12 Crafting Your Dream Home: Part 3 - From Insulation to Finishing Touches

Dive into the crucial details that shape your dream home in Part 3 of our series. Learn about garage doors, electrical, HVAC, insulation options, exterior choices, and more. Get expert insights to make your custom home truly yours.

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Transcript

Welcome back, everybody. We are going to pick up where we left off on the last episode. We were discussing different selections and different products and what we recommend in the area.

And the point where we had left off, if you've been following along, was on doors. So now we would like to kind of delve into what we were talking about and get into some garage door stuff because a lot of people don't know anything about garage doors, and that would be true for me, too. Drew, maybe, you know, give us some knowledge on some garage door stuff.

I know a little bit, but nothing more than the average. Joe, what's up with garage door? Yes. So by far the most common type of garage door is going to be a steel painted garage door.

Right. It's what you see everywhere. They're insulated.

They come with an opener. The opener is generally hung from the ceiling in the center of the garage, in front of the garage what am I saying? In the ceiling in the center of the garage door. When the garage door is up, then it ends up being in the middle.

But there's also a bunch of other options. One is like adding windows. And what type of windows are they? Door panel styles.

There's a certain range of panel styles that you can buy for the same price no matter which style they are. And we're talking style. We're talking just like aesthetics, carriage looking, whatever.

And then they have like, a flat face, they have a textured face, all these different options. Yeah, flat. You would have to go through the list.

Right. I don't even know what they are offhand, but yeah, the panel imprint is what I'm referring to. And the panel imprint, there's a certain range in which that doesn't even change the price, but it gives you a few different looks.

And then there's a step up, which is like a little bit more custom, which is a flat panel garage door with certain portions of the panels overlaid with material, whether it's wood or vinyl material to give it a more custom look. But it's still a steel garage door. Still a steel of a deal? No, they're never a steal of a deal.

Okay, well, let's talk about that. What do they typically cost? What's a garage door going to run? You say a standard. Well, what's a standard? So installed? You're talking installed price on, let's just say a ten x ten garage door, about $4,500, $5,000.

1st year standard imprinted, steel garage door, no windows, maybe. I mean, they don't add a huge cost. So you're talking a couple of $100 essentially.

Then for more of the style with the overlay on it with mostly steel panel, but then just certain portions of it overlaid with the wood or the vinyl material, you're adding a couple of $1,000 for that. So that could be $7,000. Then you can go up higher into a full overlay.

And then there's also the full glass. So those are more expensive options. You're talking on the cheap.

The full overlays are there are custom options, so the price varies. But I'm just going to give you kind of a broad range that could be from like $8,000 per door to probably close to $20,000 per door. Talking about somebody custom going in and custom building a wood overlay on top of your manufactured steel door.

And then the most custom option is a full custom wood door. And we don't even really go that route because they're not very energy efficient. Garage doors typically aren't very energy efficient.

Correct. So yes and no. The panel itself, you can get like an R 19 panel, R 16 panel, stuff like that.

But the challenge is there's a huge gap. Not a gap, but an area all the way around the garage door where air can get through at. So it's never really going to seal properly.

Or it's just there's an area for air to get through. Right, yeah. And on a heavy wind like in Wyoming that we get yeah.

You can actually go walk past that door and feel cold air blowing between the weather stripping. Because that's meant to move. It has to have a little bit of space, not necessarily open to the outside air, but that flexible weather seal is meant to move and adjust so the garage door doesn't ever get stuck on it.

Right. And so therefore it's naturally going to leak air. Sure.

And there are certain methods you can do with there's some wall locks you can buy that help lock in your garage door and pull it closer to that weather stripping. And that helps a little. But generally that's a pretty big area of inefficiency.

Does that efficiency go up pretty? What's the comparison, say, or the scale between cost and efficiency? Let's say I want to get there's an R 16 option for people who are maybe wondering what the R means. R is an R value, which is referring to insulation and how well it insulates. So the higher the R value, the better it insulates.

So if I say I look at an R 16 option for X amount of dollars versus, say, R, would you say 19? How does that scale? So there's obviously uninsulated, which let's just take that out. Right, right. That's the least expensive.

And then you go to your standard insulation option, which is like an R six, and the difference really low. Yeah. It's like a window.

Yeah. So the difference between that and the R, I think it's like an R 19 is the highest I've seen is you're talking a couple of $1,000 difference total. Okay.

In my mind, it's money well spent. Got you. You're taking it from bad to okay.

And another thing on that least expensive, it's not a sandwich construction door, which means it's steel on the outside. And then the foam on the inside, and then no steel construction on the opposite side of that foam. So the higher efficient doors and the better quality doors, they go steel, foam, steel.

When you're looking at, say, you cut the garage door in half and you look down at the top, you go steel, foam, steel. Well, the cheapest option is steel and then foam, and then it's just open. So if you're like, say, using a grinder in your garage and the sparks hit your foam, it's going to melt all that foam.

Right. And also, it's not as robust of a door. Right.

Not to mention looking pretty ugly. Yeah, nobody wants to look at foam. So the most common, would you say, type of garage door is going to be sort of your standard $5,000 mark, some windows, steel construction with the imprint and some windows.

Okay. Yeah. Okay.

