Foreign.

Welcome to around the House with Eric G. Your trusted source for all things home improvement.

Whether you're tackling a DIY project, hiring it out, or just trying to keep your home running smoothly, you're in the right place.

With over 30 years of remodeling experience, certified kitchen designer Eric G. Takes you behind the scenes with expert advice, industry trends, and the latest innovations for your home.

Home.

It's everything you need to know without the fluff.

Now here's your host, Eric G. Welcome.

To the around the House show, the next generation of home improvement.

I'm Eric G. Thanks for joining me today.

This hour is brought to you by my friends at Monument Grills.

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Here he is my go to expert when it comes to green building materials and actually building things right.

So the house doesn't make you sick.

Andy, welcome back to around the House.

Brother.

Eric, my friend, it is great to be here once again.

Oh, man.

You and I are gonna go down some rabbit holes here and maybe even talk some liquid at the end that might not make it to the radio show.

So if you're listening on the radio show, you'll want to catch that in the podcast when we do the full length there.

But thanks for coming on, man.

You and you have just been doing this like me, I think since the beginning of time.

And this is just your jam when it comes to green building materials and building a house that's healthy.

Yeah, I got started in this business back in 1989 in construction.

My family owned a commercial construction material supply company.

I started right out of college and a few years into that gig, I had a project where people were getting sick on the job site because of the building materials.

And that's it.

At that point I said, we gotta start changing things.

And I wasn't gonna risk a 70 year old history of my family's business by selling products that are getting people sick.

And I just thought it's just if there are healthier materials out there, it's gotta be a better way to go.

And.

And it just spiraled from there.

I started an offshoot of the company called Green Design center and I focus completely on the health of the occupants of the building.

Of course we talk about eco friendliness, sustainability, recyclability, energy efficiency, but really my Focus is on the health of the human occupants.

Man, that is perfect.

And you've dealt with what, 30, 40,000 clients over the years?

I bet knowing you.

Yeah.

Somewhere about 33,000 clients now.

Yeah.

I knew it.

Because I tell you what, I.

It's funny when you start counting back, because I started just after you did doing kitchen a bath design and started counting clients, and I'm like, there's a lot right now.

Except my clients aren't.

Weren't all, like, giant projects.

It could have been.

I'm helping them replace the front door, I'm helping them replace windows, or choosing the right paint for a project.

But one of the things I tell my new clients is that I. I have learned a little bit of something from every one of my clients I've dealt with over the years that I can now pass on to the next.

And so anybody who's out there saying that they are an expert and they don't need to learn anything more about whatever they're doing is completely blowing smoke.

Because after 30 some years in this business, I am still learning things new every single day.

And the science is evolving.

Right.

All of a sudden we're like, hey, this is the greatest new thing.

And then it goes into practical use, and then that's where you find the holes in that and go, oh, we didn't think of that situation or however that works.

But it just, you know, we get better at things and materials get better and technology gets better, and we start measuring things more and realizing where the pitfalls are.

That's why we call it a building practice.

We are always striving for perfection, but we have to understand that perfection, by whatever definition, just really isn't necessarily possible.

All we can do is the best that we know how and then learn from either our mistakes or learn from the new technologies that come out.

When green building started, the big push started in the early 2000s.

It was all about energy efficiency, sustainability.

And by about 2010, the industry said, wait a second, humans live inside of these buildings, so maybe we should think about that.

Yeah.

Oh, great example.

There was a cabinet line here that was made in my Portland area that was on the west coast that they were shipping to, and they were making cabinetry out of that strawboard material.

Yeah, it's super green.

I get it.

But getting it from the cabinet shop to the job site and installed was the hard part, because that stuff was like building out of race cakes if you bumped it.

I had.

I literally had a project that was million dollar homes where the builder called up and said, how fast can you give me cabinets?

I've sent back three homes because we had cabinet boxes falling apart between the time of them carrying it from the garage into the kitchen.

And they couldn't deal with it.

Again, the.

These are the speed bumps or the roadblocks we want to call them, that we all have to deal with as these newer technologies come out.

It's really the unintended consequence of trying do the right thing.

And it's horrible that these clients had to go through these situations.

But again, we all learned from those things and said, we're going to change what we do and we're going to make things better.

Oh, yeah, that was 15, 17 years ago.

So it was a while back.

But you'll learn those things, and it's for sure.

And you and I were talking.

It's one of the things that I'm noticing here.

And I'm in Portland, Oregon, for the people just tuning in.

You're out in the Midwest, out that way.

And one thing I've noticed here and is we've got an interesting climate here in the Portland metro area.

We've got probably October through June is our rainy season, and then the rest of the year it's pretty dry and not humid.

But the problem is that we have building code here that is the same across the country that really is missing the boat on building science right now.

They have just not kept up.

And I'm watching homes being built in my neighborhood here that are one to $5 million homes.

And the house wrap is incorrectly installed.

The flashing is wrong.

And I'm driving by these homes.

There's four in my neighborhood with one builder that I'm looking at it going, if that sighting lasts five years, here's what they're doing.

They're wrapping poorly, the entire house with Tyvek.

They're installing on it battens going down every 12 inches or so that are nailed into the OSB through that so they can keep an air gap in there between the siding and the Tyvek.

And then when they're putting the windows in, they've got the openings framed up.

Of course, they're wrapping the Tyvek in, but then they install the windows and flash over that.

So the flashing is trying to stick to the Tyvek and not to the wood underneath it.

