10 Crafting Your Dream Home: Part 1 - Exploring Construction, Framing, and Siding Choices

From excavation to siding styles, join us as we dive into the key aspects of crafting your ideal home. Discover expert insights on framing options, material choices, and design considerations that shape your living space. Whether you're a DIY enthusiast or planning a custom build, this episode has something for everyone.

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Transcript

Hey, Landon. Hi, how are you?

Good morning.

Happy Friday to you too.

What's latest and greatest?

I was hoping today we could talk about some selections and things that go into a house.

Let's maybe categorize those selections, talk about what are the bigger items, maybe the more spendy items. Maybe we can kind of break down the generalized scope of what selections will look like.

Yeah. So I was thinking maybe we could start it and go in the order of a building process.

Perfect.

How's that sound?

You bet.

That way we can keep our thoughts organized.

Yeah, because we're not very good at doing that.

That is true.

You get Landon and Drew together, and we might end up in the weeds somewhere. So excavation would probably be your first thing, right?

Yeah. I mean, I would say, what are we talking about? When you're talking about excavation, you're talking about different types of foundations. Really? And the landscape shape and the type of terrain you're talking about, even the groundwater level and where water is at on the land and what's going to dictate. That is where land is at and what type of foundation you're going for, and then that's going to dictate what type of excavation you need to do. So, for example, if a person is doing a slab on grade, which is not as common up here as it is in other places, but like down south, they're super common here. We don't do them as often, but they do come up. And you're talking about not digging as deep. Right. You're talking about not a very good fit for a hillside. It's also kind of limited on how high you want to go. I don't recommend going over one story with a slab on grade. You can do two stories. You just end up making the slab on grade thicker to compensate for that.

Thickened edge, I think is pretty common, right?

Yeah. But when you're going about excavation, one of the most important things you can think about is your plans long term. And if you design your site from the beginning with the end in mind, you're going to be light years ahead. We'll do like a 3D site model and ensure that your driveway is running at the right grade so it's not too steep in the winter, it's not going to wash away when it rains in the spring. And your water is flowing away from the house at all times.

Yeah. Which is critical.

Yeah. Water intrusion on a house, 90% of the problems that ever happen, you get a roof leak, you get a foundation sorry, water intrusion through your foundation, groundwater rises, negative drainage. All these things are caused by water intrusion, which can then lead to mold and all kinds of other things. So site plan is actually critical in the beginning, and so we always start.

There, especially when it comes to flood season, too. You think about a flash flood and perhaps your house is, say, just fine, or the site plan is whatever. It wasn't necessarily thought through, but it's not meant to accommodate this massive flash flood that comes out of nowhere.

And suddenly you have this huge maybe.

You have a gutter that's running in not quite the right direction or something, and it tends to pool up and it's leaving maybe away from the house, but only two foot away from the house. Then you get a torrential rainstorm and suddenly you have a bunch of water just sitting up against your foundation.

Yeah. And even though you go and compact all the soil around the outside, when you're backfilling, it's still a disturbed soil. So water will naturally flow through. That easier, even if it's 95% compact or whatever. So that's going to be naturally the easiest place for the water to go.

Yeah.

But one thing you can do, too, that isn't important is run a perimeter drainage around the bottom of your foundation. And that also helps a lot. And so it gives that water it can get down there, but then it has a place for it to go once it's there.

Right. Surrounded by pea gravel. And you basically have a getaway for the water that does make it down there. Right.
And gutters is the big thing, too, I think some people, me included, this is something I actually recently learned, just how critical gutters actually are in getting the water away from your house. You have a lot of water coming down off your roof. We don't realize that. And when it's all let's say you have a valley somewhere and there's a focus point where that water is coming off and you don't have the proper gutters installed, you basically stuck a hose in the ground next to your foundation and it's just pouring down there.

Yeah, exactly.

And then erode in the dirt away and it just gets worse.

Well, and concrete is not waterproof.

Right.

