Nice houses aren't just for the rich - How to build a quality home at an affordable price.

[Music] Bill show's on the road today coming to you from Tyler Texas where check this out this house behind me under construction believe it or not this is going to be for sale for $200,000 and I'll tell you what this has some better details than most $2 million houses in Texas we're going to be visiting a really smart builder in Tyler talking about some build show details that he has learned and is absolutely implemented on these Fair moderately priced houses today's build show all about Josh mcal really cool houses let's get going all right guys Josh McAlpine Josh what are we looking at here this is the development two phase two of a 11 House Development okay over on this side we built seven already and they're almost all sold just two more left but this one we just constructed and this is the most energy efficient homes in Smith County legitimately and am I right that this is going to be on the market pretty soon for like $200,000 actually it's a little bit less so numbers are going to fall about 190 195 somewhere around there that's crazy that's not bad at all it's the only four the all four of them are Z certified homes Zero Energy ready homes through energy Stars that's correct and it's only four certified in Smith County holy cow how about that now from the Street I got to say Josh looks like normal construction doesn't look like anything special are there some secrets that we need to see here there's a lot of Matt R singer Secrets through the entire thing I love it let's go check it out he's got a mockup for us in the back of the house so let's walk back there all right Josh so from the street it looks like you got carport out front uh full zip system sheeting always like that makes for a great air and water barrier some relatively normal looking uh gelwin vinyl windows it looks like closed sof details nothing super uh special here quite yet I am noticing though looks like you've got some fum tape the whole house is completely fantum okay so there's some high performance there's a high performance detail you don't see every day let alone on a affordably priced house okay so back porch I'm already seeing something that's different Josh look at this y'all I'm seeing that this porch ceiling framing is ledger on rather than going through the building and I'm guessing that the roof framing is also leder on is that true Josh that's just correct so it actually goes all the way up to it just like the same houses that you build the other big houses everything's going directly to the top and it's full Monopoly style framing Modi St baby Monopoly Framing and here you can see it on the back oh Josh this warms my heart my friend look how nice this looks and you actually have this in stages for me so we can see it right that's correct yes sir yeah the we finished the first three houses already completely framed so he he he wanted to get it completed but I was like Hey Matt's coming we got to leave him something so we can see on the little modification of the framing that I kind of just came up with honestly just I watched a couple videos from people and I was like man there's got to be a good way affordable way to do it and this is kind of what I came up with this is fantastic so no overhang here and I'm seeing that two by4 Ledger on is that the start of your sopit right there the start of the S that's the band that's exactly it okay it's completely banded here so that then will form the basis for his sopit right there and Monopoly framing you know you you guys are probably hearded if you've seen the build show before we're talking about where the wall transitions right to the roof and that's a tape joint so we can get a nice airtight seal there and watertight of course but then every bit of framing that makes overhang is after the fact right that's correct every part of it is actually after it and you can see on this line right here where we've already done it that whole line it's not uh it's already been airtight sealed on it that's just covering up the porch part of it of the overhang got it where it's coming out over so there's this tape line right there that I'm sort of pointing to you is the start of his Monopoly Framing and so I'm guessing like this little section you've left off here that you're adding another piece of zip on the porch or on the overhang rather and that's then forming that overhang right that's correct that's exactly what it's doing so up through here we're just going to extend it I just want to leave it open to where you could kind of see the um engineering behind it I guess you call it not really engineering just your standard blocking on it your framing all the way through it coming up on the top of it as well you can see where it's already been sealed so the extra piece that's going to come up over just like that one will get taped again just for the water barrier side of it dang that's fantastic Josh I love it just through it so the 2x4 is your subfascia then he's got a facial board that comes on he's got a sopit so when it's all put together this will look like any other house with a I don't know was that an 18inch overhang maybe something like that uh 16 16inch overhang 18 total with the 2x4 but it's 16 in s through there but look at that view