This House Has Some Smart & AFFORDABLE Framing & Insulation Details!

[Music] the build shows on the road today coming you from columbia missouri where this beautiful and very high performance house is being built i've got with me jake brute and the builder steve base of the architect and we're going to show you how to build super high performance with totally off-the-shelf components it's a great build show showing you how to build economically but also at really high performance let's get going [Music] all right guys we'll get back to steve in a minute but jake one of the things that i like about this house we just got a little bit of a tour is how i think you and steve have utilized pretty off-the-shelf components we were joking about kind of farm to table right you know everything here is kind of locally sourced but from what i'm seeing here this may be one of the most efficient houses in missouri being built today right i think that you can probably make that claim and not be uh not be stretching okay very far so then what let's start with the foundation because you've got all kinds of stuff happening here we got this big old cantilever deck that you just flew in this morning when i was here and then you've got a crawl space but it looks like also foundation as well tell me the story on the foundation here so we want to make sure that we're spending the clients money wisely and if we're looking at take these clients because we're talking about their house yep they don't need a basement yep they don't need all that space but one of the things that steve and i talked about the first meeting we had with clients on site is the view is that elevation is the height that the house wants to have to fit in its scene and one of the things that steve and i talked about in the first visit was getting it up that high but not wasting all that effort on concrete that's smart this would be much cheaper than a full in-ground foundation wouldn't it it's expensive if you don't need it and it's not good for the environment if you look at global warming potential numbers for concrete they're all over the place because it's not good right and and if you can eliminate it and you can cut some of it out you build a better house that costs less and hopefully is more efficient yeah i mean you had to have dropped at least 30 or 40 yards less concrete building this way than had you done a full foundation now this cantilever area looks like you're using floor trusses is that right yeah i think floor trusses will be a standard on all of our projects from now on the ability to just be dead flat and still have that surface cavity you know we've done some houses that are it's a 50 foot long room that's the width of whatever we can get from a floor truss 20 24 feet whatever and there's no interior partitions but yet we can run mechanicals or or you know mep through it without any problems it just opens up design potential really smart jake let's uh let's actually go into the basement because there is a little bit of a basement on this house and there's an interesting story there we'll meet y'all in the basement all right jake we got a little basement on this job but not a huge basement what's the story between or what's what's the decision i should say basement here crawl space over there so i wouldn't say let's call it a little basement let's call it a right-sized basement okay this is just mechanical it's just a little bit of storage we're just trying to hide the things that we don't want upstairs and in a super quiet house like this yeah putting it down here makes it a little quieter so all your mechanicals are down here yep and my assumption is i'm seeing some pipes through the floor you also have your sewer or your plumbing drain and we have a radon pipe back there we are required to put in passive radon yep in every one of our houses and then you're insulated on the interior wall so you're using that halo in terra which i've used as well uh how many inches of the eps is that there's uh gps gps there's two right now and then there'll be another two uh packed in between okay so what's the difference between eps and gps uh basically the graphite polystyrene is a little better for the environment and it doesn't have that thermal loss over its lifetime so it doesn't it doesn't shift graphite just like pencil lead right that's why it's not white it's got a grayish it's a coffee cup insulation that's black instead of being white and then you've got a vapor barrier on the inside too with that uh that foil facing on the inside we actually have the uh interra subterra underneath our feet as well so this slab is insulated so there's four inches underneath us uh and then the slab this slab is a floating raft uh the stuff that's on the walls you know this is the only insulation in the house that's in right now it's in because it's poured down and then the concrete was poured up against it ah so literally this concrete our feet is floating on top of insulation with insulation on the sides as well i love that concept that's great so now if i were to take my shoes off this floor would be basically the same temperature as the air in here yep rather than coupled to the ground which is 50 degrees or so correct and you get i mean it's still stone in a sense so you still get that emissivity where it will feel cooler than the air but it's a heck of a lot warmer than something