Home Renovation Project By Fort Saskatchewan Contractors
Okay, we got another little reno already, well underway here in Fort Saskatchewan. And what we’re gonna do here on this one is similar to what we do on most, which is in improving the energy efficiency through exterior insulation. So once you’re getting sick of your siding job, it’s looking a little tired and looking like it hasn’t been changed or fixed up since the seventies, then you, that’s your perfect opportunity to increase your energy efficiency.
Once again, these old homes, they are often framed two by four construction and so that it’s not up to code for today’s day and age. And there’s lots of opportunity to increase your energy efficiency. You can do up to two inches of insulation on the exterior of these guys, depending on whether you’ve got a stucco or whether the stucco’s gonna be removed. So this house here, it was I think it was an aluminum siding on the front.
The rest of the house is stucco. If you want to do this yourself, if you decide you’re ever gonna take stucco off on a house, you always want to get it tested for asbestos first, because that is nasty stuff and you don’t want to be breathing that in as you’d be grinding the stuc off. So we’ve tested this house and it’s, it is asbestos positive, so we’re not gonna expose the neighborhood and our guys and, and ourselves to the asbestos.
So what we’re gonna do on this one is we can do an inch and a half of insulation, which will give you our seven and a half that will qualify for some energy rebates. It’s not the, not the top rebate, but it will make a significant difference. So that’s what we’re doing here.
We’ll do some strapping over top of the stucco and some insulation. So here’s a little closeup at the front of this house, and as you’ll see, there’s gonna be a little rot repair required here, not abnormal for these homes. So houses built in probably 1975 or so. So over all those years, nearly 50 years, I guess a little bit of water can make its way in. And where your water will come in on almost any building is around openings in the sidings. It is windows and doors. And this is very typical that you’ll see this kind of stuff around the edges of the windows.
So for this one, We might, this is fairly hard still, but we’ll talk to the carpenter, we’ll see what he says. We might end up changing out this, this plate at the bottom of the window. But overall it is not super rotten. We’ve seen much worse, this is doable. We can get this repaired and not too great of an expense.
Now’s the time to repair this, but what you’re gonna see right here is the benefits of exterior insulation. So this is what this house was framed. You got your two by four, that’s three and a half inches, and then you got your insulation, your fiberglass insulation from day one. So what you’ve, what you’ve got happening here is the, the lumber coming straight through from the outside to the inside cold can come directly through pass right through this two by four straight inside the house. And so every 16 inches where this is framed, you’ve got these, these two by fours that can carry the cold straight through.
This is called thermal bridging. Now when we wrap this with inch and a half foam, it covers up that, that two by four and is going to greatly reduce the thermal bridging. So this house, not only is it gonna be additional insulation, another R seven and a half, but it’s also going to be eliminating the thermal bridging because all those two by fours are just gonna be wrapped up nice and warm. Even on new construction homes. They all have thermal bridging. So this house is gonna be better than most even new construction homes in terms of eliminating that thermal bridging and more coverage.
So here’s a view of the back corner of the house and here’s your original stucco. And like I say, we, we like to take this off whenever possible so we can maximize the insulation we’re putting on once the stucco’s ripped off.
In the cases where we can rip it off we can do up to two inches of insulation over top of this sheeting. It’ll give you an extra R 10 and then makes a huge difference. I did my own house over there in Pine View, 10 plus, well, gee, maybe 15 years ago I guess cut off all the stucco, put on two inches of foam. And I noticed the difference the very same night I put that insulation on. It was January and I had a corner of the house like this, which was a bedroom. One wall was insulated and one was not.
It was like minus 30 that night. I put my hand on the wall on the inside, I could tell the difference. It was incredible benefit, quieter in the house, cooler in the summer, warmer in the winter by a large margin. So that’s awesome to be able to save some money and do your part for the environment, that kind of stuff. So we love doing these, these fix ups.
This house here also, you’ll see that it was original. Looks like Cedar Fascia board requires some love, some paint stain or whatnot periodically. So what we’re gonna do in this house is we’re gonna cap all this with a aluminum that matches the color on the window. In this case it’s a gentech nutmeg color, which is the, that capping color right there. And then we’ll close all this in so it’s not all open and you can’t see that jagged edge like that. So we’ll make a nice little custom cap for that.