And then they're not even taping the seams on the Tyvek with the Tyvek tape.

And I'm looking at this going, that's a problem.

And then up the street on the Exact opposite.

On a Habitat for Humanity house, they've got some black liquid membrane that it looks like they.

I know they didn't tar the outside of the house, but it has that appearance for the unknown person.

Because I had two or three people call me up that are buddies, that are realtors that went, what are they putting on the outside of that?

And I go, it's a liquid applied membrane.

At least you're not going to get water through it.

But it does probably cause potentially other issues if you didn't take that into account in the building sites.

Yeah.

And so this is where building science and common sense kind of start butting heads.

Right.

Everybody heard that old adage, a home needs to breathe.

Well, in reality, the occupants of the home need to breathe.

The home could care less.

But what I do agree with is the wall assembly needs to be able to release moisture in both directions.

And so when we talk about breathability from that standpoint, we're talking about moisture release, we're not talking about air.

So I love the concept of using this, whatever liquid applied membrane to keep water from coming in to try to seal up all little holes that air could come in.

Because if air can come in, so can moisture and mold and insects and so forth.

But then what happens is during construction, when the windows haven't been installed yet and the home really isn't dried in completely, you're getting all this moisture that's getting into that cavity wall.

First nice day they have, they button it up, they start doing insulation and drywall, and then you have moisture in that cavity wall that needs to come out.

Common thinking amongst the industry is once you have your H Vac on, it's going to start to dry out on its own.

But how long does that take?

And will it take six months, six years?

Never.

And then this is when you have mold starting to develop in walls.

And this is why the estimate is around 50% of all homes in this country have mold and or moisture issues.

That's a very conservative estimate.

There are now research going into the whole mold mitigation issue showing that it's more along the lines of 70 to 80% of homes.

Wow, that's huge.

And it's even more so here.

And I've told this story to you a couple times on the show, but when I was in Seattle as a kitchen designer, I was up on the east side, north of Bellevue in the Kirkland Redmond area up there, million dollar homes back then, and this was 15, 17 years ago, when you're in that rainy season that I just described, you can have an inch and a half or two inches of rain easily on a day.

They were framing this million dollar home up.

They were.

There was OSB on the roof.

They were doing interior framing.

They hadn't dried it in yet.

It was dumping rain.

I go walk in to see if this thing is ready to measure walls for cabinetry.

I step in, you know, because they haven't cut out the sill plate.

So there's an inch and a half of water sitting there on the floor that the osb, everything gets soaked.

Now when I look up, there's this really cool balcony above me with this kind of circular staircase going up to it.

And it was a water feature because there was a railing going to go there.

So all the water on the second floor was running off like it was a water display at a hotel.

Yep.

Now the scary part was the framers in there that had the, they had all of their electrical cords going through that.

And there was a guy standing out at the GFCI at the temp pole going, they'd go power and eat at the reset about every 60 to 70 seconds.

And I'm like, I'm not dying in this house.

And so I got out of there.

But the problem was nobody around here, especially in my area I can have.

And I see this more with plywood but I'll see homes that are two or three stories or even worse mixed use buildings that are stick frame that are four or five stories and by the time they're done at the top, the black drywall, the black, not drywall but the black sheeting, the black studs is disgusting.

And nothing happens.

They just put building wrap around it and keep going.

And so much so I'm seeing at the home centers now.

I put this up on social media this last fall I walked into my local Lowe's store, sorry Lowe's.

And the two by fours have an extra quarter inch of white fungus growing on them.

And people are loading them up and there's black spots all over everything because they're bringing in all this non kiln dried lumber into a building that's been.

And it's been sitting out wrapped in plastic out in the heat and it comes inside and it's the perfect growing for molds.

And all these two by fours are going out the door that are just looking like a petri dish.

And it's.

We got a problem guys.

And that's just getting the building materials to the job site.

That's true.

And so it all starts with Most of the producers that I know of, let's take like a company like Sierra Pacific, do a absolutely wonderful job with kiln drying down to the perfect percentage.

But then it gets put onto large rail cars.

They wrap it and then ship it gets to the lumber yard.

It's sitting outside at a large distribution plant.

It probably gets some tears in the plastic during the day.

And then you have people who are pulling boards off of there after tearing the plastic.

And so part of it's open and so then you get water, sun, water, sun, water, sun.

And eventually it's.

You start to grow mold on the surfaces.

It starts way back when at the distribution level.

Now in my situation, I have projects all around the country and we write into the contract that all lumber has to be inspected either before delivery at the lumberyard or upon delivery.

And we have the right of refusal.

The problem is when it's the middle of summer and everybody's projects are going nuts, the lumber yard would say, okay, we can bring back another load.

It may be a few days and I don't know if the wood's going to be any better.

Yeah.

So we are in the process right now of developing protocols for what do you do with this, how do you treat it?

There are ways to still be able to use most of that lumber by treating it with very safe coatings and sealers and so forth that would care of the problem.

But again, it adds time, it adds cost.

On the other hand, there's so many parts of the equation have just been left off throughout the process.

Every step of the way just doesn't have the same level of care the way they used to.

And we're so accustomed to the I need products cheap and fast and whenever I need it.

And so everything's always an emergency.

We just don't build into projects anymore.

The time it takes to actually go through these items and make sure that they're safe before we start using them.

Yeah, I'm seeing a trend here because I am a moisture area at least six months out of the year.

And then our coastal communities.