So what about when we get into something bigger, like, say, an RV? Say someone wants, like, a big a 14 x 14? Does the price jump pretty big? It actually does, yeah. It jumps quite a bit because that goes into a commercial door. So it's a heavier construction, more robust construction.

Once again, you have more cross bracing, and also it's heavier, so you need a bigger opener and then heavier duty tracks, heavier duty wheels. Yeah, exactly. Everything is more heavy duty, more labor, more weight, more right.

Yeah. Okay, so once again, big jump. So you could be spending back into that custom range of 10,000, $20,000 for a big garage door, even though it's not even a custom door.

Right, okay. What's after garage doors, then? I'm looking back at sort of the order in which we're talking about these products and selections. We went from excavation to foundation, the foundation types, framing doors, windows, siding options.

I talked a bit about roofing, or did we talk about roofing? So let's get into maybe some interior stuff. Now, we've kind of covered the exterior. There's a lot that can be said about maybe exterior concrete.

We could delve into that a little bit, but there's a ton of talking points about inside a house. Yeah. And I guess I'll start off with this question.

In your opinion, what are some of the most important features, interior wise, in a house? What do you think every house should have? What should every house have? Good question. That would take a little bit of thinking on that. But there's a few things that we really need to go through when we're talking about interior things, and they start right after framing, because a lot of these decisions that we need to make for the interior could actually pertain to the framing.

Right. So we already talked about putting in niches and custom ceilings and stuff like that. And so we talked about the structure of that.

But what happens right after the structure is the subs come in, and then we're talking about plumbing, heating, electrical, okay. Now how does those affect those are all interior things, right. You see the finished light when you're done, you see the plumbing fixtures and the heat registers and the location of these things.

So that's after framing and is actually crucial to do a walkthrough before those things take place. There could be things like a plumbing fixture can be wall mounted. And if it's a wall mounted plumbing fixture, then you need to know that in order to place the plumbing appropriately and what type of cabinet is going to be sitting in front of that wall fixture.

So then you know the height and what type of vessel sink or undermount sink. And you need to know all those things. Even though they're interior finish work, you need to know them way in advance.

It's like most of the work is sort of planned ahead in the rough end stage. Exactly. Yeah, that's very true.

With electrical, we can talk about that in a minute. So the point is half of, we'll say even 70% I'll throw that out there. Of the work is done before the drywall even goes on.

Oh, absolutely, yeah. You have to know the fixture type, know the cabinet type location. And the other thing, too, is there are certain requirements for, say, handicap.

So if somebody wants a handicap accessible shower, a roll in type shower, we have to know that before then, too. Yeah. Know that before you build the deck.

In some cases, right. If you're framing, you got to drop the subflooring so you have a zero entry or zero step entry in a shower. Yeah.

And if you haven't picked all those things out before that stage, the homeowner is going to be under a lot of stress at that point. And once again, that's in our process. Well, why we actually choose all those things beforehand.

So when we get to the plumbing walk through, we can say, okay, this is where your walk in shower is going to be. As you can see, we recessed the floor. We have these wall mounted faucets here, and we have a floor mounted faucet for your tub.

We have, say, a handheld shower sprayer in your shower. All these things actually are pertaining to before the trim goes. They're pertaining to the rough end stage.

And it's crucial to have all that stuff done before you at least figured out before you get to that. That's what the change orders for people who can't make up their minds ahead of time. Or maybe they don't have the proper management put in place or systems like First Choice does.

You're not going to have those answers ahead of time. Right. So by failing to plan, you have now planned to fail.

Good one. The change orders will get you in the end, especially with budget and timeframe, because oh, you know what, I didn't realize this, but I actually wanted this thing to be a wall mounted faucet well, shucks. You stated this was okay and you signed off on this two months ago and it's already been roughed in and the drywall is on now.

What? Yeah, they really, really want this. You know, it's kind of an interesting and common mistake somebody will make is they'll want a cabinet that has space underneath it. For example, legs on a vanity that's really common.

And we plumbed the plumbing drain through the floor. Now if you were to go down your hands and knees and look underneath there, you'd see a white PVC pipe sticking up. Well, we want to have that chosen beforehand so we can run that pipe up behind the vanity in the wall and then out.

So you don't ever see that. Right. And maybe a lot of people wouldn't even know the difference, but we do and we want it to be right.

You know what's funny? I want to digress a little bit on that point the things that we notice versus what they notice. And when I say they, I mean the general. You're a common dude out there who doesn't really understand to build an industry so much.

Those little things may not matter up front. You're walking around your house and you have all these little nuances that the builder knows or doesn't know. Those little things come out over time, particularly when it comes to a quality install.

I'll say take a door for example, right. You know, a guy who shoves a door in, he checks his reveal and closes it fine and then that's that. But he didn't square it.

He didn't put enough shims behind it. Maybe he didn't shim or support it behind where the door actually latches and next thing you know you got this door that's just got all these issues. Yeah.

And it moves over time and it moves over time. But to the client, and especially after we'll call it the first three months or whatever, the door is just fine. It's an operator just fine.

Client doesn't know any better. Right. So that's just one little example.

But I think that's a valid point to bring up a plumbing sticking up through the floor underneath. No one would even think about that, right. So having the right builder to trust is crucial and even knowing that builder is going to watch out for you regardless, right? Knowing that they're like, hey, I can't explain everything to you, but we're going to do it this way and this is why.

