Were Old Houses Built Better?

they don't build them like they used to on today's build show we're gonna dive deep into several old houses and a few relatively new houses take a look at how they were built what materials were used what problems I found when I remodeled those and trying to answer that question we're old houses built better today's bill chair let's get going on the build show today we're gonna be answering the question we're old houses built better you know I've been a professional builder since 1995 but I actually grew up watching this old house and working on a remodel crew from junior high all the way through my college years before I started as a professional builder so I've got nearly 30 years of working on old houses experience and we're gonna jump into some really old houses and some relatively new houses today I'm gonna show you how they performed how they were built and why they lasted or maybe why they had problems so first let's take a look at this house right here let me pull up the slide show this is a house that my company remodeled about three four years ago we completed this this is an 1880s house which is pretty old for Austin Texas and as you can see the house was in relatively mint condition so to speak when we got a hold of it not a lot of remodel work had been done to it here's the inside of the house and the first thing you're gonna notice look at that really deep window jamb 2 foot thick stone walls on this house this is a solid masonry house this is how a lot of houses around the world were built for really thousands of years and the house was in phenomenal shape and we got it we added an addition on the back and here's where you can kind of see the thickness and look at that that super thick rubble wall there I mean this is some serious mass of the house you also noticed that house had some overhangs but not a ton this was maybe a 1 or 2 foot overhang on most of the house and on the basement level as I showed in the other photo the the original stone wall showed but on the upper levels they had been laughs and plastered this is kind of funny the guys later when they added wallpaper did some graffiti to the walls but again you can see that super thick Jam and how did they attach things to the house now the house had old-growth lumber really beautiful Timbers real to by floor lumber floor framing rather and then cross bracing and you can see the original floors were nailed right to the joist there was no subfloor there is no intermediate floor and then when they added windows and doors they actually let in a piece of that old-growth lumber right into the masonry and you know you would think that over the course of what a hundred plus years when I got to this house I think we started this remodel maybe 2014-2015 so this was a well over a hundred year old house that lumber embed in the masonry you'd be worried that that would see a bunch of rodder decay but I didn't see any very very impressive I did see a few areas however the termites had gotten to the house here in the south termites are a big deal for us and this is one section of some pine flooring probably some longleaf pine that just had a little bit of termite damage but for the most part the house is incredible shape we did a full house remodel and the house was brought back to its its former glory and even better okay now let's fast-forward a couple decades this is a 1930s house and this house instead of being masonry this is a true wood house it had wood siding again it hadn't really been touched which was beautiful for me so I could really dissect it and as you can see here wood siding on the outside on the inside I've actually shared this photo before this was kind of a cool photo when the house was built there was no heating cooling system in the house originally and probably around the 1950s window units were added for air conditioning again we're down here in Texas so it's super hot and I love this photo because this photo probably taken in the 70s or 80s you can see the wallpaper had a ton of staining these windows every time it rained probably had some serious leakage going on and I assume when I was going to take this house apart that I would probably find some rod and some damage now here's one of the rooms in the house one of the bedrooms we took off the drywall that was added on the probably 1980s maybe 1990s and now you can really see how the house was built this is true shiplap this is not chip and Joanna shiplap this is real one by shiplap solid pine this was found on both the inside and the outside so the two by fours were she'd on both sides with shiplap and then later on that drywall was hung and you know what on the back of the drywall I thought we might find some mold growth from all that water that was leaking in none you'll also notice that at some point someone had tried to add some insulation to these walls but for the most part almost all the cavities were empty so there was probably plenty of airflow through these cavities the the walls got wet when it rained but they were able to dry out and really no issues except for a couple of places as I mentioned on the other house that had a little bit of termite damage but not very much now that house built in the 30s probably had lumber like this I love this photo I found this from a guy that I fall on Instagram who's a remodeler debt more 101 look at this picture of old growth versus new growth lumber so that old growth lumber look at all the growth rings on that photo and the new growth very few rings this really brings out a first massive difference between old houses and new houses old houses old growth lumber they had a lot of ability to soak up moisture they had a lot of ability to be structural and in that old lumber just was a much higher quality than new lumber okay moving on oh by the way here's here's what the house looked like when we finished remodel I love how the architect Hugh Jefferson Randolph kept the very old school look at the front that added on to the back in a very modern way ok another house we're fast-forwarding a few more decades now this is a house built in the 1960s here in Austin and the first thing you notice on this house is giant