I can beat the coast at the beach house an hour and 20 minutes from my place.

But I'm seeing a trend now in the home centers that they're bringing in green non killed dried lumber.

Wow.

And again, another issue with that because.

And the argument is that one, I think that they have less warping issues because it's still staying humid, and two, if it goes out to the coast, it's not sucking up all this moisture and dimensionally changing as well, and so there's some serious issues with that.

But I agree.

I can drive around here in February and see apartment buildings, luxury homes, and I can drive by and just shake my head because everything is black and gray streaked on it.

And it doesn't matter if it's OSB or anything else.

And then we do have some people starting to use the.

I don't want to use too many brand names and dog people, but some of the OSBs now that have a vapor barrier that are factory on there to tape off and do that.

And that's an interesting one too.

And I get that could really keep things dry.

But again, we go back to how much do we want this building to breathe?

And so then we have to look at it from a standpoint of return on the investment.

So how much more are these building materials costing us?

And at some point we have to say maybe we need to reevaluate the entire process of construction.

And that's something that myself and a number of people that I work with been evaluating over the last few years is designing homes that eliminate as much of the problematic products as possible.

It means reteaching some of the methods to contractors.

Architects are having a little bit difficult time with it because we're incorporating more commercial materials into residential projects.

Like we are actually starting to incorporate.

Instead of doing traditional exterior sheathing, we're doing things like den glass to get rid of wood as much as possible.

Knowing that wood is the problem in just about every project I'm on now.

And again, this is different 30 years ago, but in the last five years, almost every consulting client I deal with is coming to me saying I have a health issue because of mold or bacteria.

A health issue like chronic inflammatory response or mast cell activation, or they have another health issue like Lyme disease and it's exacerbated by mold and chemical exposure.

But it all leads back to, if we didn't build our homes and our places of work with materials that we know are prone to degradation because of water, then we wouldn't be in this mess.

Yeah, it's really that simple.

There's new products out there now.

I had them on my show, TV show, probably 18, 24 months ago.

New product called System 3e, which is awesome.

And that uses those perlite blocks that snap together.

Wow.

Okay.

Completely fireproof.

I can put a torch on it for hours until the oxy acetylene runs out.

And it doesn't hurt it.

It's made out of perlite, so it's hydroscopic.

So water doesn't do anything to it.

Okay.

Now we're talking into a product that literally stacked the blocks that lock together.

I like where he's going with that.

I do, too.

And I think.

I mean that you think about construction down in Florida, where most homes are built with concrete block.

Why can't we do that in Portland?

Why can't I do that in Milwaukee, Wisconsin?

It's just rethinking the way we do things.

Globally speaking, the United States uses more wood in construction than any other country on the planet.

Yep.

Why?

Because we have more wood than just about any other country on the planet.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so if you go to.

Everybody says Europe does things differently.

They got this down.

Europe's been around a little longer than the United States, so they've had a lot of experience with this.

And they've already raped the land of most of the trees.

And now they're extracting as much concrete, aggregate, stone out of the ground as I can.

But the reason why those buildings last.

I was in Italy several years ago and I was staying in a villa that was built in the 1400s and was still operating as a hotel.

Yeah.

But it was built of stone.

It was built of stone and concrete and those derivatives.

And they don't have these types of problems because of that.

Here we have so much wood, we don't know what to do with it.

So we're building our homes out of it.

It's almost like we have to start thinking about the.

The Three Little Pigs.

And if it's built of stone, you can't blow it down.

There's something to be said about that.

And the problem is you get these new products.

And I'll say that, like the system 3e stuff.

I am sure.

And I'm not.

I don't know this is a fact.

But I am sure that would have been a perfect product down to build homes with in California, in Pacific Palisades, Malibu, that kind of stuff.

Because you've got a better situation there.

And what's cool is you can literally plaster the inside of it, skim coat it, because you're ready to go.

It's built in insulation outside.

You can stucco it so there's no wall cavity to speak of, which means there's no place for things to grow or things to leak.

But I can imagine it's going to take them years and years just to get through the building department so they can go, can we do that?

Yeah.

And that's where you get into an issue.

Yeah.

And then so in order for that to Happen you have to have all the builders and the builders associations on board to really push it, promote it.

And they don't want to because once you bring in a product like that, now you're talking.

That's really a job for a mason.

That's a different.

It's a completely different skill set.

In a lot of cases, it's a different union.

And so you have to look at these things and say, why are we, why aren't we progressing in a good, a quick and fast manner on building healthier homes?

And it's just the pushback of.

I believe the industry is very content with how they do things and they resist change until it's absolutely necessary.

And I'm seeing, just based upon my experiences now with clients around the country, that it's becoming medically necessary for people to make these changes.

Yep.

And that's a big deal.

And it's funny and quite frankly.

And I'm going to make a lot of lumberyards mad out there.

The wood lobby is strong.

They're a strong player out there.

I look at this and go, that's a hard one.

Now, could you be using wood?

Is framing on interior walls where it's all protected?

That's a different discussion.

Maybe.

But anything that's getting the weather out there or potentially up against, you know, something like that, I think, like you, that we really need to rethink how we do these things.

And it was one thing when it was being built in 1940s and there was so much air going through that wall, it's gonna dry out, right?

It's, you're leaking everywhere, you'll be fine.

And many times you were.

But the, like I said before, the unintended consequences.

Think of in the 90s and 2000s when the big push for energy efficiency tightened everything up.