And it'll make sense in the end. That sort of thing is, I think, something people often have a hard time following her. Yeah, well, I think that's probably enough about plumbing and selections for the rough in.

But same with electrical. It goes through all the same things. Lights located.

What kind of cabinets do you have? How far away is your ceiling can going to be from the cabinet? Do you want four inch cans? Do you want six inch cans? Do you want surface mounted lights? Where do you want your dimmers? These are all things that really need to be figured out during that stage actually before. So then when you go do that roughing, just like the plumbing, go do the rough and you point all that stuff out. Okay, this is here and here and here, right? And the homeowner already knows what they're getting.

The point of the walkthrough is that they can verify that still what they want from everything or make minor adjustments if you need to. That's very true and I experienced that a lot in the time I was an electrician for, I don't know, four or five years, something like that. What we would often do, not always, but often we would do what's called a box out.

We put all the box locations, all the can trims in, we lay everything out to the plans. And then for the mechanical walkthrough, before we've wired anything right, they walk through and check every location and make sure it's all good to go. They can picture it, right? Because the box is installed, they give us the go ahead on that.

Then we can just wire it. And then things like doing a video walk through and stuff to verify things later and record everything. If you have a wire tucked away in a wall so you can cut in the special light later and knowing where that wire is in the wall and all that kind of stuff.

But there's also a lot of special features that a person might actually add during the rough end stage during their walk through. They're like, oh, we really want some indirect lighting around our master bedroom, or we might want toe kick lighting up underneath the toe kick. And now that we see these treads sitting here on site, we realize there's actually room for that.

And that's kind of when people can start. It's not the ideal time to add things in. It's really ideal to figure out everything ahead of time, but really that's kind of your last chance.

Well, you're going to have a little different viewpoint on it, looking at it on paper versus walking into your house and seeing the framing. When it's all up, it's just you can't compare. So that's when people typically, oh, I didn't realize it was going to look like this.

And there's only so much the builder or the subcontractor can do to help you visualize. 3d rendering software has come a long way now and I think that's a huge step in the right direction. Maybe it's virtual reality technology or whatever so that they can formulate a good image in their mind, but the end of the day, you walk through your house and it's just going to be a little bit different.

It's realistic then, right? And then once again with the heating. Same type of situations, but not as much. You're talking about things like where the furnace is located, because we need to make sure the ductwork can get spread throughout the house.

A lot of times, pretty much most of the houses we build actually have two furnaces just because of square footage. Yeah, square footage where those are located. And we might have to actually do some frame down.

Soffits in certain areas, we try not to, but every once in a while, we have to run into that. We're talking about if there's certain swings of doors, we want to make sure that the registers are in the right spot so they don't end up in middle of the doorway. This is common in, like, a double slider door or a french door.

If you don't have all your windows and doors picked out in advance, the HVAC guy could make a wrong assumption. So we'll do a walk through and say, hey, if the door is not set, for example, lay out your register. Even walking through and planting where your furniture is going to be is a big one, too.

Yeah. Hey, we don't want your heat register sitting under your couch if you have a sectional that you're going to and this was my experience when I built my own house. I did a walk through with the mechanical guy.

He came through and he said, all right, well, tell me how your situation is going to you're going to have a coffee bar over here, and how about your furniture? And now my registers are all right where they should be. Yeah. None of them are covered.

Yeah, if you cover your registers, it's decreasing your efficiency because you're blocking the airflow and the air still comes out. It's just not as efficient as it should be. Right.

You're putting more effort on or more, call it strain on your total air movement in your house, too. Yeah. And then along with HVAC, a lot of times we're doing conditions crawl space.

We talked about this earlier in a different podcast about foundations. So we'll actually run a heat and air supply or a supply and return down in the crawl space. If you have a wow.

Crawl space foundation, get it out, Drew. Get it out. And that keeps your air fresh down there, and it keeps it heated, keeps it conditioned, it ventilates, it no need to dive into that again.

But essentially that's another thing that we're going to point out when we're doing a walk through on that. And then the other thing really is your thermostat location. Believe it or not, this is kind of a big deal because if you're framing up, thermostat can go almost anywhere in the house.

You just run a little low voltage wire to it, and that's it. The thing is, they can oftentimes get put in the wrong spot where the fireplace, for example, gas fireplace, is putting heat right on the thermostat, triggering that stat to sense stuff that it shouldn't sense. Yeah.

It's saying that your house is too hot because that one little area is hot and now it's not going to turn on. Or if you have it on auto mode, it might actually kick your AC on. And so you're in the middle of the winter, you have this nice cozy fireplace and it's warm in the living room, but the rest of your house has the AC running.

A little side tip for that too. People get familiar with your thermostat. They're really not that complicated.

You should know. Hey, is your fan on auto? Is it on? Always on. Is it on? Kind of get familiar with thermostat and keep an eye on it, especially if you only have one.

To this point. You mentioned having the stat location being so critical, which it is. But the same can be said for zoning when you have multiple zones in a house.

So if you have a master suite that's controlled by one thermostat versus and then having one in the living room and one upstairs, whatever, versus just one centrally located stat. And your subcontractor will know how to guide, you know, hey, you want it to be in an accessible area. You want to be able to get to your stat easily.