overhangs the last house that we looked at that wood framed house one or two foot overhangs this house had like five foot overhangs brick facade and whenever I see a house built in the 70s 80s with brick facades I'm worried I'm worried that that brick soaked up a lot of moisture when it rained or if the sprinkler systems hit the brick and what kind of rot or mold or issues am I gonna find behind the brick but guess what those massive overhangs those 5-foot overhangs meant that when we took some sections of brick down to check it out look at this it was in pristine condition back there now this house had an interesting type of sheathing that wasn't used for a whole long in a long time in America this is a gypsum sheathing that had an asphalt impregnated face basically a tar paper face and again because of that overhang nothing was getting wet back there that brick never got wet and even though we have a material that's not one that I would certainly use today it had because it wasn't getting wet it was in terrific shape I found really no problems on this house and here's the inside of the house after we stripped it down to remodel it very few problems inside but a couple of termite issues just in a few very specific places not not widespread by any means now why did that house in particular do so well let's take a quick two second timeout for some building science here this was a study by building science corporation from Canada where they looked at old houses and remodeled houses and percentage of houses that had problems look at that red column on the Left houses with no overhang they found a lot of problems houses with a bigger overhang over 24 inches not that many problems so the first takeaway from this I think is that overhangs from those old houses made a massive difference in making those old houses last those old houses also as you saw had some great materials between old-growth lumber or super thick stone walls that's some materials that we may or may not be able to get today they also were materials that weren't particularly moisture sensitive right you know drywall or newer growth lumber or OSB plywood much more moisture sensitive those older growth materials not as sensitive the other thing about those older houses in particular the you know 1880s or 1930s house that I showed a minute ago when they were built there was no air conditioning they had heating of course to keep people from dying in the wintertime but there was no air conditioning back then and as a result there was no cold surfaces for condensation to happen remember last week's video we talked about air flow and what happens when air leaks into a house with air conditioning a lot of bad things happen those houses avoided that by not having air conditioning also those old houses they were energy pigs you know they had lots of air flow they didn't have hardly any or no insulation which meant that in the wintertime if it got cold out they had massive eating bills it was super hard to keep those things warm and when they did finally air-conditioned them they probably had a heck of a time keeping the air-conditioning going they need massive air conditioning to cool them down they were massive energy users and again lots and lots of airflow that was a good thing remember that 1930s house with those stains under the window that house dried out because it had lots of airflow and that was a good thing for that old house the last thing I want to mention on these old houses too is that for many many decades as Americans we had pretty low standards when it came to comfort you know the people that lived in those older houses they didn't go to their thermostat and set it down to 72 every night before they went to bed they lived with whatever the conditions were and maybe in the wintertime they added some heat but they probably put a sweater on and in the summertime when it was hot they sure didn't sleep with a duvet cover over them and and snuggled up tight under the covers because the house was cold no they they probably slept on top of the covers and they sweated and maybe as as they were able to they added a fan or a window rattle or in one room so that could cool down at night but they sure didn't have the comfort standards of today so now let's talk about newer houses and again let's take a two-minute timeout for building science here I love this definition of building science if you watch my channel you know I talk about this a lot I've gotten an education in building science and my hope is this channel is going to help educate you and that's what we're talking about today the practical purpose of building science is to provide predictive capability to optimize building performance of new and existing buildings to understand and prevent building failures and to guide the design of new techniques and technologies I love that definition ok next before I show you a couple newer houses let's talk about the layers of the house right so there's there's really something on the outside of the house that we refer to as the building envelope but the envelope is comprised of three parts we've got the protection layer the control layer and the structure now in the Stonehouse the structure was the stone but we really didn't have the control and protect layer everything was stone on the wooden house the structure was the wood it really have much of a control layer on the outside it really just had a paint film right now we fast-forward to the 60s house and we saw the structure was wood it had some gypsum sheathing out there there was insulation in the cavities and the protection layer was the brick there's four things that a house has to control right it has to control water and that's in control air that's control vapor and then lastly thermal that's the the temperature change or the insulation layer on the house those old houses did a pretty incredible job of controlling those first three things without having failures but at what price so as we look now at some newer houses let's keep all those things in mind so this house is one of the first houses that I put ethos on e i fs extern external or exterior insulated finishing system if you're an old builder you know