The unintended consequence of do, of trying to save energy and be more eco friendly is we're building homes that are tighter and tighter, that cannot get rid of this moisture, number one.

And number two, there's the chemical exposure that we didn't have in the 40s and 50s, number one, because we didn't have these chemicals around, plastics weren't really readily.

Weren't readily available in all building materials.

So since about the 60s when plastics became ubiquitous in building and the use of all types of synthetics throughout the entire construction process, you have all these materials off gassing and off gassing is essentially the release of unreacted chemical monomers from materials that can last anywhere from 30 days to 30 years.

Just depends on the product and depends on where it's being used.

So for the people out there that don't know, that's new house smell, new car smell.

There you go.

Exactly.

That new home smell.

And some people say, oh, I love the new home smell.

I love the new car smell.

It makes me feel like I, that's great.

But for a giant percentage of the population, somewhere around between 25 to 30%, that smell is toxic.

It is dangerous.

And so we have to look closely at this and say, what are we doing?

We're building homes again, trying to be better performing, trying to save cost quicker, installs all these wonderful things.

And the aesthetic that you want to achieve, the trade off is these homes are not safe.

Yeah.

And building code is in many areas so far behind.

Think about how many areas across the United States that a range hood is not even required for building code.

Or bath fans.

As long as there's a window to open, they can get around it.

And I look at that and go, guys, this is 1940s thinking.

It is.

And I totally agree with that because I come up across that all the time.

And then take it to the next extreme, which is these building codes that have the insulation requirements that are so incredibly high that the only way to achieve them is to use spray foam insulation, which there is no such thing as a spray foam.

A safe spray foam insulation.

So they are requiring these things in order to meet an energy code.

But yet they then make you as the homeowner, essentially, you're building your own casket, I believe.

Yeah.

I was in a crawl space shooting, and I don't want to disparage anybody here, so I'm going to say this carefully.

I was in a crawl space doing some content.

They had done a very beautiful job of encapsulating the crawl space.

They had multiple, multiple dehumidifiers.

They had foam insulation underneath the.

The crawl space plastic.

It was well done.

And they had to come in and put a fire retardant over the foam so that wouldn't burn.

And I got down there, the ammonia smell was almost unbearable in that space.

Yeah, I've been talking about this for years, too.

The fire codes, the fire code requirements.

A lot of these things date back to the great Chicago fire.

Their mentality for requiring these things.

I'm sorry, but if your crawl space is on fire, you got other issues, right?

Yeah, you got way other issues, you know, so get out of the house.

Right?

Exactly.

Yeah.

And let's use technology that we have at our avail, which is.

I don't Know things like smoke detectors and fire detectors.

To let us know, let's not put a coating so on that.

I had a situation just a few years back and you may remember this too, because it made national attention.

There's a very large manufacturer of wood building materials that made tji joists.

And these TJI joists, in order to meet the codes in these particular areas had to be sprayed with a fire retardant coating.

That it's what's called an intumescent paint.

So as it heats up, it swells to perform to.

To create insulation.

Essentially.

Yeah.

This intumescent paint was releasing so much formaldehyde into the homes that it was driving families out of these homes.

And I'm talking about not just in a home here and there, but entire subdivisions.

So we are striving to try to make the home saf, but we're poisoning people while we do it.

The mentality just doesn't make sense at all on this.

And at the same time these same fire codes refuse and it drives me nuts.

Refuses to deal with trust systems where we have the stamped plates.

Because talking to firefighters out there that I've had on this show, they talk about when they'll build the floor systems with those kind of where it's like a 1012 or 14 inch and they're building those out of those steel plated trusses.

If there's been an active fire in there for more than five minutes, which is many times a response time from the time they figured out to get there, they won't walk onto those surfaces or go onto those roofs because about two to three minutes in with a fire on, those plates get hurled and come off.

And there's no other screws there, there's no other fasteners.

And so I've talked to firefighters where they've gone into newer homes that had that as the floor system and they go walk in and they don't realize that floor is collapsed.

But the tax strip has kept the carpet there like a.

And so the carpet looks a little bowed.

But they go walking in there, the floor's already collapsed and they don't even know it because the carpet's still attached to the tax strip and it's an issue.

And then you get that up there.

So there are so many little issues like that.

They get so hyper focused on and completely miss the other ones.

And I agree, if we spent more time with maybe sprinklers or fire alarm smoke detector things, we'd be way better off.

Yeah, I totally agree.

And I think it Also requires us just as the consumer, to bring these things up when we're talking to our builder, talking to our architect.

And we have to make the conscious decision that when you're designing and building a new home, what is the most important aspect of this build?

Is it to have the esthetic that you're looking for?

Is it to meet a price point?

Or is it to have the healthiest home possible?

You can't have all three.

You can have two out of the three, but you have to choose which one you're getting rid of.

And with my clients and I deal with people who have severe health issues, their focus is always, I got to build a home that's completely healthy for me.

Otherwise why build a new home at all?

All right?

Then we get into the design process and people get influenced by the television shows that are showing these wonderful designs and the magazines and the websites, hey, trust me, we're all creatures of that.

I want to, if I'm going to spend a half a million dollars on a new home or more, I want it to look beautiful.

Yeah, but you have to make the decision.

All right, maybe this doesn't look as nice, but it's not going to poison me.

It's not going to be a problem if it starts to burn things of that nature.

And that's a really tough decision to make.

But we have to, I don't know, we gotta be stronger in these decision making processes and really focus on what's good for us long term.