Concrete is actually porous. And so it's going to hold most of the water out because the pores are not very big. But over time, water will actually seep through concrete.

It's almost like condensation. Yeah, it's kind of how it acts.

And so you obviously put a weatherproofer on the concrete to avoid that. But bottom line is you got to keep that water away from the bottom of your foundation and against the house.

Yeah.

The other thing too, with foundations is a person has their land picked out and they decide, well, I'm on a hill and now I want to build a basement. And how that basement is poured and engineered is another critical thing because we don't have very good soils around here. There's a lot of times that we have soils that are expandable fatty clays and stuff like that. And we always do a geotech whenever we build a house. And the reason we do that is because if somebody has expansive soils on their property and a crack shows up five or six years down the road like a major crack. I'm not talking about a curing crack, right, because concrete cures and it shrinks and it's going to crack no matter what. But those are smaller, non threatening cracks, right? They're meant to be there. I mean you can't really get around it. But when somebody has a structural crack in their foundation, that's a big deal. And so how's the rebar, how's the concrete, what's the mixture of the concrete and all those things? They have to be taken into consideration based on what type of house you're building, where the loads are at, what type of terrain you're on, and a soil condition. So another important selection your house design is going to your foundation design is going to be based off of all of those things. So we know how to build it correctly.

Let's talk a little bit about foundation types more. You'd mentioned a slab on grade. It also can be referred to as a monolithic slab, which is where you pour essentially your foundation perimeter and the concrete slab inside the house at the same time. It's monolithic, right, which is real common for like you mentioned, in lots of areas, not so much up here. It's kind of the right place for the right foundation scenario. But the other common foundation would be a crawl space. And maybe let's talk a little bit about that, the common depths, the pros and cons.

Exactly. So in Wyoming, we have a 42 inch frost depth for our we have to let me say that differently, our foundations have to be a minimum of 42 inches below surface because our frost depth is commonly getting close to that level. And so our code is designed specifically for that. You don't want frost underneath your footings at any given time and as soon as it does, it will build up and expand that soil and actually crack. Concrete frost is incredibly powerful and so we always go down four foot plus an eight inch footing. So we go deeper than normal just because one is we want to ensure that our foundations are safe. But two, our concrete forms are 4ft tall. So it's easiest just to go near the top of that form, concrete form and pour it full. So with that being said, now you have this area underneath your house that has a dirt floor and you can't live down there. What do you do with it? Well, what we do is we actually run our HVAC and everything underneath the house and we insulate the outside of the crawl space. And so we're heating and cooling the crawl space and we cover the crawl space floor with plastic and seal it all off.

And that is a conditioned area down there. I mean you could crawl down in your crawl space and it should be the same temper even a little bit warmer or cooler as your house. Yes.

And so what that essentially does is keeps everybody has probably seen the foundation vents that they used to put in back in the, I don't know, early 2000s. They probably stopped doing that. So up until that point, everyone had these foundation vents cut into their foundation that would go into their crawl space. And anything that was happening outside was also happening in your crawl space, essentially. And so air would blow in and bring the leaves with it. If your vent broke out, like if your screen broke out or you got.

A raccoon makes its way down there.

Yeah, mice water is oftentimes blowing in.

There, especially with the Wyoming wind. You can imagine you have, say, a house that's squared north, southeast, west, right. It's perpendicular with the directions, and you have a prevailing northwest wind, and you have a vent in, say, your west side of your foundation and your east side, and you just created a vacuum through your foundation. So you get a wind that kicks up, and it's just blowing this cold air right through, sucking it through like a windmill. And now your floor is freezing, and maybe your pipes are even starting to freeze a little bit. And if you have anything down there for this climate, for this dry climate, moisture is not so much of a problem as it is in, say, I don't know, on the West Coast, say, Washington state, they typically have more like mold issues. And so ventilation is a bigger deal, but not out here. And like you mentioned, it's just kind of a dying thing now. There's better ways of doing it.

