These are the steps we’re going to be taking. In the first process, of course, we’re going to double-check and make sure that the window is square. The time to do that is during the framing stage, make sure during quality assurance to check for plumbness and squareness of the windows doors.

The next thing we’re going to do is we’re going to cut the house wrap back in an ‘I’ form, we’ll cut the top of the house wrap up at a 45-degree angle and get it out of the way we’ll take the sides and we’ll wrap them around to the inside. After that, we’ll put a flexible seal pan down, run it up about six inches on both sides of the window then we’ll fold it down.

Then we’ll caulk in around the window on the sides and top but not the bottom, and set the window in place using shims on the bottom. 

We’ll come back and tape the outside of the window to the weatherization wrap. Once this is done, we will tape the top of the window, pull the weatherization wrap down to the window, and tape off the seams, and that will give us a complete window installation.

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This home has a lot of qualities of a high-performance home, a few that I want to point out is that you have a 2×6 outside wall and the studs that are 24-inch center that gives you 33% more insulation than a 2×4 outside wall. The next thing we have, if you look up to the header, you have a cavity for the foam to go into above the header, cutting down the thermal transfer temperature from the outside to the inside. Same thing with the corners if you see my hand coming around the corner we have room for the foam coming around the back side then you have a 2×4 inside wall, this wall’s on a 16-inch center so you can see the difference between the spacing of the studs on the inside wall versus the stud space on the outside wall.

I want to do is demonstrate some ways to verify that the wall is going to flow straight across the plane of the sheetrock. The main thing is make sure that the framing members are straight, they plumb and aligned it when they frame the house, but what happens when the wall stud goes to warping on you? A good way to check this is with some kind of straight material on the job site and check your studs by lay it against the wall. You can see which studs are lined up good if you have one that’s way out go ahead and mark it, and you can adjust accordingly, but you can take this along all the walls of the house inside walls and outside walls, and look for anything that’s out of plum.

Another thing to remember before you sheetrock make sure all your media wires come to one location. So you get them all hooked up, but also important, make sure you have a 110 to plug your media equipment into. Your media wires come to one location your 110 comes to the same location, that way when down the road, you’re not having to bust a bunch of sheetrock out to fix this stuff. 

Some more things you want to be looking out for prior to sheet rocking is on your framework. Whenever you have a wall going parallel with your joist look up top and make sure you have the dead wood blocking on top of your wall. Think about how the sheetrock comes to the wall you want to make sure you have something another shear out to on the top part of the wall. The next thing you want to look at is our nail plates up on top, make sure the nail plate goes plain with the wall, if it buckles out you can have buckling sheet rock, especially in the corner and it’s going to be very obvious. 

Anywhere you have a wall intersecting with the long wall on the house you’re going to have a tee. I’ve got a tee going that way with the wall and then a wall going this way that forms a tee you want to make real sure that you have proper blocking top middle and bottom for that tee. What that does it stabilizes that tee to help the sheer rock from cracking out on the inside corner.

Make sure when you’re walking around all your windows and outside doors that the headers have blocking on top and bottom so the sheetrock can come down and make the corner and have something to nail to. 

This is a good size garage and you’ve got a lot of open span areas. When we do the open spans we have the beams that support the weight, so we have the LVL coming through the middle of it and we elevate the LVL off the plane of the ceiling that way if we have a deflection of that LVL beam it won’t get into the plane of the ceiling. Anytime you have a span of over about eight feet you want to be sure and put a stiff back on the joists. This is almost 20 feet on the span if you look up you’re going to see that the stiff back goes across, but all the joists are blocking the stiff back using wood blocking that prevents that joist from pulling loose from the stiff back.

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If the brick poly is put behind the OSB, or it’s put up before the sheathing is, then moisture has access to the bottom of the OSB which is the incorrect application. Again you want to make sure you have the drain pan coming down and nothing’s coming back.

We’re working on the integrity of the house exterior envelope. If you notice how we’re protecting the integrity here with the penetration of the freon lines for the heating and air system and the electrical lines that supply the heating air system. Through the exterior envelope of the house we have tape around to seal it off tight, then we have tape around the metal protectors sealing them off tight also. 

We’re looking for the integrity and to keep the moisture out of the house. This house is a full foam encapsulation so we don’t worry so much about air penetration but we do worry about the moisture penetration which is the house’s worst enemy. 

Anytime we have a penetration through the brick we want to protect that from being damaged. So if you notice, we have the wiring coming through the brick and we have the sleeves for the wire that penetrates through the brick that helps protect this wiring from being damaged by the mortar and the brick and in the process of bricking the house. 

Same thing with the freon lines. the metal caps will help protect the integrity of the freon lines as they penetrate through the brick during construction of laying brick and also in the long term.

On the house wrap, it’s a properly sized house wrap meaning it goes from the brick ledge all the way up into the soffit. There’s no horizontal seams at all in the house wrap, also that the application of the house wrap that we’re nailing it up with plastic caps. The benefit of a plastic cap versus a staple, a staple has a tendency to penetrate clean through the house wrap. Thus breaking the drain pan that you’re trying to protect. The plastic cap helps maintain the integrity of the house wrap and exterior envelope thus we don’t have any moisture penetration through the house wrap into the house. 