No question.

I gotta ask you some questions here.

I want to give you a little lightning round here.

So if you were to choose a building material on the outside of a house, plywood or osb, I'm diving in on you, man.

I'm diving in on you.

This is not a yes, no answer, because it can't be.

Yeah.

So if I had to choose just between exterior grade plywood and exterior grade osb, cheer grade plywood.

Okay, nice, nice.

I tend to agree with that.

I tend to agree with that.

And it's though, you know, asterisk from my point of view, I've seen plenty of times exterior grade plywood, especially like half inch stuff that's on a roof that I've seen it start to delaminate because of the rain, but at the same time, the OSB is failing too.

That's it.

So you deal with.

And so that's why I say all these what ifs?

Right?

Or.

But ifs.

Yeah, if you do exterior grade plywood, plywood for sheathing, then I'd Also say you've got to have a really good wrb and it's got to be for the walls.

It's got to be something like I'm a big fan of the peel and stick like the seagull wraps.

Oh yeah.

And because it takes some of the user error out of the equation and then the same thing for roofing materials and using the synthetic roof underlayments.

But this is the thing.

It's when a customer asked me what would you do in your house?

I can give them the answer.

But then here are all the things that you have to do to make sure that whichever one of them you choose will actually work.

Yeah, absolutely.

So my favorite kind of if I was going to build a wall as an example and say, okay, here's how I like to do it, I tend to go of course, you got your two by six framing.

I would put in like a rockwool insulation or one of the insulations in there because it, it helps you with fire, helps you with water a little bit if it gets through there.

But then I would go ply weather resistant barrier.

And if you're putting something else up on it, rain screen things properly flashed and then you're sighting on top of that 100%.

No.

I think the use of rain screens has made a huge improvement in how these wall assemblies perform.

And then on the inside, of course in most parts of the country, there's the code is that you have to put in a moisture resistant barrier on the inside in between the insulation and the drywall.

And most of the builders in those areas will use a 4 or a 6 mil plastic.

4 mil is actually is code.

6 mil is a vapor barrier, you can't use it.

But in either situation.

The problem with this is it allows for vapor transmission in both directions.

Yeah.

And so it's fine in one situation, but you don't want to have moisture inside of the house pushing back into the cavity wall.

So I always recommend the use of a smart membrane, something that allows the vapor transmission only in one direction.

And again, it's like you're pulling teeth with the contractors because they're so used to what they're using.

We just have to get them to change a little bit.

I've done an awful lot of work now in the last few years trying to teach the trades here locally on here's what you're trying to do.

You're trying to keep air from getting into the cavity, you're trying to keep water from giving the cavity.

But you have to assume moisture is in there, never assume that it's perfect.

Always assume it's not perfect.

So now we have to give it the ability for it to come out.

So everything has to be moisture, vapor, breathable.

So we're now using, for instance, on all new builds, we're using mineral paints on all of our walls because mineral paints will always be breathable.

Where traditional latex paints are, lose their breathability over a period of time.

So we want that to always be able to transfer that.

That vapor.

So it's interesting, here's a debate that I run into.

Same kind of thing, building code out here.

Depending who I talk to, depending where in the code book you're looking, if we want to get that technical.

And I got into this debate with my brother out at the beach house because we.

That was probably you and I talked about it.

It was one of the worst water damaged.

I.

It was.

When we bought the place, it had tarps for 20 plus years on the roof.

And when we went on the inspection, I was tyveked up.

We had respirators on and there was water like a hose running out of the middle of the living room floor.

And the.

It was so bad that the oak hardwood floors, the two and a quarter inch oak wood hardwood floors, had expanded so much that in the middle of the room, the two pieces had swollen up so high that, that they were back to back on edge in the middle of the floor.

So huge moisture problem.

But when you read through building code out there, they were saying that before drywall, they wanted a vapor barrier there, they wanted plastic.

And I'm like, we have a vapor barrier on the outside because that cedar shingle.

So I've got 15 pound felt out there in a lot of the area that we didn't mess with.

And in the other ones we had WRB there.

But I'm like, I don't want to put a moisture sandwich together here.

There's no place for it to go.

And the guy goes, you have.

He goes.

And it was funny how we asked him and the building inspector went, you've got a moisture barrier on the outside.

I'll count that as the inside.

And I went, see?

Okay.

He knew what the problem was with the code because we went, right.

And he goes.

And it was out on the coast, you're a block from the water.

And it's.

And he's, yeah, we don't need two vapor barriers there.

And I'm like, yeah, I think a.

Lot of the problem is the interpretation of the codes.

And as you found out, you had that inspector interpreted it in your favor in the correct way.

But the next inspector may not do that, and it depends on their personal experiences.

Yeah, I think that.

And also, I think there's a.

There's a misunderstanding of a lot of the terminologies and the codes.

And that happens by both the builders and the inspectors.

On the outside, you need that water resistant barrier.

On the inside, you need also a moisture barrier, but not necessarily a complete perm rating of less than one vapor barrier.

But it gets interpreted as a vapor barrier.

And then you're right.

Where does the water go?

It doesn't go anywhere.

It sits in the walls and it just turns into a mold factory.

Yeah, it's tough.

It's tough.

And so that's one of those things.

And next question I want to ask you.

So fiberglass versus mineral wool type insulation.

If money and time are no object, I'm doing mineral wool.

And I caveat it that way because, let's face it, it's a little more expensive.

What do you get for that?