Yeah. And so instead of running those vents through, we see your furnace has to have fresh air to operate because of what a gas furnace does. Right. So you're inducing fresh air into your furnace and then transporting that or transferring that around your house mechanically. So that's how you end up venting. It's still ventilated. It's just done mechanically instead of naturally. Instead of yeah, it's not a naturally.

Naturally aspirated I was thinking. We turbo it instead of naturally. Aspirated for all you snowmobile guys out there, you know what we're talking about.

And then the other thing, too, is your floors are staying warmer. You mentioned your floor gets cold. Well, when you have a ventilated crawl space, you have to insulate the floor so your stuff doesn't freeze. But when you have a negative 30 deg winter day, and that could potentially go on for a week here, yeah, hopefully not.

But your insulation is not going to stop that.

Your floor will still be cold, especially.

If you have something like tile, man tile, like concrete stone tile. Everyone knows that retains heat and cold really well. And, yeah, living on a cold tile floor, especially in the middle of the night, and you step on an ice cold tile, there's nothing worse. There's nothing worse than that.

Another thing that since we're talking about frost protection and stuff like that, just a minute ago, I was thinking on the slab on grade. So we're not going down four foot, right?

Right.

We're only going down 16 or 18 inches. So it's just a thickened on the edge. Yeah, just a thickened edge. It's 1618 inches thick, which gives you structure. So you might ask, well, why do you go down so deep on why don't you have to go down as deep as you do on a crawl space? Right, well, what we have to do is we have to use foam concrete forms which actually stop the frost from penetrating near the foundation. And frost generally only descends into the soil vertically. And so if your concrete is formed with these types of forms that are 16 inches by 16 inches, triangle, just for an easy explanation, they're not quite triangle, but pretty close to a triangle. That means your frost is 16 inches away from the foundation, which is far enough that you don't have frost. Heave penetrating underneath your concrete.

It's not going to creep horizontally and get underneath your thickened edge.

Yeah, and I think I've heard that over a long enough distance it would creep horizontally. But you're talking such a deep depth by the time it got there, it's really not going to happen.

Coupled with your geotech, too, depending on what type of soil you have. Right. Because frost is going to play a little bit differently in, say, clay versus something else.

Correct. Yeah. So wherever water can collect, that's where frost will grow. Frost doesn't grow in a surface that's completely drainable. Like, for example, drain rock. You can't grow frost in drain rock because the water doesn't build up there, it just dries out. But at certain point, your drain rock is going to end. And if that's deep enough, then it's going to hit soil and then frost could potentially grow there if it's, say, within the frost depths of your location. So a lot of times people went on a really tall wall, tall foundation wall. They'll actually specify backfilling with drainable rock. And what that does is the water will then run through and allow, first of all, no frost near the foundation. And second of all, it also keeps any expandable soils from pushing sideways.

Right. You're constantly dissipating that.

Yes. So that drain rock, the backfilled drain rock, we've done this on a few foundations and the water drains all the way down to below the footing level because you put in a perimeter drain below the footing level and then drains out. And so it's a pretty cool system. But it's also expensive because you're talking about so much drain rock.

Right. And digging down further, is there any other types of foundations? I know the two common ones are a crawl space, and then there's a slab on Grade or a monolithic slab.

Yeah. So the other is a piling foundation. And this is where you're talking big money. We've bid a few of them. And on your average house, like the average houses that we build, they're 2500 to say 4500. For a house in that range, a piling foundation is going to add about roughly 80 to 150 grand.

Right.

And so that price is on top of your standard foundation. So you still have to do your foundation after that.

Right.

So what a piling foundation is, is there's a couple of different ways of doing it. But a common way around here is they'll actually auger holes down. And the geotech report is going to specify the depth. We see them like 18 or 20ft deep, maybe 18 inches around. And then what they do is they'll put rebar cages down into that 18.

Foot deep hole, essentially building just a super solid post concrete and rebar.