what I talking about if you're young builder you probably ever heard of this this picture was taken in 2001 this was really a pivotal time in America and a pivotal time in my career because this is when I first learned about building science this house you can see framed pretty traditionally and had plywood sheathing on the outside and then this efis system this was a relatively new system in the marketplace that came out in the late 90s around the year 2000 it was a cheat of foam that you would glue the back of the foam with the glue and stick it right on to the sheathing and then on top of that you would put a synthetic stucco basically a trout on one coat stucco on the outside it would come out of a five-gallon bucket it was like a latex coat of paint stucco combined and then you would caulk in all the windows and you'd leave it the problem with the system was that you had to have a perfectly sealed exterior or moisture would get in and what happens when moisture gets into a house that doesn't have air flow that's not made out of solid stone walls or doesn't have the ability to dry here's a perfect example of that this house tons of rot and literally these photos were taken just the hair over a year after the house was built the water was getting in and it's a little hard to tell in this photo but probably the water is coming in from these upper windows right here where we had just a little break in the caulking some water is getting back in there it had no place to dry there was no air flow even though we had relatively good materials you know some really good plywood that plywood could never dry and you've heard me say before my friend David Nicastro if it can't dry it's gonna die it's exactly what happened here tons of rot because the system wasn't allowed to dry and what does this mean for us today it means that when we've got more sensitive materials like we are building with today we need to control the rain we need to control the water let's look at another house this is how a house that I remodeled this was just the hair of her ten years old when I got there fairly typical Texas house and actually shot a video of the base of the wall now you saw this as a stone house but this is unlike the first stone house that was solid stone this is a stone veneer just like a brick front of the house is a stone front there's a stone ledge like you can see in the photo here the house had a sheet applied WRB weather resistant barrier it had this black kind of paper flashing that was meant to kick it out and you can see now that this this OSB which is a more sensitive material it's not like a solid wood when exposed to water especially at the base of the house because you even on a house with overhangs on a two-story house you get a lot of water at the base of a house look how this paper base flashing fair come and detail you see analysis black you can see that there was some black stuff happening on the OSB and I don't have a picture of it here but if you put your knife into it it wasn't mushy that clearly it had degraded that OSB had in only ten years okay let's let's look at the inside of that house now now inside of the house we had a vapor control air that's that plastic layer that's a big no-no in Texas in Texas we do not want any vapor control in the that's in northern detail we only want to control vapor at the outside wall and we had a few places where sprinklers were hitting the house and getting things real wet and as a result here's what we found in the back of the sheetrock in several places now am I saying that every house built in last 10 years has this issue no I'm not saying that but I am saying that we have a much more sensitive materials that we're building with today when we build with sheetrock and we build with OSB and newer growth lumber let's look at another one this is another one I remodeled this is these photos are from about ten years ago and at the time this house was also about ten years old again a fairly texas tuscan looking house and if you look right to the right of the front door look at that black staining happening there on the stone remember that in your mind we're gonna look at this picture after we've taken the skin off this building so here's us doing the remodeling we were changing the front facade and changing things around but you're starting to see what we're getting into here look at that OS b you can see that it's dark-colored and discolored in a bunch of areas on this photo here look at the very left you see that green staining on the on the brick anytime you see green or black staining on a brick or a part of me a stone front like this you should always be thinking what's behind there if that is green it means it's getting wet and this is a porous material brick and stone absorb and the mortar really absorbs what's happening behind there well this house had one layer of tar paper as the protection there was also a white sheet applied WRB but it was getting wet we had some areas where the gutters weren't working properly and we had splash back we also had some areas where the landscape sprinkler heads were hitting the house on a pretty regular basis and that was absorbing a lot of water and what happens when that absorbs a lot of water and again you've got sensitive materials it's not good people we need to be really cautious about that and this is on the front porch where we actually had a pretty decent overhang in this area but again a sensitive material look at that OSB after ten years of getting wet now this wasn't soaking wet but it was getting enough moisture that we even saw a little bit of fungal growth on there that white stuff not good not good and more of that same happening over on the other side of the house so let's fast-forward a little bit we talked about the materials we talked about the overhangs we talked about older houses being energy pigs let's talk about those comfort standards and can we build today like we built in the old days you probably could if you're building a cabin in the woods that you knew you were only gonna occupy a certain amount of the time but if you're building a house that you care about the energy bill or you care about comfort I'm not sure