right there I mean that just tells the story guys beautiful work Monopoly framing all this is added on outside of the fact outside of the envelope perfectly air sealed and uh as we walk inside Josh tell me the tell me how you're able to do these houses at such a affordable price what's the what's the Genesis here so basically what what we wanted to do is make it the most energy efficient home here and this is actually a grant funded through HUD and it's for the City of Tyler okay um it's for low to moderate income so the City of Tyler is actually your client the City of Tyler Tyler is actually the people that we are building for um they're they contracted me to come in and do all 11 of these houses holy cow that's awesome and as we walk inside this looks like pretty traditional framing nothing special here uh wait a minute there is some specialness going on here these are 2x4 walls but am I seeing staggered stud that is staggered stud check that out that's awesome so 2x6 bottom plate bottom and top and then your studs are on 24 in on Center staggered I'm guessing 24 inch Center stagger that's exactly it so so we got two foot over here two foot on that side um fantastic now I am noticing though that it looks like there's an occasional extra stud in here that looks like a 2x6 in the wall what's going on with that Josh so the first house that we framed the inspector came out and uh came out to inspect it for the framing side of it and he called me and was like Hey the there has to be a single stud in here for fire block every 10 ft that's required by code for a fire block even on foam insulation that way there's no fire is it because it just creates a a cavity for flame to go through basically yeah and if I'm sure people watching this know but staggered stud construction allows you to have a nice uh thermal break cuz this is approximately 2 in in here between the face of this stud and the back of the zip and that insulation that he's going to use what are you going to use for insulation here by insulation okay open cell will be able to go in here and kind of zigzag around these studs you'll also notice he's got nice California Corners so he's got nice full depth insulation on that corner as well with maybe one thermal Bridge here for fire blocking reasons that's correct uh with that 2x6 in the corner but other than that looking really good am I also noticing that You' got an insulated header pocket too that's exactly it watching Steve and I love his shows Steve basic awesome isn't he Steve basic everything that he puts out I always try toh take note of it and I saw this it was a while back when he did it but the LVL so it's a 9 and A2 in on these front windows which are about 5 1/2t wide so we went with a 9 and 1/2 in LVL for that very reason to where I could have a pocket for there's no thermal bridging even in my headers y so it's a LVL on it and believe it or not running a 9 1/2 in LVL was only like a dollar less than a dollar a foot holy cow more that that was literally it as compared to doing a double 2x 12 um header on it yeah double 2 x 12 with some plywood in the center that's exactly it where by time you swat that out to an lbl it's really not bad it is not more expensive that's fantastic and Steve always says you know bringing the continuity in bringing it all through here the uh um yeah so you've run the zip R into the uh uh into the jams as well that's correct and then it looks like you've put some Big Stretch or some other cocking that's it that's exactly back Rod all the way behind it and then put some cocking in front of it for the sil tightness of it oh that's fantastic way to go and I saw there uh Zip system stretch tape Str tape on the bottom on the Sills on the Sills on the inside it is completely zip taped the house and then talk to me about your attic it looks to me like uh you're probably getting yourself set up for a conditioned attic is I right that is correct so everything will be um in the condition space and uh I had guys over at Rose City AC are just phenomenal we went with a an upgraded system so it was something that I had to have them kind of engineer and it was somewhat new for them they they' done it on the commercial side but no Builders here any Texas really want to spend the money you know let's go see if we can find Will from Rose City and a couple questions will I got to tell you Josh gave you a pretty nice envelope to start with I'm guessing not every Builder you work for here in town gives you such a well insulated and tight envelope to work with uh no uh most of them don't Josh did really take care of this one pretty well yeah you definitely did so I'm guessing you guys probably started with Emanual Jay on this job before you get started on really doing design talk to me about the manual J what' you find out on this house uh found out it was going to be a pretty good envelope uh when we're designing the energy star houses the we started the manual J with the energy audit uh this one was going to be a pretty fun project uh the low square footage with the amount of equipment that we're putting in here it it was it was pretty fun so what' you find out this is 1300 Square ft I wonder what your tonnage is on this thing uh it calls for and I don't have it with me but 1.2 tons 1 .3 tons 1300 foot, ft to the ton basically which is a