Exactly. That rebar cage goes down and they fill that whole thing full of concrete. Now you have all these on every corner and then intermittently at space, whatever the spacing needs to be on the straight walls, you have all these concrete pilings going down in the ground. And then from there you pour your foundation on top of those and it spans from piling to piling. So that's in extreme conditions, where the soil conditions are extremely unstable.

Or maybe you're building some big fancy house on the mountain, right, on a hill face or something like that. And you got to go way down. And there's no way to unstable soil like you mentioned. So this is like I picture like those Amazon people building these huts on.

Stilts above a river, only you don't see them. Right.

Only you don't see underground.

Yeah, right, similar to that. I guess. I hadn't thought of it that way. Yeah, interesting.

We could just do that too. Just build a house on stilt, cut some trees down and wedge them into the dirt and call it good.

Yeah.

Moving on from excavation, I think we covered that stuff pretty well. But no, this is good stuff. I think people don't really think about frost a whole lot. I know. In Minnesota that's another big thing. Oh, one point I wanted to bring up ICF blocks, maybe real quick. We can talk about that, being as we're on the subject. Explain what exactly an ICF block is, what it does, what's the advantage?

Yeah, so an ICF block insulated structural form. I'm sorry, insulated concrete form. It's a layer of foam on the outside, concrete in the center, and a layer of foam on the inside. So when you buy these forms, they're essentially two pieces of foam and then depending on what brand you buy, but essentially you have two layers of foam with a void in the middle that's held together with some plastic, like, supports or whatever. Yeah, plastic supports. And you stack all these blocks up. They're kind of like Legos.

I love them. They're so fun. I love Legos.

And once again, you'd put in your rebar according to design, and if you have a taller foundation, it equals more rebar. Smaller foundation equals less, right?

Yeah. Well, and real quick, those plastic supports actually have, like, placeholders for the rebar, for your horizontal rebar to lay in. It's all designed with rebar and everything in mind. They're actually very easy to use. So there's a lot less tying rebar, actually.

Right. You build your whole foundation as though you're forming it with regular forms, build it the same, and pour everything. You have to cut all your windows out. It's kind of complex. I can't exactly explain how to install them just on a podcast. But you would stack all these blocks up, and there's windows you'd cut out, and you'd put window bucks around and whatever. And when you're done forming, you pour. And after you're done pouring, you leave all the foam there. So now you have an insulated concrete form that's full of concrete, and you're done. You don't have to insulate your basement. It can be super handy. And you know who it's really handy for is a homeowner who doesn't want to hire a concrete guy to come pour his foundation. So now he's killed two birds with 1 st, plus he didn't have to hire somebody to do it.

And it's a very good product in the end, it's a very solid foundation, provided it's done right. And I love the idea that the two birds of 1 st like, to me, if you can get two birds of 1 st on anything with a house building product, that's the way to go. Right.

Two things. One is it's not as common still as regular formed concrete, so it's harder to find people to do it. So if you aren't going to hire somebody to do it. And the other thing is, it actually costs more.

It is expensive. You're really buying time.

Yeah. It costs more than forming a foundation and insulating your basement. But if you're doing your own labor, then it's cheaper, right, because you don't have to hire somebody. So it kind of depends on the route you're going and what your end goal is.

Sure. I know in Minnesota, it's pretty common ICF block, and there's actually people that do their entire house all the way up to the first floor, up until it meets their roof. They'll do their entire house in ICF block. They basically have a concrete house.

Yeah. And that makes a super efficient house. You can actually do roofs in it. Do you know that?

Yeah, it's essentially a sips panel in that method, right?

Well, I've actually never done one, but yeah, essentially, you install your concrete forms on your roof. The foam is on the underside, and then you put in all your supports to hold it temporarily. And then you pour concrete on the top. And so you end up with a concrete roof and then you weatherproof over the top of that concrete.

Yeah, that'd be interesting. I'd like to do that just to try it and see how it would work. Do an entire house in concrete, you'd.