It also needs to be able to pick up this, that, and the other. They'll know what to do as far as that guidance goes. Yeah.

Real quick, maybe we can talk a little bit about just generally go over some HVAC systems, whether it's forced air, whether or heating and cooling, I should say whether it's forest air, mini split, PTAX, what are the pros and cons? Yeah, geothermal. There's a lot there even in for heat and having radiant heat. Yeah, you bet.

Okay, so the most common is a gas forced air. It's energy efficient as far as I'm I'm being the sound guy, sorry. You got it.

All right. It's energy efficient. Okay, let me say this.

The cost to energy efficiency is probably the best. So you have a really quick payout with a gas forest air furnace and air conditioning system. You can gain efficiency through different methods of heating and cooling.

They also cost more. So depending on your priorities, say your priorities are just simply having the most energy efficient system you can get and the cost isn't as important and you're okay with the longer payout. Then you can go with things like in floor heat or geothermal system, or you can even do like there's some solar options out there for solar heat, solar water heaters and stuff like that.

But by far the most common would be gas, forest air and air conditioning system. And let's not forget that a humongous part of that efficiency package when you're considering efficiency in general is how many windows you got, the design of your house, all those different variables. So don't think that, well, I'm going to pick the most efficient system, but I'm going to have these massive windows, you're only going to be as efficient as, we'll say, your weakest link when it comes to a lot of times, a modern house or most new houses have big windows, which I don't blame people.

I love windows myself, especially with the mountains. Yeah. Mountain views, big windows.

I love it. And personally, I'll pay for the inefficiency of the house because I want those windows. But if your number one priority is efficiency, then make your windows smaller.

Okay. And then so geothermal. Geothermal is a really high energy efficient way of extracting heat.

There's two different ways you can do an air to air system where it actually takes warmth out of air. It's like a heat pump system. And honestly, it kind of blows my mind how it works, but it basically draws in outside air and extracts any warmth from it and produces it into your house.

That's about as simply as I can say it without diving. Tell us more. How exactly do the molecules I'm not telling you more.

It makes your house warm. We'll leave it at that. But it's more efficient.

But it's more efficient. It's an electric system. It makes your house more warmer and more efficient and more stuff.

It is an electric system. So if you don't have gas, it's less expensive than running propane. Okay, definitely.

But if you have a gas as an option, it's going to be cheaper to run gas. Yeah. A little side tip for people out there.

If you have natural gas, use it. Enough said there. Yeah, it's a good way to go.

And then there's a water to air geothermal system. And that's where there's a couple of different ways of doing it. But the most common way is you run piping underground.

You bury it six or 8ft deep. If there's a little groundwater, it works even better. If it's real gravely soil, it works less.

Okay, so it's less efficient. But you run piping underground, and then you put a product through the pipes. It's glycol.

Glycol. Thanks. I was like, what is it called? I got you.

You run glycol through the pipes, it extracts any warmth from the ground, and then it runs it through a process where then it can transfer it into your house. Right. There's a challenge with that, and one is in the winter, that's drawing all the warmth out of the air, so it makes the ground cooler.

I mean, sorry, all the warmth out of the ground. So in that area, it actually cools the ground and it freezes harder. Your frost table might drop a bit deeper than normal assume.

And the reason that's important to say is the more warmth that draws out of the ground, the less efficient it is, because now it's working harder and harder and harder, and it's freezing closer and closer and closer to these pipes. It's just pulling that frost down in deep right there. And it's trying to produce heat from that.

So it still works really good and it's more efficient than a standard gas furnace or anything like that. But if you really want to get the most efficient system for a geothermal, you can do like a water system where you actually put, where you actually draw water out of the ground. And some people call it like a pump and dump.

And you have to have high quality water for this to work, so it doesn't work everywhere. You drill a well and you'd actually draw water out of the ground, you need like 25, 30 gallons a minute to produce for a fairly large house. Run this through the system and then you pump it back out.

So it's a continual so you're bringing out the water, you're extracting the heat and then taking that remaining cold water and dumping it back in the system. Yeah, and there's a couple of things about that. One is you don't want your well to be super deep because now you're wasting your energy savings on pumping the water 400ft out of the ground.

Right. The other thing is if you do a shallower well, a lot of times you don't get high quality water. And so you kind of have to have a perfect scenario for this to be the best system.

But if all those things line up, then it works really well. Say you have a 30 foot deep well, easy to pump the water out and it's good clean water, then that's going to be a super efficient system because the consistency of that water temperature is the same throughout the year. It's probably like in our area, I think it's like 48 degrees, which seems cold, but it's still enough, plenty warm to get warmth out of.

And a lot of places it's even 55 degrees groundwater and it doesn't change in the winter. It's always the same. So that's what makes it the most efficient.

But as soon as you start getting crap in your water and stuff, it can actually damage some pumps and stuff like that. So you want it to be nice, good water. So in other words, most of the places around here probably not the best option.

There's a lot of pretty bad water. Yeah, I don't know. I shouldn't say that.

It varies a lot. Yeah, right. That's probably a better way of putting it.

It varies a lot. You really can have yeah, so maybe let's touch on electrical heat a little bit, which I personally have a lot of experience with. Well, I'll just hit some main points here.