These windows, they’re gonna be countersunk in the house once we get our inch and a half of foam and our strapping on. So what we’re gonna do is take some of that same nutmeg brown metal and we’ll build an el trim to build all these windows out so that you can’t see the edge of the insulation. When we’re done
Here at the back of the house. The boys get the deck boards taken part here a little bit ’cause there is a window down in there. Can’t see it too well, but there’s a window down there they want changed out. We’re changing three basement windows in the front window in this house.
And so we’re gonna pop off a couple deck boards so we can get in there and work and get that done. And yeah, that’s about it for the back of the house here. It’s pretty basic, very simple job for us. Gonna be nice here. We’ve got the new front window, nice big front window. It’s gonna be venting for the people here and so that’s gonna be much nicer. Get a little bit of cross breeze through the house over running into an issue in the front. The old window was framed incorrectly and the header is too short to accommodate this window, even for the original window, it was just framed wrong.
It’s amazing. There’s less than an inch for the header to sit on the right on the edge of the window, not even on the framing. So we’ve pointed this out to the homeowner, we’re opening it up on the inside and we’re gonna get that fixed up. We can reframe that header from the inside.
Here you can see our starter strip is custom made starter. The insulation’s gonna sit right on this. We’ve got our inch and a half. It will it probably be an eighth wider for the foam to sit there. And then this new siding will hook on here. We’ll insulate this whole house with this halo X terra R 7.5 and it’s gonna, like I say, wrap this house nicely.
These homeowners didn’t want to remove the brick, so we’re just gonna leave that. We’ll flash that out. Put a nice drip edge on here, probably in that same matching brown nutmeg. It’s real easy for us to demo this kind of brick. If anyone is sick of the old brick look, we can easily change that out. And we’ve done it many times. So these folks just like, like the look. So we’re gonna keep that on here for him.
Just look at the front door, we’re gonna have to flash that out as well. Matching aluminum color and then got Allen on the inside here he is doing a little exploration to see how much it’s gonna cost additional, unfortunately to rebuild that header. But it’s completely unforeseen. Instance, that’s there’s a framing, major framing issue on this, so we’re gonna keep it to a minimum. It’s gotta be done in a day.
So it’s not, I’m not anticipating a huge bill for this, but we definitely will address any kind of issues like this as we see them, bring ’em to the homeowner’s attention and get approval before completing any fixes. And as you see, there’s the old, the old siding trailer. I’m sure you’ve seen it around town many times. We’ve got a few of those and we always put a porta potty on site and every job so people are not watering the trees out back and keep the site clean for you.
So Gallason , local Fort Sask people, give ’em a shout if you need any porta potty services. They’ve been really good to us and we appreciate them. This project is gonna be Da Vinci D 4.5 Dutch lab in pecan. So this is a premium color vinyl siding. And we’ve done some 3D modeling for this client.
And so we can show ’em what this house will look like with pecan color on it that’s gonna match their, their brown, the brown eaves trough and the new brown fascia and that. So real, real nice serve. Okay, we got another little reno already, well underway here in Fort Saskatchewan. And what we’re gonna do here on this one is similar to what we do on most, which is in improving the energy efficiency through exterior insulation.
So once you’re getting sick of your siding job, it’s looking a little tired and looking like it hasn’t been changed or fixed up since the seventies, then you, that’s your perfect opportunity to increase your energy efficiency. Once again. These old homes, they are often framed two by four construction and so that it’s not up to code for today’s day and age. And there’s lots of opportunity to increase your energy efficiency.
You can do up to two inches of insulation on the exterior of these guys, depending on whether you’ve got stucco or whether the stucco is gonna be removed. So this house here, it was I think it was an aluminum siding on the front, but the rest of the house is stucco. And if you want to do this yourself, if you decide you’re ever gonna take stucco off on a house, you always want to get it tested for asbestos first. ’cause That is nasty stuff and you don’t want to be breathing that in as you’d be grinding the stucco.
So we’ve tested this house and it’s, it is asbestos positive, so we’re not gonna expose the neighborhood and our guys and, and ourselves to the asbestos. So what we’re gonna do on this one is we can do an inch and a half of insulation, which will give you our seven and a half that will qualify for some energy rebates. It’s not the, not the top rebate, but it will make a significant difference. So that’s what we’re doing here. We’ll do some strapping over top of the stucco and some insulation.