of my house I absolutely love it guys hopefully you learned something today uh if you want more of this nerdy building science talk I'll put a playlist of two or three other videos that are similar to this so you can learn more about this topic and stay tuned I do want to uh tease something for you my buddy Steve basic and I have a series we're filming in June uh called building signs 101 it's going to be free to you uh it's going to be I can't remember if it's 11 or 12 Parts but several parts many many hours really going to go over the basics of building science so if this video appealed to you and your nerdy side of how do houses work why do they function why have we built this way and what's the better way to do it what's the more durable the more healthy the more efficient way to build things that's really what we're all about here at the build show and if you're not familiar I have a website we started three years ago called buildshownetwork.com all my videos are on there plus I have 11 other builders Tradesmen and women and and an architect Steve basic shooting videos almost every single week on their job sites sign up for our newsletter in the description below and of course hit subscribe if you're watching this on YouTube guys follow us on Tick Tock or Instagram otherwise we'll see you next time on the build 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Channel: Matt Risinger

Views: 607,185

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

Id: ddjjwY6zzG8

Length: 35min 16sec (2116 seconds)

Published: Fri May 12 2023