fantastic oh yeah yeah it makes it nice it's a very high efficient envelope yeah and we like those we want to see more of those for sure so talk to me about the equipment you're using in what are you putting in here uh we're putting in some rud 18 sear sear 2 uh communicating full modulating equipment wow fantastic all heat pumps I'm assuming yes sir okay and then any other equipment besides uh heat bump you putting Dees in here at all or what are you guys doing for fresh air we've got a 70 pint uh Santa Fe dehumidifier uh a brone AI uh Erv and uh we also have makeup air for the M municipality codes fantastic now I don't normally think of affordable housing as getting a brown Erv is this kind of standard for you guys is this I don't think it's standard for anybody but uh this this is kind of a a flagship for us too we're we're trying to hopefully make this a more common thing that's awesome man super impressive now how how are those devices or are they not communicating to each other like for instance how'd you run that Santa Fe the Santa Fe is hooked into the the rud communicating system as basically a backup because the red communicating system will take care of dehumidification by itself okay and so if it's in dehumidification and the system is having trouble keeping up with you know Texas humidity uh the Santa Fe comes in as a as a as a back Source oh interesting okay and how did you run that separate duct work or utilizing the House's duct work uh both it it has its own separate return centralized and then we uh Supply into the existing supply duct work through the plenum uh with back flow dampers and things like that my friend Sean Harris who's a big HVAC nerd like me says he likes putting the Dee into the plenum because then it's going to dry out all that duct work if there was any incidental moisture in there and just make sure it's nice and dry but I would tell you too like this all this duct work which is running through your air conditioned space you know it's not going to have sweating up there it's not going to have issues it's going to be in real nice shape interesting you had a lot of vaults in here to work with though so you had kind of a limited amount of attic space with these vaults didn't you yeah it was very limited uh and it was fun designing it out uh which I know this stuff isn't supposed to be fun but it it really was uh combination of hard pop and and flex ducting and you know just really uh you know kind of coming up with it on the fly on some things yeah now I got to ask you a question well I get in a lot of expensive houses I've done very expensive fresh air systems in some of my houses this pretty affordable house at 200k did you get push back from Josh about you know putting an Erv in putting a dehumidifier in some of that kind of stuff I wouldn't say push back uh you know we we worked me and Josh worked on this from from Square One it wasn't a typical bid situation yeah uh we both attacked this as soon as he came to me with the project uh and we worked with the city you know the municipality that's paying for it yep and once we came to a decision of what we wanted to do uh the economy of it was kind of second nature at that point because we wanted it to happen it needed to happen and and we made it happen with the budget that was allowed that's awesome impressive work will very impressive man if you guys are watching this anywhere near Tyler I would definitely give these guys at Rose City a call I mean everything here is clean well done I love that they did a true manual J really looked at the envelope the windows impressive will nice job brother yes sir thank you thank you Josh this is an incredible build for 200k man are you making money on these I'm trying that is for sure but it's not it really wasn't a thing for me and my wife of making the money cuz I've got oil and gas interest I got other things that I do yeah so it was more of a opportunity for us to somewhat give back in in in a way and and not charge what a normal Builder would charge and it's it was more of a kind of a heart thing for us that we really wanted to be part of this project but I want to I want to just say man I mean these are $200,000 houses that even if you built them for no profit these details are still far better than I see on $2 million houses in Texas which is I think how I started the video I mean all of this envelope detail really good HVAC system this is not standard for us in Texas no it is not but I've had a great mentor his name is Matt um I think I have watched every single video I'm that dude I truly watched every one of them and learned every technique truly from the build show with Matt I mean not with Matt but with uh um Steve Steve and those guys everybody like all the stuff that they're doing so I'm like I can implement this and it really was a thing to me when I reached out was was I build smaller houses not everybody I don't build million dollar houses2 million do houses but I'm like you know what if if another Builder if this is what was a teaching thing for me is is to let other builders know that you can do this on a budget I mean I proved it not that it has anything to do with me but my Subs everybody it was some learning curves you know was the old saying is like oh we don't do it like that why why do we don't do it we don't build