Number one, if you're going to go baseboard, don't so baseboard heating, it's a good heat source if your option is electrical, if you don't have gas available and depending on your situation, but typically you're better off going with electrical than propane, electrical will be a bit more efficient. As far as is it BTU or whatever for propane, for. Propane and then yeah, gas.

What's the measurement for heat? I always forget. Okay, well, you're going to get the best bang for your buck. I think when you're comparing electrical to propane, electrical will be better, certainly not as good as natural gas, but if you don't have that, go electrical.

And the reason why I say don't go with baseboard heating is there's several different options for electrical heat. I'm not going to get into all of them, but the most common are baseboard, which are the heat registers, the metal looking thing that's down low up against the floor, that's anywhere between four foot long to eight foot long. There's little two footers.

The problem with that is there's a lot of problems with it. One, you can't put your furniture against them, so you're really limiting your footprint for where you could put your furniture. And when you're laying these out, like, as an electrician, you're always trying to think there's a certain equation that you're trying to follow to cover your square footage.

And if there's a window, you'd want to have it go against the window so that it's going away from the coldness and there's all these different things. And so you're kind of limited to where this stuff needs to be set up in order for it to work properly, which further hampers the functionality of your space. So with that being said, if you're not going to do baseboard, what are you going to do? Well, I would recommend cove heating, which is just like a baseboard, except it's up high.

And the only downfall to that compared to baseboard is baseboard is down low and the heat rises. You're going to get a little bit more out of that with the COVID heating. It starts higher up and it's trying to force it down, but it's naturally going to rise.

So, something to consider if you're looking into electrical heat, there's also other options like mini splits and PTACs and that sort of thing. But I would say nine times out of ten, a cove heat system is going to be better overall as far as livability. Not necessarily for efficiency, but as far as livability, the best bang for your buck.

When you lay it all out, your cove heat is going to be a much better option than your baseboard heat. Baseboard is just kind of a dying breed. So one thing that I kind of like about the electric baseboards or coves is you can do a thermostat per room.

Yes. And it's easy to do, super easy. So you can highly regulate it.

Yeah. Hey, the storage room never gets I'll just dial that back to 50 degrees because I don't really care. Yeah, no, that's a very valid point, and that's a huge thing, especially when you have kids or when you have gas stain.

Maybe you have a guest suite in your house. That's kind of a big deal. Another thing I really like about COVID heat is well, obviously it's up and out of the way.

You're not fighting with your furniture. You're not whatever. You do need to be careful and make sure it's installed properly.

You don't burn your drapes down or whatever. Yeah, but it is a very nice heat. It's a really nice heat.

It feels amazing. It's cozy. It's cozy.

It doesn't stink. It's just a very clean, nice electric heat. Electric heat typically is that way.

It's just the cleanest way of getting wood. Fireplace is obviously very messy, and gas is gas. Electric heat is very clean, nice, comfortable heat.

Well, the nice thing about electricity is the more we use, the more these coal mines can stay in business. That's right. Maybe I'll digress a little bit and I'll go there because I'm that guy.

But I seen a meme the other day, and it just cracked me up. It was a smart car, which you drive. Electric car.

Great. I think Tesla's cool. Whatever.

What do you mean by smart car? Smart car, electric car, hybrid cars, whatever. I didn't realize smart car was actually a brand. Oh, okay.

Anyway, this electric car, right. And so people think, oh, well, it doesn't need gas. It just runs off electricity.

It's like, do you realize that to get that electricity, it has to be produced somehow, whether it's through a coal plant, nuclear, natural gas. Why just plug it in, right? You just plug it in. Well, the plug in, though, people where does the plug in come from? How does the plug in get its power? And that always baffled me, that people don't make that.

They can't carry the one there and make that math check out. If you want to charge your electric car or your electric whatever, and you plug something in, that power comes from somewhere. It's being produced.

It's being produced at a plant somewhere that's burning coal or is nuclear powered or is powered by natural gas. There is some sort of form of energy or consumable thing being burned to produce that electricity. We'll go solar.

Well, we're working on that. Yeah. But I don't know.

Every time I think of that, that comes into mind, like power comes from somewhere. Well, one thing interesting about electric cars is Wyoming is not a very easy state to have electric car. No, it's not.

There's harsh weather. Well, there's yeah, that and plus the amount of charging stations available. But nonetheless, it's kind of a little bit off topic, but just kind of interesting.

Yeah. So back to the electrical heat thing. If you're looking to say heat, a little storage room or whatever, a baseboard heater is fine.

I wanted to put that out. There is a use for baseboard heaters. They are very cheap.

They're typically cheaper to install and cheaper ferment the material. So there are uses for that. By and large, I would say cove heat or a mini split system is probably the way to go.

How are we doing for time? Mason okay, maybe we can get into we talked about heat sources. We talked about insulation would be next. Insulation.

So you get all your mechanical stuff done in your house. Your plumbing is installed. Your wiring is all in, your HX systems installed.

Now you got to insulate before you could put your drywall up. Let's talk about some different options. This is really where efficiency can play, obviously, a very massive role.

Yeah. So the most common way today is fiberglass bat insulation in your walls. R 21, two x six framed walls with r 21 bat insulation.

R 49 blown in fiberglass in the attic. That's standard. That would be, yeah.