that has soil on the bottom side of it i like how you said that earlier i'm going back to what you said a right size foundation not a small foundation this is uh 20 something by 20 something yeah 26 by 26 which is enough room for all your mechanicals one or two furnaces going down here probably your water heaters going down here your plumbing pipes can go down when steve designed the house did he put plumbing in line with this space as well yeah so the majority of our plumbing here is in this tower so there's two floors above us uh all three of our bathrooms and our laundry room are above us the only plumbing that's not in this space is the kitchen that's in that uh cantilever that we were just standing underneath gotcha and then you said earlier that cantilever portion which is on crawl space the crawl space will be open air basically because you're going to have zip as a soffit in there and then you're going to fill that with insulation so this house is kind of like two big arms coming out with this basement sinking down in your mechanicals and again going back to cost and being smart with your money i think jake and steve designed this house in a really cost effective way but getting really high performance had this basement been four times bigger or five times bigger it would have cost a lot more if simply for no reason it's just a lot of concrete and concrete's at least 100 and some dollars per cubic yard right now so saving 20 or 30 yards that's real money for your client let alone all that labor and you can make an argument that those columns out there that are board form concrete that you know that is the most expensive concrete on the job yeah but it's 10 inches by two and a half feet by six feet tall it's not 26 by 26 or 40 by 18. yeah you know and those are sunk down below your frost line which has got to be what 20 inches or so 30 inches is where code requires here so actually those are we just dug this basement like it was gonna be a walk out and then we just poured those footings at the same elevation as this and made them the height that we wanted that way there was no math and we didn't have to worry about grading multiple directions because it's a really rocky site so we just said to heck with it let's just cut it like a walk out and then we just backfill them around them love it all right jake let's go upstairs love this basement concept more from upstairs all right jake as we're coming up from the basement i'm seeing your rim joist and here's your top of your um halo foam this is two inches of that gps as this comes up here though how do you resolve this area there's no stud bait to fill in with a kind of standard bat or blown in yeah we're looking at the the osb looking material you can see there is our engineered rim okay and so that technically is the because the start of that cantilever we don't want to use spray foam everywhere if we don't have to it's expensive it's not as good for the environment as some of the other choices out there so it has its place and this is one of those places we're able to spray from the bottom side of our floor down across the rim across our plates and then capture the edge of that gps insulation everything's one continuous bead then you know and then all we have to do is bring our wall insulation down so if we sprayed let's say two inches of closed cell right here it's going to be a vapor barrier it's going to have a high insulation value and it'll also connect to our vaporware here on top of this yep that's really smart and you don't need much of it you've got about this much on your foundation rather than spraying that all the way down and then all the way underneath and it takes a nearly impossible transition and makes it super simple and one contractor and then this halo then makes a real makes a really good choice because it's high insulation it's also a lot cheaper than closed cell phone by doing that hail over there all right jake when you come up here oh my gosh there is so much to see and talk about but what i love about this as we said earlier is nothing here is from europe or from some exotic land this is all kind of locally sourced wood products i love it talk me through your wall assembly so we're using like we talked about downstairs we're using the zip r as our our air barrier and some continuous insulation in this case it's a r9 so the poly iso on the back side of that zip is an inch and a half okay so two inch total thickness on that assembly half inch basically 7 16 zip yup and then inch and a half and then your studs are they are t-studs this is our first time working with them yeah uh and we did the math and when you combine a you know blown in insulation like cellulose or or uh fiberglass or we probably are going to use havelock wool here uh with that r9 on the outside we're a r32 wall assembly with basically a two by six stud and then that that exterior insulation with really almost no thermal bridging because of that massive amount of zip plus the t-studs which also allow that insulation through the stud and break it yep that's really cool and the regular framers that we work with put it together without any specialty tools they didn't even have to buy a special nail gun anything we just it's it's wood and sheathing and it's just a simple assembly that you know the low man on the totem pole is still able to execute what size nail did you use when you nailed