like that anymore you know but it's new everything's changing you don't have your same bag phone you had in the 80s right we all got iPhones Everything's changed why not the building side of it so that brings a question for me like when I see these Monopoly framing details I'm working on the framer that I've worked with for you know 15 years Bill wood and his crew I mean they do all my work it was really easy for me to uh you know show them how to do it I didn't have to talk him into it I suspect you've got some trades that haven't worked with you before what did they say or how did you train them when you started to tell them some of these framing details in particular so Octavio uh Sarah is is my framer um Alexandria um Alexandra's construction is who he is and he loved it like he he was the one guy was like dude let's go like show me what I need to do teach me and I will do it on everyone and he took pride in it so it was uh it was I cannot praise him enough on the details that he put into it with his guys he was on top of them like he knows exactly what I wanted this was the last house out of the second phase okay so the first one was kind of that learning curve second one he was learning it more third and fourth I'm telling you he's like man I want to tell my builders that he wants to start building this way want to start framing this way so it was it was great all right so then let's talk the proofs and the pudding what kind of numbers were you getting on this house have you don't need blower door test what kind of performance are you seeing so I did actually so the first two houses pre- insulation both of them blew a 3.7 okay which in Tyler code is three yep so after insulation I blew a 1.1 so spray film insulation then 1.1 spray foam insulation 1.1 and then two days later Arrow barrier came out and arrow with arrow barrier the end result was a 0.34 what both houses BL and I'd like to point out that these are not like passive house level whatever I mean these are like some basic gelwin uh you know vinyl windows right it's correct upgraded I I went with I think it was energy star code 7.3 okay um but it was I wanted to get it proof for the following year so the numbers look pretty good I mean when I looked at that uor on that window it's like 0.26 that's right so it's almost an R4 window most windows in mu code are like R3 so that's a 30% jump in performance even though those numbers don't look like a passive house number that does make a big difference doesn't it a huge difference so for this whole house upgrading it to from just basic to what it needed to be for ZR certified house upgrading it to this was literally less than $400 on the whole house package holy cow that's crazy so it's minimal money and that's something that I want Builders to know is doing the techniques doing these things it's minimal the most expensive part that I had in this was the hbac system yeah I mean you put a better system in but what I'd like to point out is that you know you didn't put a top of the line Zender you know like the Lamborghini you put the Toyota Camry of systems in which is that brone AI I suspect that's maybe a $3,000 is dollar system and you know that's 1% 2% 1.5% let's say of the price of the house but that's really important when you build a tight house to bring fresh air to do it continuously just as important for an affordable house as it is a luxury house and yet so many luxury Builders aren't doing anything for fresh air or they're doing some crappy system where you only bring it into the return side and yet you're doing a true Erv yes so this system honestly the only upgrade that I had in it was doing the RV doing the um the the the humidifier in the full system the whole house dehumidifier whole house Erv system it cost me an extra as as instead of going with just a regular HVAC HVAC system was about 6,000 more 6,000 bucks not bad at all for for and that was as you always say it's the lungs of the home when we're building high performance Building Homes this tight we have to upgrade our system so if you're building a million doll house maybe that's less than 1% of your construction cost it might have been two or three % on a house of this size and scale but that's money well spent it's going to be with the house for the life of the house the best money especially on the system on the efficiency side of it that's pretty awesome anything we miss detail wise that's covered up that we can't see today that you wanted to mention that you've learned from the bill show so one the rainscreen you know the first seven houses that I built over here um those were all I did rain screen on those as well and I went with a 1x4 okay all around the windows the walls everything did the uh uh bug screen underneath it did everything with it and it added about 400 bucks per house okay so I was looking at this one and and and I knew this extra stuff I wanted to do so I'm thinking how can I save so I actually found a product we did it at one of my buddy's house we did a stucco house for him and I had some of this left over so I looked at it I'm like this is going to work great and this whole entire roll it's a massive roll I can't think the exact footage of it but it was like literally 300 bucks oh my gosh that $300 roll is going to finish this fourth house and so did you cut