End up with the fireproof house.

Yeah.

The foam would melt, if I suppose.

Right, interesting. Moving on from excavation and foundation, maybe let's talk about framing a bit. I know there's not a whole lot when it comes to selection. Typically, the design is going to dictate what your framing is going to look like, but there's things like bonus trusses, maybe skylights. There's little things with framing that you can do that are maybe custom.

A couple of things that come to mind right offhand is, first of all, nobody around here builds exterior walls with two x four. And surprisingly, I get that question a lot. Yeah. Hey, are you building this in two x six? And yes, we're building it with two x six. We don't ever build a house with two x four exterior walls. One is we can't get our insulation value very good that way, but two, it's just a more robust structure and we don't want to cut corners on something like a structure. So, yeah, it's always two x six exteriors, unless you get to a tall balloon wall. And a lot of times we'll actually go to a two x eight because the wall is so tall, you lose strength with height.

Right.

And then there's things like your trusses. Is this going to be a hand framed, extremely custom cut up, hand framed roof or something that we can have.

A factory build trusses for, which is most common?

Yeah, the most common is the trusses. We prefer that because then we can just hire a crane and come and set them all. But sometimes a roof is just so complicated and cut up, it just doesn't really pay to build trusses because your trusses are so overly complicated that it's first really hard to build them. And two, super expensive. So there is a point where it's a trade off.

Yeah. I think it's pretty common to have a trust package. And then there's a lot of what you would call over framing or extra framing or whatever built into that. Right. Like, hey, we've set the trusses, we're at about 90% now. We have there's a lot of dinking around to tie everything together, make sure your values are all lining up. Right. Framers. Love that. No, I don't think they do.

And then there's things like bonus rooms. Since we're talking about trusses, you can get rooms that are built into your trusses for over certain areas. Like garages is super common. It doesn't have to be over a garage, it can be over any part of the house. But a garage just seems to be an easy place to put bonus trusses, which is if you picture I assume everyone can picture what a trust looks like in their mind. You essentially take the center of that trust out and you have livable room. So the center of your trust is hollow, and you sheet the floor.

By the way, you can't just do that with any trust. So for people you jack knobs out there who think they can crawl up in their attic and start stalling your webbing out of your center of your trusses, that's not going to work. It's engineered. It's engineered. So you can't just simply, oh, I'll clear this room out, and I'll have a bonus room up. Yeah, no, don't do that. People do it. Don't try that at home.

Yeah. Please. Okay. The bonus trusses, we have things like we can do timber framing.
Timber framing is a way of adding posts and beams. A lot of times they're exposed. They look really neat, adds a cool, more rustic type. Well, it doesn't have to be rustic, but a lot of times it's more common. In a rustic type house, we have different types of floor joists and floor trusses beams, steel beams, wood beams, glue, lambs, lvls laminated type beams.

And there's a lot of those different options out there as far as getting that exposed look. But I think a pretty common way is actually doing what you'd call a faux beam or a fake beam. A lot of times it doesn't really work or pay off to do it structurally, like, actually have it built into the structure. But they want that beam look in their, say, their living room. Well, we can just basically build a fake beam where it just sleeps or sisters or is just up against whatever your drywall or whatever, and it looks like it's built in, but it's really not doing anything.

Yeah, so we've done that quite a few times. We've also installed real beams and real timber trusses that were actually not structural.

Right.

And so they actually are a full blown, like a 500 pound timber truss or however much it might weigh, but it's actually not holding anything up other than itself. And so that's a pretty cool way of making that timber look without actually doing a full timber frame house.

Yeah, I think too, things like eyebrows maybe describe what an eyebrow is and then also corbles or lots of those little fancy things you can do that are sort of aesthetic add ons. They don't really do much, but they structurally but they look really cool and it gives a lot of character. It can really dress up a house with a couple of, say, steel roofed eyebrows.