that that because that's that two-way sheeting's pretty thick right so it's a three and a half inch nail you huber provides a nailing schedule for it so you do have to pay attention to things like that okay uh but you know we're able to get those nails but your nails gonna fit the three and a half no big deal yeah and you also ran your t-studs with the i think they call it the flange side which is that two and a half side of the outside so plenty of meat to nail into uh hard to miss almost at that point yeah that was a conversation between the lead carpenter and i we were talking about it and you know t stud leaves it up to you you can orient it however you want and they basically just said well uh let us have the fat side and the drywall guys can deal with the skinnier side although the skinny side's the same size as any other framing it's a regular stuff what does it matter all right now another couple of things i want to point out here look how he sunk his headers for his windows to the sheathing on the outside so he also has a basically an insulation pocket even at his headers but one of my favorite details on this house that i've seen you do before and and i think you and steve must have pioneered this because i'd never seen it before i met you a couple years ago jake is this airtight lid detail talk me through this this ceiling and the way that you do this i think is absolutely genius it's uh i think it's as simple as you can make it probably so when we talk about the air barrier on the wall we're talking exclusively you know zip and the tape that goes with it or liquid flash that goes with it yep that's a product we're already using for water management on the outside when we go to the ceiling we're already dry walling our ceiling all we're doing is asking the drywall to do another task in this space it's super simple because this volume is one room no interior partitions except for a little pantry over here yep all of this will get rocked in one one shot before the interior partitions get built so your 5 8 sheetrock will just get hung on the ceiling as normal and we're not using anything special on the framing right these are just uh trusses from your truck local truss manufacturer right yep the only thing that we have to do is we have to note that the interior partitions will be non-load bearing so upstairs we have some walls so we just have to make sure that we can get it because it's going to have interior partition with drywall and then the truss sitting on top of it got it so in other words your trusses need to always span front to back or side to side without an interior spot to land on yep but other than that pretty straightforward now talk to me about i'm seeing this uh eight inch layer of three-quarter advantage all the way around a racetrack all the way around these outside walls tell me what's happening there so the same way we talked about connecting our insulation downstairs with the making that connection with the spray foam it's all about that connection if the air barrier isn't continuous then it doesn't matter because then it's two separate air barriers here we can tape the advantec it's basically our third top plate we tape that advantek to the outside to the zip sheathing and then when it lays to the inside it provides a space for us to run a couple beads of sealant and then the drywall comes across and mushes into that and now we've made a continuation of one thing and now it's zip drywall zip back down the other side that's super smart so double top plate just like normal and then after your subfloor is finished you're ripping that subfloor into how wide are the strips are those eight inches they're 12 inches 12 inch okay because we've got we've got five and a half on your top plate plus you've got your zip sheathing distance so it's actually seven and a half on top so then we've got another five and a half let's say showing on the inside and then that vantec which is on his double top plate is then taped for air tightness so now his wall sheathing is taped and air tight and that comes on there and then when you add those two beads of acoustic sealant now that drywall which is off the shelf you know not an expensive part becomes his air barrier so now this whole air this whole area here is airtight but that takes a little planning right because you don't have a bunch of duct work or electrical up there talk to me about all those other things that might poke through that air barrier so it does mean a second trip for the framer a second trip for the drywall crew and a second trip for the electrician and the insulators okay so we're gonna get everything above the lid before we uh before we rock so we've laid out all our lights on the floor we'll pull all of those we'll air seal all those boxes we'll completely insulate everything so it does mean that we're pulling switch legs into walls that don't exist yet so we have to nail the details up front but the framers like it because they get to come back and finish framing in what is a conditioned space at that time the drywall guys actually have started to complement it because they don't have any little bitty cuts in closets nobody has to try to finish and hang one two foot by four foot section of rock in the closet the electricians are the only ones that i don't think see any benefit but uh we're really nice to our electricians we do all of the layout for