There’s another process that we have on the outside of the house. This process going on is again for moisture control, moisture gets through the brick through a capillary action through the mortar. So you have mortar on the back side of the brick and it as it goes down it comes out of the weep holes in the bottom of the brick. It also works as a convection going up to where the air flows helps dry the back of the brick out and it kind of insulates between the brick and the house. So that’s important to allow air to flow, so you need to have a cavity for it to flow through so if you go up to the back of the brick and you come out to the vented soffit the vented soffit allows, again, for the airflow from the brick through the soffit and back out of the house thus helping to dry and insulate between the brick and the house.

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There a lot of ways to add a safe room to a house. You can put it in the garage where it’s exposed, you can add it to a closet to where you can still see it or you can hide it behind a bookcase. 

If you hide it behind a bookcase – like what we have here – you just come to it you open the bookcase up then you have the access. Now notice the safe room door opens to the inside, the secondary door on the outside of the safe room opens to the outside. 

The best practice would be not to have this door on this because if the house falls down the door blocks whoever is in the safe room. The safe room door opens to the inside. Inside the safe room you can have electronics, lighting, and you could have a security system tied in. So if you did have to go into the safe room to hide they can locate you and find you and know that you’re in there.

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So we have a 22 kilowatt generator here we have it on our transfer switch tied to a separate panel box now keep in mind with this being a partial house generator we have two panel boxes in the attic and we have two cutoff switches on the outside let me show you how this works when the transfer switch senses loss of power within a few mega seconds it’ll kick the generator on which re-feeds back through the transfer switch to the sub panel on the far side over here let me take you over here and show you the two sub panels with the main disconnects.

So we have the main feed coming into the house which is split off into two separate feeds, you have one feed running a sub panel in the attic that’s not supported by the generator and you have the second feed that’s running a panel box that is supported by the generator. So the paddle box with this feed has a circuitry in it that when we lose power the generator will feed that circuitry with power and we’ll go up in the attic and take a look at them.

As I mentioned downstairs we have two separate panel boxes in the attic of the house combined they carry all the circuitry within the house as a whole. Individually the panel box we have here contains a circuitry that is supported by the generator in case of loss of power. That’ll be your refrigerator we spoke about or the office area or whatever you want to have controlled, the other panel box controls the net of the remaining circuitry within the house.

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Consider when we pour the foundation we set the drain of the tub and we also stub up the water for the faucet. If we don’t use the right dimensions – i.e we have the wrong model numbers – then it won’t work together as good as it has here. You want to make sure the faucet drains into the tub correctly, without that information communicated and the right trades people are working together this would never work.

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This is where the power comes into the house it comes from the outside service into the house to the back side and it comes into these panel boxes. Then from the panel boxes you can see the wires which distribute out to the main part of the house. One thing I want to point out is the neatness of the wiring it’s bundled up tight it gets to the attic and it uniformly goes down to the rest of the house rather than scattered throughout the whole attic. Something else I want to point out, is the height of the panel boxes, this home is built to more of a universal design that means the panel box will drop slightly so that the person in the home can get access to the main power cut off in case he needs to.

I want to point out the green tint to the bottom of the framing members. We tint our termite protection green so that we make sure we get proper coverage of the framing members with the termite protection. The mark we have on the stud is just signifying that the wire is too close to the edge of the stud and then it needs a nail plate.

We’re in the kitchen area so I want to point out a few aspects of the wall system here. To start off with, if you notice the water lines are PEX I like PEX a lot for many reasons but the most simplistic reason is you got blue cold and you got red hot. The splices are easily made and the runs are all full run from this location to the previous location. Another thing is a blocking for the cabinets you have blocking for the lower cabinets blocking for the upper cabinets and with the universal design aspect of it if you notice the switches are slightly lower than what most switches are on the wall.

The next thing I want to point out on the wall will be the PVC feeds. You have the PVC going from the very top down through the slab feeding the island and you have one feed in the floor plug. With it going all the way to the top plate it makes it easy to feed later on if you want to add additional wiring to it. Then you look at the very top all these penetrations in the wall are foamed and sealed off. 

I want to point out a few things on the island, you have the bar that’s been framed up for the back of the island. Then you have the water lines and power lines and such coming from under the slab on the far end of the island. And you have the PEX come across, remember the red PEX for the hot water the blue PEX is for the cold water, and they’re terminated with copper. It makes a lot easier and stable to have your shutoff valve on the end of the copper rather than being fed through the PEX. 

You have your drain lines through the PVC. This particular drain line is set up to have a mechanical Studor valve installed on it which is a one-way air valve for the ventilation system. Another way of doing that is a loop system to where the PVC would loop up and around, down back to the slab and back to the roof to help ventilate again the sewer lines.

I want to point out a few things when it comes to a wood burner fireplace inside of a full-foam encapsulated house. Now this is the 42 inch firebox and we do have the outside combustible air coming in to help feed the fire but it’s not near enough to help this fire burn properly. So on a wood burning fireplace, in a full-foam encapsulated house, you need to be sure and open your window slightly one closest to the firebox to help this fire burn properly.

We have blocking in the wall of the kitchen to attach the cabinets to so you’re not trying to find the studs when you’re installing the cabinets. You have a 36 inch lower cabinet and then between the lower cabinet and the upper cabinet is about 18 inches. Then from the upper cabinet they are normally about a 42 inch cabinet on the uppers, but on this particular house we have we’ll have cabinets from the upper cabinets to the ceiling that are just open cabinets for displays.

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