Yeah. So an eyebrow is how would you explain an eyebrow? It's a protrusion, generally over another thing, like, for example, a two foot overhang with a roof over a garage door that maybe sometimes they are only 2ft long coming off of each corner of the house. Or sometimes they'll go all the way across the top of the garage door.

It's like a little lean to kind of coming off the side of your house that's stand under the rain.

Yeah, that's a lot better.

Little lean to roof or something. Yeah, but really it's just aesthetics, right?

Yeah, it's aesthetics. And it adds a little especially on the face of garages. Garages are pretty boring. It's just a big old garage door and then a gable eyebrows are really good spot to put that. You can build them out of beams and do a steel roof on it and really actually dress up your garage face quite a bit with some eyebrows.

Yeah. And even tying that in too. I'm just picturing you look at the front of a house, say you have a big garage door on your left like you described. You have your main front door in the middle that has an entry. And then you have, say, another window and room to the right. You do an eyebrow over the garage, you do an eyebrow over the window on the right and suddenly you just tied all that together. That suddenly seems like it's meant to be right. And it's dressed up and it was a simple way of doing it.

Yeah. And they don't have to be just like you said, they don't have to be over just garage doors. It could be over windows or the front door or depending on the architecture of the house, you get creative with that and make it work.

Do it over your water spigot, whatever. That way when you go out in the rain to turn your hose on, which you often do, you can stay out of the rain.

Or you could just do a teeny one.

Yeah, there you go. Like a birdhouse one. That'd be perfect. A couple of other things that just came to my mind. There's different styles of like bird boxes or exposed tail ends of tresses. There's lots of little different things like that you can do. Maybe we won't get into all this framing jargon, but there's a lot that you can customize with framing. I think people it all comes out in the design and the planning. Right. But people who don't really understand framing typically, I feel typically won't necessarily be aware of what the options are. And so they'll just kind of go with the recommended whatever. And perhaps there's a lot of framers out there that are just like, well, you want this basic structure, that's fine, I can build you a structure. But then there's, I would say another tier of framer that says, hey, here's all your options, or here's your plan set. I realize that this wouldn't work or that wouldn't work. That's another topic that maybe we could discuss is the discrepancies and opinions between an architect and the tradesman. But there's a lot you can do with framing and essentially that's your design. That's the design of your house that's going to change everything.

Okay. So generally when you pick a house plan, you don't. Look at it as, oh, this house will be framed this way. You think, oh, I like the look of this house. And then you send it out for bid, and then the framer is going to look at it, oh, it needs to be framed this way. And that's when the questions start coming up. But a person, when they're looking at choosing a house plan, they're not thinking about how it's going to be framed. They just like the style of it or whatever. And that style is most likely going to be framing, right? All the roof pitches, all the wall heights, the cathedral ceilings, the stairways, the bridges from one floor to the next over an exposed two story living room, the window sizes, all those things actually are a direct correlation to structural framing. And an average homeowner, there's some who will think about it, but an average homeowner is going to look at it like, I love this house. I want to build this house. And the framer is going to say, these are all the things that I need to know about this house in order to get it framed. And then hopefully the architect like this thing you brought up a second ago, we'll figure all those things out so then the builder can go ahead and do them.

Right? I'm not knocking architects, by the way, for all you architects out there, I.

Love you guys, or the structural engineers, there's people to design all this stuff to ensure that these architectural ideas actually work, right?

I think that's what see, everybody in the building industry doesn't matter what trade or what position or architect or framer. You're going to look at it through your own lens. If you're a framer, you're looking at it from a framer's lens, plain and simple. The architects can look at the overall picture. They're not going to be 100% through a framer's lens and then move on 100% through HVAC lens.

Right.

They're going to look at everything from sort of a bird's eye view. So after framing, I know we probably have to split this segment up, but that's okay. I want to talk about some bigger items that are very common, and I often get a lot of questions about siding, roofing, doors and windows and oh boy, can these affect the cost of your house?

Yeah, big time.