You get a product that will not retain water, which is fantastic.

You get a product that has a better R value per inch.

You get a product that is much better in sound control.

Oh, it's so huge.

It's such a big difference on sound.

Exactly.

So what we'll do sometimes, depending on the project, Eric, is we'll actually do like a blown in blanket system of fiberglass for the exterior walls and then in the interior walls where we want sound control between bedrooms, the laundry room, so forth.

We'll use the mineral W. That's one.

Thing I started doing probably 15 years ago when I was known as Roxul here in the US But I would do it around all my bathroom remodels because there's always a bedroom on the side of it.

So I would just say, hey, guys, put it in the budget.

Let's put it in there.

Especially around the shower and the toilet and that kind of stuff.

Let's just make sure that we get that in there.

What are you talking about?

I'm like, it will make such a difference in the sound of those bedrooms.

And it's also going to help a little bit if there was a fire in there, too.

That's not going to hurt.

Yeah, exactly.

Right.

There's many upsides to doing that.

The downside, of course, is the cost.

As we've talked about before, I think we have changed the way we build things just to keep costs down.

And those changes, for the most part, haven't been positive.

And so we need to get back to the true costs of building good quality homes.

And something like this is a really good attribute to have.

Yeah.

And code has got to get up there.

Even code.

Great example.

If I walk into my Home Depot store.

Yeah, Home Depot and Bro Newtone, I'm calling you out on this.

If I walk into my ventilation aisle there on the shelf, even though it hasn't been building code for 20 years, I can get a forehead duster, bent hood that won't vent to the outside for the kitchen.

Right.

Blows it right back in your face, which does virtually nothing.

And it drives me nuts.

And usually once a year I'll do a, I'll do a radio show and podcast on My 10 Favorite Things at the home improvement store that doesn't meet building code or you shouldn't use.

And it's crazy.

And I look at it and go, look guys, that hasn't met code here for 20 plus years.

Washington, the next state over probably 20 plus years.

Why are we selling these?

Yeah, I see these Zillow listings for multimillion dollar homes, these beautiful kitchens and they have a microwave above the range that recirculates.

Drives me nuts.

Makes zero sense.

It doesn't do a thing.

And if you look at the.

One of the big conversations right now in the industry is talking about gas versus electric.

Right.

What's what, which one is better for the environment, which is better for the occupants.

And I will argue with anybody that a gas range is perfectly safe if you have and you use a vented to the outside range hood and you use it properly and you make sure to test all your gas connections on an annual basis to make sure they're not leaking.

Even if you had an electric range top, an induction range top, if you don't use your range hood and that exhaust to the outside, all of those VOCs and other pollutants that get created during cooking, stay in your house.

So it's you really.

It comes down to ventilation.

It does.

And when you look at the ingredients these days that are in our foods that now we're baking and cooking on the top of that they're going someplace that smoke is burnt protein, burnt chemicals, burnt oils.

And that's what that is.

And people still to this day I can walk in and go, I noticed this really after I.

One of the things I did as a kitchen designer is I like to go back at the one year mark, right before the one year mark and revisit things through them.

One, I learned a lot on the design side of what they Liked or what they didn't.

And then I could see how the performance was because it really gave me a snapshot of how things looked.

It was really cool to go back and test it and look and get their opinion.

And I learned a lot that way.

I'd look at the bandhood and I'm like, wow, it's dirty.

And wow.

The.

I don't think you've ever taken the mesh screen out of there.

Are you even using it?

Yeah.

It moves a lot of air, but it's too loud.

Ok. Yeah.

Really?

Yeah.

The inconveniences that we have to deal with.

Oh, my gosh.

The noise.

You're cooking in a kitchen.

You're making noise with the pots and pans.

You know what?

If you can't hear your television while you're cooking because you got the fan.

On, turn up the television.

Evaluate priorities a little bit.

Exactly.

Yeah.

And it's crazy.

So it's just one of those things that.

I agree.

And the same goes with bath fans.

I happily hear they've added code that you got to put the.

You gotta have a timer at least on it.

But at the same point, I think the one thing that I learned the most in my house was putting in air quality monitors that I could jump on my phone and look at and a handheld one that I could go around and take with me, and I would set it down on the couch next to me when I would watch television or if I was cooking, I'd set it on the counter and I'd be like, hey, why is that beeping?

Oh, look what's coming out of that $20 online fast fashion pillow that someone ordered.

Wow, look what's coming out of that.

That's scary.

Yeah.

I think having access to information is always helpful, and so I'd certainly encourage whatever brand you want to work with.

These whole home detectors and the ones that go right to your phone and alert you if something's going on.

Even the handheld equipment, I absolutely love having and using.

But I always caution people, you have to be really mindful of what else is occurring in the house.

So I had a situation just a couple of years ago where we were doing a very intricate VOC and formaldehyde test in a home.

And it's a test kit system that we'd send out.

The homeowner would do the test and then send it back to the lab.

And the numbers came back staggeringly high.

And he's.

I don't know what to do at this point because we've exhausted all the Other ideas we had to fix this house.

And about a week later, he calls me up and he said, I gotta tell you, during the test, which takes about 20 minutes, I went upstairs to give myself an insulin shot, and I used a little bit of alcohol to clean my skin.

Mike.

There you go.

There you go.

It's amazing how detailed these.

These systems are, so you really have to be mindful of that.

So if you're doing.

If you have a handheld, make sure you're doing it two hours after you took a shower and put on hairspray.

Exactly.