that we can build like we did in the old days you know here's a 1970s car this is from my you know my generation I grew up in the 70s and the 80s wood that car today be still be sold and a lot no it wouldn't think about today's cars and today's standards much much higher standard for every measure of performance whether it's comfort whether its energy efficiency whether it's gosh almost anything when it comes to the car those two cars they both have four wheels and a steering wheel on an engine but they are vastly different machines vastly different materials being used and that's the same with today's houses okay let me fast forward now to to give you a an overview or a perspective that maybe you hadn't thought of before if you've seen this house before I call this our perfect wall house this is a concept designed by building Science Corporation and a really smart building scientist Giusti brick this is a house that utilizes new materials but puts them together in a way that's a little bit different so let's run through this house this house frame traditionally you know regular to buys new new growth lumber now we did sheath it on the outside in kind of an old-school way but you'll see you'll see in a minute why because the inside of the house was going to be left exposed and as you see this finished photo you think where's the insulation there check out my other video I'll put a link in the description on a tour of this house but where's the insulation the insulation is going to go on the outside of the house rather than the inside of the house so now let's look at the exterior here's the outside framing we she'd the house pretty traditionally with wood we built it with wood but then what did we do instead of a weather resistant barrier or something that was only relatively waterproof like tar paper or a sheet applied product that gets staples through it we put a really bummer waterproofing on this house we used basically an ice and water shield on the outside of the house you see me do this all the time on my houses today I want to use that silver water perching made by Polly wall called a luma flash but this is the very first time I'd ever thought about it and had done a really very waterproof exterior you also noticed this house doesn't have any overhangs and I mentioned earlier that overhangs are good for houses that's true but let me show you why we didn't on this house we were able to run the waterproofing from the foundation up and over the ridge of the house and all the way back down so that was done it looked like a big Monopoly piece and it was able to be wrapped top to bottom with this super thick gooey waterproofing peel and stick and then on top of that we added the insulation now we use two layers of insulation on the outside of the house and why do we do that why would we wrap that insulation on the outside of the house well now that insulation is just doing thermal control duties for us behind that is the control layer that's controlling water and air and vapor all-in-one that peel-and-stick is gonna do an incredible job of controlling the water controlling the air in controlling the vapor the insulation is just doing thermal duties and then we ran a 1 by 4 batten on that and attached siding to that so here now you can see this is the gable and that insulation is all the way over the house like a big blanket of insulation no bridging no issues with with studs causing thermal bridging everything is thoroughly blanketed the only holes in that where the window indoors and here's the finished house as a result we didn't hang drywall on the inside because we wanted to kind of showcase what we could do but you could hang drywall on this house you could you could build this very traditionally on the inside if you wanted to you could even put laughs and plaster in there because I hope today's episode gave you a little bit of a taste and a desire to learn more about building science but what's the big takeaways on this our old house is built better and some respects they were built a little better we had some better materials back then but in other respects they weren't built to today's standards I don't think any one of you would go back and live in that 1880s house with your family or that 1930s house as the way it was built in the 1930s we can't go back there when it comes to materials air conditioning energy pigs airflow or low standards we cannot overhangs but everything else is changed and so we need to think of the house from a building science perspective we need to think about how we put our houses together we need to do the best possible job we can when it comes to waterproofing and keeping the air out of our houses and then what should we do those things right then we can worry about vapor control and insulation those things are low down the list when it comes to importance guys I appreciate you hanging with me today we wrap up today's episode with with a little quote from the elements of building one of my favorite books that I come back to you all the time I have so many pages underlined in here because I love this book but but I love this quote about quality what is quality quality is great excellence quality like honesty is not optional nearly everyone knows the difference between a mediocre and a quality product the best employees will want to produce it and the best customers will pay for it selling quality instead of price will bring more interesting and more profitable jobs guys thanks for following me on the build show for more information on this topic check out the links that I'll have in the description below a couple other videos that I think will give you more info on this topic otherwise follow me on Twitter Instagram we'll see you next time on the build show [Music] you

Channel: Matt Risinger

Views: 484,977

Rating: 4.8882189 out of 5

Keywords: old houses, better built, new homes, construction, old consctrucion, are new homes junky, matt risinger, the build show, new vs old homes, crappy built homes, remodel vs built new, remodeling, build, building science, matt risinger presentation

Id: KBMMDY3LFAA

Length: 25min 9sec (1509 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 14 2018