So maybe we'll start with siding. I know we use LP Smart siding a lot with a good paint. There's masonry, there's steel siding, there's vinyl, there's all these different options. Maybe start off with your favorite siding method.

And why favorite siding method? I don't really know what my favorite is. It all depends on the house style. If you're going for a more rustic look, you can do rustic in a modern look, and you can do rustic in a country look, and you can do rustic in a farmhouse look. And so there's all these different styles, and you can do a modern farmhouse. There's so many different ways of doing things. There's not a favorite for me. If a person wanted to go, say, a mountain modern, then there's thermally modified wood. I love thermally modified wood. They bake it to an extremely high temperature. Don't quote me on this.
I think it's like 1100 degrees or something like that. Really high temperature, but with no oxygen so it doesn't burn. It just bakes all of the what would you say? Like the imperfections out of wood impurities.

Are baked out of the yeah.

So wood is known to contract and expand a lot, but when it's thermally modified, it takes that characteristic away. One of the challenges with wood is it won't hold a finish very well because of that expansion and contraction. If you picture an accordion and say you painted the accordion baffles, or whatever they're called, and then moved it back and forth, obviously that paint is never going to stay on there. Right.

It's just going to crack off because.

It'S moving so much. Well, it's the same concept with wood. And that's for example, a reason why we quit using wood door jams on our exterior doors. Because those door jams just get brutalized and they're just raw wood. No matter what paint you put on them, they're not going to last for very long, a couple of years and that paint will actually start flaking off. And so thermally modified wood actually takes that away. So you get this wood look without that defect. I guess you could say it. Another thing is it makes them pest resistant. And same with the weather resistance. It increases the weather resistance. So all that stuff is that when thermally modified wood gets wet, the water doesn't even affect it because it doesn't absorb the water.

It just wicks.

Yeah, just like, well, I don't really know the right term for it. In my mind, wicking is like pulling it in or pulling it out.

Right.

With this thermally modified wood, it won't absorb into it.

So it's like water resistant maybe almost.

Like yeah, it's like water resistant putting.

Rain ups in your windshield.

Yeah, but it's a pretty new product. But I really like it. In fact, we're doing our whole office with it. And you combine that with some thin cut, real natural stone and do a metal roof. Now you have this extremely rich looking or not rich as in dollar wise, just rich as in good colors and.

Solid real natural colors too. Yeah.

And then it ends up being low maintenance. So metal roof is obviously low maintenance and the thermally modified is low maintenance, but it's all natural looking and the stone is really low maintenance and it's still natural. And that makes for a really high end look while being low maintenance. And that's extremely hard to get. Most high end products unfortunately, are high maintenance.

Right.

But let's say you're going after more like a farmhouse look, and you want the white painted siding. LP is an awesome product. We use it all the time. LP is, like you said, probably our most popular siding because it's affordable. It doesn't have the characteristics of other brands of siding, of breaking and sometimes falling off a wall, like certain brands chipping like that. So it holds up really good and it's affordable and it's super easy to install and it holds paint really well. So we'll use Sherwin Williams Lifetime Paint, and the first house I built is like in 2009 or something like that. It still has not been repainted. It's holding up really well and so firm believer in that paint, and it holds really well, LP. So lots of bonuses there, too. Yeah, we really don't use vinyl siding. I personally don't recommend it. It's not really in our target. I mean, we don't really build houses that it would fit well on, and we get wind and we get hail, and I try to encourage people and have so far been successful in people not using it.

I can't even think of a house you'd be hard pressed to find something that's built within the last 1015 years that has vinyl siding here that's not just like an opinion, everyone knows that here in Wyoming, like in Wyoming, you don't want vinyl siding.

Yeah.

You just don't.

And it is one of those things where if you have no choice, it's probably the least expensive by quite a bit, and it's super fast to install. So there is things to it that are good, but from a quality aspect, I don't recommend it.