A couple hours after cooking, things like that, you have to be mindful of that.

Great, great idea.

Yeah, that's.

I've seen that happen, too.

Where it just.

Absolutely.

I forgot about that.

Where it just completely throws off the.

The thing.

And I've noticed that, too.

Giving the dog a bath or something.

Walk by the one sensor, and you're like, what was that?

Okay, that was from the soap, and it was green soap, too, but it just didn't like it, and the humidity was off.

And I'm like, oh, okay.

That's what it is.

And, yep, it's amazing.

We're running out of time here for the radio show, but wanted to talk liquids a little bit with you.

What's new in your world of whiskeys and scotches out there?

Oh, boy.

As anybody who's heard me on here before knows, I am a scotch whiskey and bourbon sommelier.

So I do, in my spare time, for a hobby, I conduct whiskey classes.

And so whether it's for somebody's birthday, whether it's a corporate event, and so I have to do enough research and education so I know what I'm talking about.

Which.

It's a tough task, Eric, because somebody's got to do it.

Sounds horrible.

Sounds horrible.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Pray for me.

Yeah, I'm praying for you.

Yeah, I'll pray to the whiskey gods for you as well.

So I'm doing an event coming up here in a couple of months for a client.

I think this is my fifth or sixth one now for him in his family.

And he says, all right, what are we going to taste this year?

Because we've done everything else.

Scotches, bourbons, you name it.

So I came up with a whiskey topic, and it's called Oddities.

And so I'm working on the title.

Oddities of mash Bills and Curious Casks.

Oh.

So it broadens up to.

It can be a bourbon, a scotch, an American whiskey, another malt whiskey from around the world.

But what we're doing is we're going to be tasting whiskeys that have.

That are against the grain, so to speak.

I like that instead of using corn, rye, barley, and wheat, they're using things like spelt and millet.

Or I'm tasting one now, which is 100% rice from Louisiana.

I'll tell you what, if you expand beyond just your traditional bourbons and traditional scotches, there are so many interesting and amazing flavors out there.

It's really remarkable what these distillers are doing right now in their endeavor to try to find the next great spirit.

And.

And I've been really blown away by how good some of these are.

What's funny, too, is you start to see it, and it's, oh, here I'll see somebody doing one that's been aged in a Pinot noir barrel or red wine.

Or you're seeing all these different kind of, pardon the pun, mashups of all of this, and it's just, wow, okay, that's interesting.

And they all have such wildly different flavor profiles.

Oh, they do, they do.

And so that's why I love doing these events, because I think we're all creatures of habit.

And so it's.

I'll just.

If you like Maker's Mark and you're going to drink Maker's Mark all the time, that's wonderful.

But expand your horizon a little bit and understand that you may find something that has that same flavor profile, but it goes in a different direction.

It's like wine.

When people say, do you like red or white?

Okay, yes, I like them both.

Yeah.

But now you give me a whiskey that you really love, and it's like your go to whiskey.

I will give you 30 or 40 others that you should try that are almost the same, but a different enough that, that you go, huh, that's interesting.

And yeah.

And especially nowadays because just in the last couple of years here in the US We've actually developed a new product category called American single malt.

Yeah.

And you know that you got a couple of great producers, right, in Portland.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so that's.

For me, that's one of my favorite.

My favorite drinks now is an American single malt.

And it's not Scotch, technically.

Right?

It's not.

Yeah.

I mean, it's made the exact same way, the exact same ingredients, but it's made here in the US So the difference is the climate for maturation.

The difference is the water.

That's a huge difference, Right?

Huge difference.

And the.

For instance, in Scotland, they distill everything twice.

Scotch.

It has to be distilled twice.

It can be distilled three times, but two times is the minimum here in the U.S. single distillation.

Yeah, that's what bourbon is.

They're doing that with single malts.

And what I like about that is it's more of a raw flavor.

You get all the flavor.

Yeah, exactly.

So it's funny, my cheap.

Go to sitting down, throw it on a piece of ice.

I've been drinking now the Tex blended whiskey out of Texas.

Yeah, okay.

I love it.

It's easy, it's caramelly.

I don't have to throw anything on it.

It's just.

It's inexpensive and I enjoy it.

That's my.

It's been a rough day.

I'm going to sit back and kick back and sip on two fingers.

Just that kind of.

Just chill, nothing expensive, but just.

It's as inexpensive as anything else out there is on that kind of what I.

It's not, it's.

It's not the low shelf stuff, but it's just the good, drinkable, easy stuff.

Yeah.

I appreciate anything in the 20 to $30 a bottle range because you're gonna get some.

You're gonna get quality.

It's produced in a quality manner.

It just might be mass produced.

And so what?

I don't care.

People laugh at me when I say this, but I've done a lot of what are called blind tasting events.

All the glasses are nondescript.

You don't know what the bottle is.

You don't even.

I don't even tell you what the mash bill is until you try it.

And then we rate it.

There's a whiskey out there called Mellow Corn, and if you've ever seen Mellow Corn, I've seen it.

Never tried it.

It's bright yellow in color.

It is like a green label with a yellow ear of corn on the front.

It's obnoxious.

And it's going to be all the way down to the bottom of the shelf.

Right.

It's about 16 bucks a bottle.

But I will tell you, when I do blind tastings, especially when I'm doing blind tastings with real bourbon lovers, this one almost always comes out at number one or number two out of five.

It's drinkable.

Right.

It's just one of those things, people go, oh, that's amazing.