Your run of the mill type of insulation. And it's fairly efficient. It's way better than insulation in the 60s.

But I would say that's probably your starter level for insulation. There's upgrade options. One thing is spray foam.

Spray foam is a lot more expensive. There's two different options of spray foam. One is open cell.

Open cell, and one is closed cell. So the difference between the two is open cell is more of a fluffy type. It might almost look like whipped cream.

It expands a lot, and there's a lot of air bubbles in it. Yeah. And it's softer.

You can push your finger right into it, and you fill the whole stud cavity with it. Closed cell is very hard, and it glues really well, so it seals off everything. It's not permeable.

It can be waterproof, depending on the type you get. So you can put it on the exterior of your house. And because it glues everything so well together, I don't think they consider it as a structural component, but can actually add a lot of strength to your house.

Yeah, it's like an adhesive, basically. If you went and applied liquid nails all around your house and it's much thinner, you'd only put it on, like, three inches thick between your studs, and it doesn't expand nearly as much as soft foam does. Yeah.

And then you can also do that in your ceiling. And there's a couple of different ways of doing that. Whether it's up in the ceiling trusses up above the drywall, or if it's down against the drywall when you're in your attic and you look down by your feet, you could spray it against the drywall there, or you can spray it up against the roof sheeting on the top.

And either way, it just kind of depends on your application. But then there's even still another option, and that's doing insulation on the exterior of your building. And this is actually the most energy efficient.

Ultimately, what you want to do to gain the most efficiency is stop the cold from penetrating your building envelope. And so the best way of doing that is putting the insulation actually on the exterior of your house and then putting siding over that. So if you were to look at a cut down of that, it'd be your wall framing, your sheeting, your waterproof vapor barrier.

And then you would have a type of foam on the outside of that and then batons to attach the siding to, and then your siding. And so it ends up being a thicker wall. But the bonus to that is now your cold has to go through all that foam before it even gets to your building envelope.

So that stops most of your cold there. And then you insulate your wall with just like a fiberglass bat or whatever you want. Or you can do spray foam inside.

That's a really good point. Think of if you picture the house you're in now most people it goes like this from inside to out. You have drywall, then you have your insulation, which is in between your studs.

And then you have your sheeting, and then you have your exterior siding. The cold penetrates through the siding and through the exterior sheathing, which have like no R value. In fact, they are really good at transferring cold.

And then it now penetrates into your studs, which your studs go from interior to exterior almost completely. So you have like if you were to take a thermal set of goggles or like thermal imaging. Yeah, if you use infrared and you could look at it through an infrared lens at your wall in the wintertime, you would see where everywhere where there's a stud, it would be blue, representing cold.

Blue, blue, blue, blue. And then a little bit warmer in the middle, you lose so much heat through your framing. It's just unbelievable.

A fiberglass bat insulation, the actual insulation itself is 400% better insulating than that stud next to it. So now if you took that 400% and put it all on the outside of your building with foam yes. Now you've just caused thermal breaks before that cold ever greases those studs, take all the studs out of your house, put them all in a stack and sandwich them together and it would be like a very dense solid, like twelve foot long wall, right? Yeah.

If you stacked all your two x four studs that were all from your house, that is how much of an area, square footage wise, of coal that's just penetrating straight into your house. Right. And let's forget about the windows.

This is just the framing. Right. So houses actually now obviously they've come a long ways in the 21st century, but they're stupidly inefficient.

They really are. Another area is your header above your window. It's a big solid mass of wood.

And a lot of times framers actually prefer to use a glue lamb so they can get the full thickness of header over the window, which makes it easier for framing. You just cut one piece of wood and you stick it up there. You don't have to nail on a ledger or anything after the fact so you have this big chunk of wood up there that's five and a half inches thick, and it's once again transferring most of that cold right through.

And so, once again, not to keep repeating myself, but put the insulation on the outside, the majority of that cold is stopped before it even hits that header. Yeah, absolutely. It's like putting a blanket around you with a bunch of holes versus getting one good blanket and just completely enveloping yourself which one are you going to stay warmer in? It's really how it works with the house.

And there's a couple of products out there that they do this zip system. Some people really push it. I personally don't push it.

I personally don't like it. It's not the zip sheeting itself. They, they here we go.

So they, they have a lot of people calling you. Yeah, what the heck, dude? I love the system. Yeah, exactly.

And I'm probably the black sheep on this, but I'll tell you why I feel this way. One is they have an option to attach, they come with foam on the back. So you install the sheet, it's a 716 house sheeting, and then it has foam and you can get one inch or inch and a half foam or whatever.

And that's supposed to do the same thing as putting foam on the outside of your house. Like we were just talking in one system sheeting and foam together. It's like, oh, it makes your life way easier.

The reason I don't like it is you now have to use a three inch framing nailer to nail your sheeting on. And when your nail penetrates through the sheeting, through the foam, and then finally hits the stud, there's essentially a big void where that foam is at that the nail is not holding tight. It's like basically an area of play where it can move.

Yes. Right. And so now you have to add a whole bunch of extra fasteners with these extra long nails in order to make up for your strength that you've lost because you're not nailing the sheeting directly to the stud.

Right. Can only hold as. Yeah, that's interesting.