Right. Yeah. I would anticipate a ten year timestamp on that before you have to start replacing pieces and corner trim and it doesn't seal as well.

Bugs get behind it and you pull a piece off.

I've certainly done that. I've worked on remodel jobs. You're ripping off this vinyl siding. There's just layers of box elder bugs all packed in behind there, or mice or whatever.

A good alternative, though, to vinyl is metal. So metal is robust and it's strong and it'll hold up in a wind or foul weather. One downside of metal is somebody like.

A little if you have kids that.

Are huffing rocks, I was just going to use that example. Well, I do have kids that huff.

Rocks, so I'm very aware.

That's hilarious.

Yeah.

So if you have a kid that's throwing rocks, it'll dent the siding. And that's not really repairable. It's just now you'll have a dent on your siding. The thing is, that can be caused from other things, too. Like, say a yard guy is mowing the yard and it hits a stick and the stick flies against the house. Or, I mean, anything that hits the house could potentially cause a dent.

Right. Kids are playing basketball or baseball or whatever, one fast grounder and you just knocked a big old dent in your siding. That's one thing I like about LP too, maybe that's kind of real quick covered. I think this is probably a question in a lot of people's minds that are listening.
The value, what are you paying for what you mentioned, your thermally treated or thermally modified wood? It's a super nice product, but it is more expensive. And then vinyl is the cheap, but kind of a get what you pay for and then right in the middle and why it's so popular, I think, is LP smart siding and LP products is because it's a very robust given proper installment and a good paint, it's a very robust product. I personally have worked with that stuff for years. And it's very durable. It's just very durable. It doesn't like chip and come apart on it. No, there's none of that.

Yeah, they've done a ton of weatherproofing tests on it. They've soaked it in water. They've done all these different things to ensure that because it's made out of OSB. Right. OSB can have the name of expanding and swelling and turning flaky. Right. When OSB swells, it turns into like you can see all the layers real clearly and they start to come apart.

Right.

Well, LP has done a really good job in ensuring that does not happen. They've done all these tests where they soak it in water and all these things, and they've figured it out where it doesn't do that. But yeah, you're right.
As far as pricing goes, thermally modified wood, it is really expensive. You can find it for twelve dollars to fifteen dollars a square foot for just product without not including installation or anything. You can have LP installed. You can have LP bought, delivered, installed, and painted for less than the cost of buying thermally modified alone.

And also, that's not just a.

You'Re.

Not limited to horizontal siding or horizontal lap siding. There's different you know, you can get all sorts of different looks, all sorts of different styles, methods of installation for around windows and trim. There's a lot of variables that you can get with LP. Smarts. I really sound like an LP salesman over here. I really do believe in that product. In my opinion, the best LP.

Can we get a sponsor?

Yeah, we could certainly I'll be sending you a commission invoice the best bang for the buck, in my opinion. It really is. You can do battenboard like a vertical siding, you can do a horizontal siding, you can do different lap overhangs and yeah, there's just so many different options you can do. And it's a great product. I really do love it and I work with it a lot, so I'm not just blowing smoke. I know what I'm talking about.

So in the old houses, one of my really favorite things about LP is when you look at an old house that was built like, say, in the, say, early 19 hundreds or something, and they had did wood siding with the small lap. Yes. You can actually replicate that with LP. Now, they offer a smooth option, and they have for a couple of years now. It's not brand new, but most people don't even realize that they have a smooth option with no wood grain imprint on it. And when you put that on a house with the small lap, it looks great. It's awesome.

You can really obtain that classic what do I want to say?

Like Craftsman style.

Yeah.

What you'd see just driving here in town, looking at those old, early 1930s, 1920s houses, they have that siding, and it looks really good.

Right. I think we're about 45 minutes.

Yeah.

We still have a lot more to talk about.

We don't want to go on for too long. We can just do another episode.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, maybe next time we can continue the siding conversation. We can talk about maybe some more different options. Steel, masonry, that sort of thing. So until next time. Bye.