them and everything so they don't tend to complain very much super smart so then after that rock's installed what will we insulate that space with this is going to be blown in i think that above the ceiling will probably be uh cellulose cheap it's easy to just fill as deep as we can yeah and to go from what 12 inches or 24 inches to 30 or 36 inches of cellulose it's ground newspaper with some boric acid it's not much money at all and now your ceiling lid could be what what's your r value probably going to be uh so we do have a taper so on the smaller side it will be closer to that r38 we make a little bit of sacrifice for aesthetics but anywhere we have the space we're going to be 60 65. r65 without any crazy spray foams or expensive materials or parts just some standard 5 8 drywall and paired with uh passive house levels of air leakage so that r65 performs at a much higher level when it's not fighting air yeah there's no air leakage through there let's uh let's go upstairs next jake and talk about how some of those walls will get built later upstairs meet you upstairs all right jake now as we come up to the second floor i'm guessing that this is not one big open concept plan up here is that right we did joke with the homeowners the other day and i tried to convince them to just make this the master and move their kids downstairs to share one bedroom but no there are two full bedrooms with closets and bathroom and there's even a homework space in today's uh covered times and you've already popped lines uh so i'm guessing this is where your two by four walls will get built yep uh and so we'll actually frame all that in like i was just saying after the dry the ceiling's drywalled uh the framers have a little bit more blocking to put in up top uh we'll run some strips of advantech to fully fill over top where the walls are so we have something solid some meat to grab going up it also gives us a place to air seal uh you know if the wires the switch legs that have to go up at this point we can drill a hole in the in a wide piece of advantech and then air seal that ah so there's a little more prep in the ceiling and up here you can really tell like what you were talking about downstairs these trusses run front to back um this is a shed roof meaning this side's just a little higher than this side you're gonna have a vented roof assembly so probably soffit vents on both sides right air will flow up there you'll probably have baffles up there to keep the insulation from falling out uh and then tell me about these little uh are these just one by twos i'm assuming yeah so the lumber yard rips uh one by four in half and it's actually funny that you pointed out the baffles too you know we talk about we're going to be better each time we're going to learn more each time you can see we've left some out the insulator doesn't like fighting him up and in there so we leave a couple rows out so that he can he can stick his baffles in there and then we can run our strap room to work and our framing's two foot on center and everything stacks all the way down to the foundation yeah i'm noticing all those sauces are coming down aren't they and so what we've done when we go to our strapping it's perpendicular but we're able to run 12 inches on center and then we can go back to half inch drywall we don't have to worry about sag and that's right we'll use our five eights up there then nope it's half inch rock and even when it's got seven thousand pounds of insulation on top we're not going to get any sag in that you know i love it and these t-studs i just realized that i hadn't thought about that these are on 24 centers not 16's which means these are plenty strong i'm sure your engineer blessed this but now there's that much more insulation in the cavity the less thermal bridging to come through because if you haven't seen jake on build show network uh before he's shooting videos once a week from his job sites here in missouri i met jake i'm two or three years ago at probably jlc live and i every time i come see jake or watch one of his videos i'll learn something he has a great video about 16-inch versus 24-inch on-center framing and why advanced framing is really pretty darn smart and crazy structural and one of my favorite parts about that video i'm giving it away one of my favorite parts of your video is your analogy between 16 and 24 is if we always framed with 24 on center which is plenty strong 99 of the time to carry the loads and then we went to 16 inch on center framing we would think it was ridiculous that we would use all that lumber when it's not necessary and this is a great example of that in this house his headers are pushed out he's got 24 inch on center a ton of insulation and again like we talked about in this house jake off the shelf components nothing here didn't come from your local missouri lumber yard that i've seen today everything here is pretty pretty standard equipment yeah i think that it's a wise building and it's uh with a purpose and an intention rather than just show up and do whatever we want to do it's it's let's plan things out and let's get to get to where we want to be with a little bit of thought and planning i love it man you're such a smart builder go follow jake on instagram he's got a great instagram feed he's shooting videos and stories all the time on his jobs i'll link his instagram feed below and sign up for our