So if you nail your sheeting directly to a stud, there's nowhere for that to move. You add an inch of foam in there or inch and a half of foam. Now there's also a big weak spot in between.

Well, let's say you even do it perfectly, but repeat that process around an entire house, there's going to be some areas that most of them probably, that are going to be loose at best. And then the other thing with that is they say you don't need to use house wrap because our wood is already waterproofed. Well, I believe that their wood probably is waterproofed, and I believe that that's good vapor barrier.

A good vapor barrier. But now to add tape over a joint, it's like I've never once put a sticker on something and had it last forever. Right.

I might be the old fuddy duddy who doesn't believe in this, but until it's truly proven, I feel like doing some sort of house wrap. And I'm not necessarily promoting any sort of specific house wrap. I'm just saying a good high quality house wrap.

Tape your joints, follow their instructions. That process has been proven for a long time. Yeah.

And there are certain house wraps that are better than others. Certain house traps really don't do much. Right.

But as long as you have a high quality well, how long has the zip system been around? Do you know? Because it's not that old. Right. It's been around for, what, a decade? To be honest, I don't know how long it's been around, but it's been becoming more popular in just the last few years.

Okay, so I'm also curious, too, what the payout is, the initial upfront cost. We're comparing your standard sheathing. You're not having to buy three inch framing nailers.

You're not having to deal with, for three inch framing nailers, all you framers out there. I am not the framing expert here, but I have used a three inch framing nailer, and it just seems like they constantly jam. They have yet to make a good system for that require more air.

You're fighting it. I shouldn't say constantly jam. It just seems like you're going to have a misfire every 10th nail.

That's my experience. Well, nonetheless, from my position, you're probably right on all that. I wouldn't disagree.

But from my position, it's like even set aside all that, it's the structure that I would worry about. It's like 80 miles an hour. Wind comes up and you got that layer of foam pushing against your wall.

I would much rather have the sheeting nailed directly to the studs and then put foam on the outside of that. It's an extra step and it makes it more difficult. But your energy efficiency is a little bit tiny bit better because, one, now you can use a full two inch foam, and two, that foam is on the outside of your sheeting, which is the actual outside of the house.

Right. So that's my opinion, and everyone's way is the best way, let's not forget. I'm just not going to push that product because I don't believe in it.

Right. A lot of guys use it. So moving on to we talked about insulation now, but let's talk about drywall, drywall options and maybe get into a little bit of painting and that'll probably wrap it up for this episode.

Yeah, you bet. Drywall. Here in Wyoming, we use drywall.

There are certain commercial applications and stuff where people will actually use plaster, but we use drywall here. So we're installing a half inch light rock on all your walls and five eight, your standard drywall on your ceilings. And the reason we use five eight on the ceiling is because your spacing is bigger you have a two inch spacing on your trusses, and that five, eight holds better.

We also use half inch drywall on the walls because it's lighter and easier to use. And you don't need that spacing requirement because all your studs are out 16 on center, plus they're not hanging. Yeah, correct.

Then you go into finishing. There's smooth wall, which around here, that's our most expensive option. You're talking about 250 a square foot.

If you go to a hand texture, that's more like $2 a square foot. And then orange peel, which is about a dollar ten a square foot. Orange peel is generally, unfortunately, the least liked with our customers, but it's also the least expensive.

And it's something that a lot of people are actually even though initially they say, oh, we want smooth wall, but when it comes down to it, and we need to make a cut somewhere, a lot of times they say, oh, well, as long as the orange peel texture is lighter, subtle. Yeah, subtle, then we're okay with it and we're okay saving that cost. Smooth wall is extremely labor intensive for you guys, thinking that, oh, well, you don't even have to texture it.

No, that's not how it is. There is so much time spent in making that wall look flat. I remember walking in once and seeing the drywalling crew.

They had lasers set up and they're sighting down these walls and they hit the sander a little bit more, and then they come back to really do a good job on a smooth, flat surface. There is so much labor involved. Yeah.

Come in in the evening and shine a light down it, too. Like a halogen light. Yeah.

And you can see if there's any shadows. It really brings that out. Exactly right.

And if your framing is even a little bit wonky, or if you got one stud that was bowed out a little bit, they fight that their sheets bowed out just slightly. And you can't even tell till you bring the halogen light out. And suddenly you're like, Whoa, there's just so much.

Take that and apply to a big old chopped up house. Right. You're going to have like a two month long drywall and job doing a smooth texture.

So I like hand texture. There's so many different types of hand texture. But I like hand texture because, A, it looks good, you can get it more rough, or you can kind of knock it down a little bit smooth, so it's not a pain in the butt with your trim, or you don't have big gaps around your light switches, but it can hide a lot.

Like, you can have your kids poking holes in it with pens and whatever. You can go put some spackle on there and you don't even really notice. Yeah, it is.

And it looks good. I like the look of hand texture. It really adds sort of an authentic bit to the house.

Yeah. And also there's different methods of doing hand texture to get a different look. And depending on your architecture, you're going to want more of a troweled on look or maybe more of a smeared look, or maybe like a brushed yeah.

And there's all kinds of different ways of getting the look that you want with different tools depending on the architecture of your house and your personal style. But in general, that's the middle of the road price. And it's a pretty easy thing.