Exactly.

Right.

And usually what I do is I'll usually have that one like number four.

Number five out of five.

And so you've tried all these others, then you try this, and it's so smooth.

It's called mellow cone for a reason.

It is mellow, it is smooth, it's sweet.

Extremely drinkable.

And again, 16 bucks a bottle.

You really can't beat it.

Okay, now I got to try that because I've been just for the last number of years.

My just go to was like Buffalo Trace.

That was just my easy drinkable.

That was the cheap stuff that I had.

But then my buddy was up from Texas and brought that.

I went, I like that a little better.

I do love the Texas whiskeys, though, because they do have a little different flavor profile than any other American whiskeys.

And Coney's is one of my favorite distillers down there.

And they just have so many interesting flavors that you can't get from anything else.

Yeah, I think they're made.

TX is made, I think.

What's that Firestone or Robertson or whatever down there?

Kind of one of the bigger ones.

But it's inexpensive.

I used to have to drive up to Washington state to get it because I couldn't get it here in Oregon, which just meant going across the river.

Now they got it here, but it's way more expensive in Washington because they got all those taxes up there they nail you on.

So they've got like a 40 sales tax or something crazy.

Yikes.

So it gets expensive.

But yeah.

And of course we got some great brands here in our area.

But there are so many different brands and so many.

I still like whistlepig out of Vermont or wherever easy drinking go wrong with it.

It's just.

Again, it's a tried and true.

Actually one of my favorites right now is Barrel Barrel Craft.

And they have called Seagrass.

Ooh.

And Seagrass is a.

It's a.

A blend of bourbons.

Okay.

That were then aged independently in various types of barrels.

Like an ex rum barrel.

A third of it was aged in an ex apricot brandy barrel.

Ooh, cool.

It's unbelievable.

Yeah.

One of my favorite pours right now.

A little pricey, about 60, 70 bucks a bottle.

It's a special occasion bottle.

But I'll tell you what, for an American made whiskey, I'm a scotch drinker.

Yeah.

But that one, I. I'll tell you, it is the best of the best.

Yeah.

Some of those is just.

It's like right now I'm.

I've been drinking a.

Last month I've been working on a bottle of Basil Hayden dark.

Very good.

Dark rye.

I could drink that.

I could sip on that all day long.

It's just beautiful.

One of the goals for this year.

I always set goals every year.

Not New Year's Eve.

What am I gonna do this year?

Differently.

But I set goals for business.

But this year, I also set.

The goal was I need to clean up some of the old bottles that I have on the shelf, because as a whiskey sommelier, I have somewhere in the neighborhood of six to seven hundred bottles of whiskey.

Oh, I'll donate my time to come help.

I gotta help a brother out.

Come on over, brother.

I'll be happy to pour you one.

Or a few.

Exactly.

So one of my goals this year was I am not going to open up a new bottle until I finish an old bottle.

Nice.

And because I have all these bottles that, you know.

And whiskey never goes bad.

It changes.

The flavor profiles change as the oxidation occurs, but it never goes bad.

So I have some bottles that are 10, 12 years old that I had this much left.

That's it.

I don't care if I liked it or didn't like it.

I'm finishing this.

And so I'm keeping a photo record of every bottle that I killed this year.

Nice.

And so sometime in next January, I'm gonna be posting a photo collage of my bottle kills of the year.

All right, I want to see that.

That's good.

You got it.

I was thinking you and I should do some kind of an online whiskey tasting sometime where we tell people to go out and buy these four bottles, and we do it on like this, and we all do it as a live event, and people could come in.

I think it would be so fun, especially if you gave them a week or two of, okay, do this.

Go buy these four bottles.

That way it's not too expensive.

Give people a little time to do it.

We all sit there and.

And do it.

I think it'd be a lot of fun sometime.

We've done this before where we've done.

We do bottle shares with friends.

Yeah.

Because it's.

You can do that.

I've got friends.

You can try some.

And.

And we then distribute samples.

And I'll tell you what.

And the ones.

The most fun ones are when I just put numbers in the bottles.

Yep.

I don't put names.

Yep.

Pour 1 through 5, and let's taste them.

And I guarantee we'll taste whiskeys anywhere from 15 bucks a bottle up to 200 a bottle.

And the one that always ranks number one is something around 20 bucks.

Yeah.

It's awesome.

It's awesome.

So, Andy.

Yeah.

Let's do it.

Let's do it.

Let's do it.

So, Andy, how do people get a hold of you because you've got such a great knowledge base of everything from taking care of those healthy home issues out there, whether you're a modeling building or working with existing structures that you're trying to clean up a little bit?

How do people track you down?

The best way to get in touch with me now is I have a new website for my consulting, my podcasting, all my content.

It's called NTE Live.

Nice.

Ntelive.com and from there you can get the YouTube show and all the other places and so forth.

I'm in my 50s.

I started my YouTube page about six months ago and I'm still getting the hang of it.

These young bucks that start a YouTube page and have a million followers in six weeks, that's not me.

No, but same here.

This is the best way to learn and to reach out to me for consultations, so forth.

I still have my material supply company, Green Design center, and that is thegreendesigncenter.com.

You got it, brother.

Thanks for coming on today, man.

It's always a good time.

We could do Joe Rogan style of this for four hours and not cover it all.

So I'll have to do it again soon.

We will do that with whiskey.

All right, brother.

We will do that.

I'm Eric G. Thanks for tuning in to around the House.

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