newsletter on buildshownetwork.com so you'll get a notification every time jake is posting a video but with that jake let's go talk to steve for a minute and here's some of the design and architecture principles that he uh that he did on the show okay good luck with that thanks man i appreciate it yeah all right guys if you all don't know steve basic incredibly talented architect steve actually helped me with the details on my house steve this house incredible house we walked through some of the details with jake on the inside but talk to us about the outside and how this fits with your vision for the house yeah so it all started i don't know about about a year ago when i met the clients out here and we talked about what was a good fit i mean there was a bunch of brush here and we talked about you know sighting the house up on the hill potentially and i said you know there was this natural little cove in the trees here with a beautiful view off there and when we were standing up there i basically you know said why don't we position the house like right along this axis and we can finish it off with a glass wall looking out we can build a deck out there we can design it so that we start with a solid mass but then we break it down as the house moves down the hill and we just get less and less material and you can see part of that is born out of you know we have the basement over there and then we switch to concrete piers and then it finishes with a cantilevered deck and a 10-foot or 12-foot cantilevered roof so everything kind of just dissipates into the air and then it kind of goes on so that the house is really about you know about that idea of just kind of vanishing and taking in that view that's beautiful it's it sits so lightly on the hill because of that right yeah it doesn't feel massive and part of it is is you know the homeowners are going to let this just grow naturally so it's going to feel like you know and we talked about this on that day one that rather than thinking of the house as being built think of it as being just dropped in i love it and stuck into the ground because in two or three years that's what it's going to look like now is there a building science benefit to any of those parts and pieces between the cantilevered deck or any of those other things that you mentioned so there's a whole lot of benefits and and i know you've heard me say it before but every house has thousands of decisions and we can make you know the high decision the modest decision the low decision or the real crappy decision we'd try not to make those but we all know there's people out there that you know run that spectrum of decision making and you know unfortunately this house has got almost like every building science challenge that you could throw at a house it's a pretty compact house i think it's it's in that 20 2600 square foot range but we have a you know you can see seventy percent of the house doesn't have a basement under so you can imagine in the wintertime when you're wearing a jacket you're nice and warm here but if i stick my hand out it gets cold really fast right so that's what we're doing to this house we're sticking that hand out in the winter time so we have to find a really good mitten for this house and a really good enclosure system for that sense right we wanted the cantilever deck or we wanted a deck system i went to the cantilevered deck just because of that kind of airy nature of it but when you put a deck on the house then the question is okay if we're doing a cantilever deck it would naturally be well let's just plug some lvls and go 10 or 15 feet back into the house or 16 feet and then fly out the 10 feet yep and part of that decision-making process and working really closely with jake and the homeowners you know getting their opinion because they have to say okay to it and then jake and i have to figure it out along with his steel sub and the structural engineer but how do we build that deck so it really isn't a thermal problem to the house right i like to think of it as let's build the house build the enclosure and then we can add all this stuff to it so in other words you you thought about it as like a bolt-on process rather than had that steel let's say run through into your floor system that would have been a way to bring the cold into the house or the heat into the house yeah it'd be pretty much like if i bought a really thick heavy mitten and then i stuck a metal rod through it into the palm of my hand and held it in the mitt you'd feel it it's like i would feel that coldness in the middle of it and not only that but if i spend all that effort and and the financial part of building that really good mitten i don't want to cut holes in it that's right right so and it's it it just so happens that the solution to the thermal problem kind of heightened the aesthetic solution right so you kind of get both you get a you get a really cool looking deck that's solving a lot of building science problems i love that so really smart it's kind of a ten for one right not even a two for one that's fantastic and and you know we have that that deck that cantilever so obviously we had to solve for the um concrete piers you can see those are board forms so i had to work with jake do we do horizontal do we do vertical how do we do it jake did a phenomenal job even took all the two bys and cut the rounded edges so we all we have nice crisp corners and everything on there um and you can see from it from an architectural standpoint you know we have the two-story mass that starts on the left side and then the house gets smaller and we have that sloped roof it's a one and twelve and you know the building scientists out there i have a a system that we built in here so that's actually going to be a fully functioning vented roof at a one in 12. 