it into strips like I'm seeing here yeah so it comes in a big roll we just cut it to the length which about 74 I believe was the length of it and 4 in wide we're putting it on every foot that's fantastic and this is just like a 3D mesh type product looks like it's maybe St 38 inch thick you didn't necessarily need the um Filter Fabric on there that would have been to make sure the stucco doesn't fill up the Hol but you don't need to take it off either no not at all it's fine man impressive anything else on the outside you did that you want to mention so Aqua bibs on each house okay sweet also I did Eric's Titan um how the outlet boots for your HB Outlet boots with hbac which will had never done before and he saw them and he absolutely loved him he said man I will provide this now for every single home that's killer are you going to do the line set cover as well that PVC line set cover yes sir I did it in white so on an affordable house to have a line set cover to make sure that the insulation doesn't degrade now you've got a house that you've given to these homeowners that's going to last a couple of generations I mean this is a really well-built really tight and crazy affordable house I am super impressed Josh anything that else that you miss that you wanted to mention no I think that's pretty much everything okay so I got I got to Gig you on one thing because it's something I've thought about too and I I asked his permission before I I did this I noticed you've got one double beam coming through your envelope here do and I've made that same mistake before and I've got a house coming up that I was about to make that mistake on in my CAU up um when you've got two beams penetrating through the zip it's really hard to air seal them and you pointed he pointed this out to me off camera by the way I'm not I'm not gigging in here on camera uh so what uh Josh told me is the next time he builds this plan he's going to go with a single LVL there and I said another option too could be do an exterior Post in that location but I like the single LVL that way when that penetrates the zip sheathing you could tape it you could liquid flash it you can airs it but when you have two coming through it's almost impossible to air seal it so that's one small amount of leakage and of course a little leakage isn't going to kill us and he's got Arrow barrier but everywhere you can seal it down tight which you really have on this house I mean I saw the sea fum tape on the outside uh I've seen that you've gone in and preo before your insulation contractor comes just tightening everything down it looks to me like uh your on your penetrations you've stuck with the Jake brutin one hole for one thing method so you've really sealed this house up tight and don't forget you've got less forgiveness on a 12200 ft house than you have it on a 3,000 ft house literally so we did the exact same thing I built a house help my buddy build it for his parents and he had never done like a kind of high performance type building so I was more more or less a consultant with him on it and um that house was 3,300 ft excuse me 3200 sare ft um we didn't do a blower test before but afterwards we blew a 2.2 and then after arobar we blew a 0.4 and that was a 3200 all 10ft plate line massive vaults everywhere so it was uh it proved my system excuse me your system it's no it's all our systems it's all our systems I just in my mouthpiece I'm just a normal Builder like you man Josh super super impressive man I'll put uh if you guys need Josh or you're interested in talking to him I'll put his email address in the description below but uh you know there's there's literally thousands of you just like Josh out there that are watching these videos learning from all the build Show Network uh contributors there's no new information none of this is stuff I've thought of I've nailed I've grabbed it from other people as well Josh is now teaching Tyler how to build this way as a community and I suspect there's going to be other builders that are going to pick up these methods and Tyler your framer is going to take that over and talk to a couple of his Builders about what you're doing here I bet people have visited that you don't realize and said what what the heck are they doing here uh because this is different and it's better and what's awesome about it is it didn't cost a crazy amount of money it was a couple of percent more on the bottom line and it's worth it so Josh well done my friend great job hopefully I'll see you at build show live in November in Austin Texas Absolutely I'll be we might need to get you in a speaking role because you've really got a lot to learn you've got a lot to teach and a lot of people have a lot to learn from you so anyways guys big thanks for joining Josh and I for a job site tour here if you're not currently a subscriber hit that subscribe button below we've got new content every Tuesday and every Friday follow us on Tik Tok or Instagram otherwise we'll see you next time do you know I close this out have you ever seen any my videos absolutely otherwise we'll see you next time on the build [Music] show

Channel: Matt Risinger

Views: 178,995

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

Id: 29zF8XfJkcA

Length: 26min 14sec (1574 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 30 2024