You can run samples out. Hey, I don't know what one I like. And well, we can have a drywall or actually build you sample boards and say, do you like this one? Do you like this one? Along with drywall.

So corners, corner bead, you got bullnose, you got square, you got chamfered edge. Let's see. Oh, wrapping windows.

That's a big one. You want to save some money on your trim outs on your house. A good option is to rather than do a trim casement all the way around your window, just have the drywall corner and wrap into your window.

So really you have your window and then your window sill, and then everything else is just a real clean, finished drywall. It's a little bit of a money saver there. And it certainly labor, saves a lot of labor, but it looks good.

We've seen houses like a more modern house. A lot of times they actually want no trim, and so they'll wrap the drywall around the windows because it gives it a lot of minimalist look to it. Yeah, minimalist look with the black window and the white wall.

It actually looks really good. I personally like the look a lot. I really do.

I can appreciate good trim and all that, too, but I like that look. Yeah. Then you can do sills if you want to do sills.

What we'll do a lot of times is somebody's like, oh, we need to just cut $5,000 off our house somehow. Well, what we can do is go in your house, in your bedrooms and wrap three sides and put wood sills on. And the wood matches the other trimmed out windows throughout the house.

Yes. And then there's the more custom option, which goes with more of the smooth wall type look. Maybe real modern is there shadow beads you can install.

And essentially what it is, is you stop the drywall in certain areas, like where they come up to the windows or where they go to your baseboards, and you recess your baseboards into the wall. And then you put this shadow bead in, which causes a three quarter by three quarter square recess over the top of your trim, but that's actually flush with the drywall. Does that make any sense? Yes.

You have your baseboard trim, people, if you're looking at it from a side view, you have your baseboard trim. It runs up to the top of your trim and then there's a channel that's sort of inset into your wall and then your drywall starts. Yeah.

So you could imagine like you could even your trim and your drywall are both nailed right to your studs. So that brings your trim and the face of your trim and your drywall at the same elevation. But then there's a three quarter inch gap from the drywall to stick some electrical tape lighting in there, which is kind of like I think it was a really cool idea, right.

That would be pretty expensive throughout your whole house. But doing that track lighting, you could stick it in that groove. I think that was probably part of its intent.

Yeah. Imagine that turning on and having what's it called when it goes down the line in LEDs? Oh, yeah, it's like delayed. It's like a line, I don't know, strobe or something, whatever you want to call it.

So it's like yeah, it turns on as you're walking down the hall and it lights up a little channel right by your feet. That's pretty cool. Yeah, you could even set that up with sensors, pressure sensors.

So where you step is where it lights up. Be kind of cool, especially for the dancing people out there. So back to drywall, though, there's the different textured options.

There's different things that are required by code, like dense shield and fireproof drywall between your house and your garage, dent shield going in your shower. Or like basically a non corrosive or non rodable, mold resistant type of drywall that sits behind your tile in your shower. Maybe let's talk a bit about painting and kind of how that ties into drywall as well.

Typically, a lot of times a drywall will actually install the primer coat after they've done their mudding and taping and all that, and hanging your drywall and doing your texture. They'll prime it and then it's now ready for paint. It's typically something.

Yeah. So what they'll do is they'll come in and do all the hanging taping and then prime it and then texture. And what that does is if you texture over a mud joint and over paper next to it, they cure at different rates because they absorb moisture at different rates.

So you get what they call flashing. And so everywhere that there's a mud joint over your drywall, they run the tape and mud over your drywall joints. Wherever there's that you'll see a different texture versus where the paper is at, it'll just look different.

Yeah, you'd be able to pick out your joints. So you prime and then you texture, and then it takes care of that flashing and then the painter comes in. So you install your trim, cabinets, flooring, minus not the carpet, all these things.

And then the painter comes in and he primes again over all the texture. So you end up with our houses, you end up with two coats of primer and then the paint so how we do it is we install all of our trim and cabinets and everything and we mask all that off and we paint all at one time. You can go and spray the whole house off, it's all mask.

There's a little bit more time in masking, but you get a way cleaner looking product. You're not having to cut in with a paintbrush for hours and hours and hours. And it's the touch up.

I mean, you could spend a week coming back and doing touch up after everybody, after all the subs are done and the flooring guys are done. The electricians and their dirty, greasy, nasty, stupid electricians you know what's funny is that was literally, like that was one of my biggest issues is you'd be digging in your dirty electrician bags or whatever. You're getting this blackish kind of grease or even unpackaging a light, and it's got, like, the packaging oil on it, and then you get this white trim anywhere.

So you're constantly trying to clean, you keep your hands clean and touching light bulbs. Well, it's a real issue. Pretty soon you see all these finger marks around everything.

So that's essentially why we want to paint everything after. And honestly, we actually are painting before the electricians come and trim out. But all the other the cabinets and trim and the flooring, not the carpet.

Carpets always last. It makes it just a lot cleaner, smoother, final product. Absolutely.

Maybe on our next episode we got to button this up because we got people to do and things to go or however the saying something like that. Yeah, we can delve into some flooring options and some different trim options and maybe talk a bit about cabinets and countertops as well. There's so much to cover, guys, and we've been pretty broad.

We could really dive into all these topics or any one of these topics for a good several hours, but that would be super boring. So until next time, we'll get back and talk more about interior products and selections. Take care.