112. even though it's 1 in 12 and a lot of people are going to say hey you drop below a three don't do it we're trying to keep the foam out of the house we're trying to do it more of a conventional system and you know you can look for some future videos because we're not going to get into the details there but i'll just throw it out there as a teaser i think we have that licked and i don't think it'll be a problem and we're going to test it and verify it and all of that good stuff but again that house kind of disseminates as we go across here and then you see there's the bump out for the front entryway in the dining room and that i chose not to put a sloped roof on architecturally i kept that as the horizontal line because now that becomes the datum line if i sloped it you wouldn't acknowledge that that one in 12 as much as you do when you have the comparison against that flat roof it really kind of jumps out at you and and gives that kind of juxtaposition of roof planes yeah i like that so that you can really understand it love it slow proof amazing house jake's done a great job building it the design is there and what i love too about working with you steve and the short amount of time that i have is your details are really good they're really really well thought out and i know you and jake really spent the time on this house and you specifically drawing those out making sure that when the framers showed up they knew exactly what was going on in this house yeah and we'll do and i'm actually going to do a series of videos for the build show network undermined where we're going to take a look at the house in a building section identify the problem areas and then how we solve for all the transitions because you have water management you have air leakage the insulation thermal management and vapor management all of those control layers we have to maintain continuity and successful in what looks like a simple house but from a building science perspective there's a lot of challenges so there's a lot going on there but to reiterate what i said at the beginning of the video one of the things i love about this house steve is that there's no fancy you know parts or pieces from overseas everything that you're seeing to this stage of the house is really all available at the local lumber yard yeah there's nothing special going on and that's you know i i one of my you know thought processes when i'm designing it and doing the details is is trying not to get too fancy because we want to replicate it and i know you know a lot of our videos we get all kinds of comments in the in the youtube section but you know one of one of the things about doing this video is is that there's a lot of pieces here that you can pull out and use in your own house right i mean yeah we have a whole kitchen dining room family room that's a cantilevered but we all know that occasionally some people might do a two or three foot bump out that's right over the second floor this is no different the building science assembly here is exactly the same as that two or three foot cantilever but you just need to be able to take these details and kind of re revise them and refine them to solve for your situation but the building science and mother nature she doesn't know the difference between 18 feet or three feet that's right she just knows that moisture moves from high to low um heat moves from hot to cold so play by her rules i love it steve so impressive man what a beautiful house guys if you're not currently following steve go check him out on buildshownetwork.com he also is posting to his instagram feed daily super talented architect who not only gets the beautiful side of what we do but really understands the building science and steve you're such a unique combination of an architect out there he's making videos on buildsharenetwork.com every week teaching you the principles of really good design and the practices of really well-built houses guys i'll put a link in the description to our newsletter sign up so you can get a friday email for when steve's got a new video out every single week if you're not currently a subscriber to my youtube channel hit that subscribe button guys we make videos every tuesday and every friday follow me on twitter instagram otherwise we'll see you next time on the build show [Music] you

Channel: Matt Risinger

Views: 162,555

Rating: 4.9262505 out of 5

Keywords: Matt Risinger, Build Show Network, The Build Show, Build, framing, advanced framing, how to frame a house, tstud, what is tstud, is tstud good, basement insulation, HALO insulation, missouri passive house, missouri builder, jake bruton, columbia mo, aarow building, steve baczek, sunk headers, halo interra cost, halo interra price, halo interra review, how to insulate your basement, graphite insulation board, pros and cons of advanced framing, is advanced framing worth it

Id: 5YlM_pLiwao

Length: 30min 17sec (1817 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 19 2021