Ask This Old House

Kevin

On "Ask This Old House," our experts travel across the country to answer questions about your house. Today, Jenn take you on her journey to becoming a landscape designer.

Jenn

I went and started a nursery, and I loved it.

Kevin

Then Richard and Ross will team up to show you ways to save money on your heating bills this winter. And Nathan will replace a vinyl kitchen floor with a modern, easy-to-install alternative. All that on "Ask This Old House."

Jenn

I didn't set out to be a landscape designer. In college, environmental studies was my major. Back then, it was not something that just everybody took. I knew I wanted to do something in the natural world, but I didn't know exactly what. I started teaching outdoor education at a place called Shelburne Farms in Vermont. I fell in love with teaching kids how to milk a cow, what runoff from a mountain means. I loved it, but I knew I needed another piece. So, I went back to school, get my masters in landscape design, and when I got out of school, no architecture or design firm was open to hiring because they want someone with experience. So I went and started at a nursery and started at the bottom. I was like, "Yeah, I'm going to go. I'm going to, you know, be on their design team." They're like, "You can go to the field and get 20 of these, 40 of those." And I really started from the horticultural bottom, and I loved it. Every two weeks, I'd write down who was blooming together and what sequence would go together. And then that kind of evolved into like, okay, she knows what she's doing somewhat. Now, let's let her apply it to a construction site. Going to a job site and being on a design team, I got to learn from all the others around me, and I just kept running with it and went on to a bigger design firm and worked there just doing the same thing -- design build. And so years later, I had a a six-month-old and the two year old, and my boss was retiring, and I was like, "Wait a second. I have all these designs already designed. Why don't I start my own company?" And it's been the best thing I've ever done. You have a lot of good bones here. There's definitely good plantings that have been here for a while. So say this, Japanese holly, I think we just tuck it in and prune it

to reshape it. Woman

Okay.

Jenn

This is an arborvitae, and that's doing well. This boxwood has definitely seen better days,

and I'd like to take it out. Woman

Get it out of here.

Jenn

Yeah. So what I'm thinking is, we go through and do the removals that we want to do... Nice!...and then do the pruning, and we'll come up with a plan from there.

Woman

That sounds great.

Jenn

to be a good landscape designer, you have to be flexible, creative, a good listener and put it together so it makes one cohesive piece. Woman #2: Everything looks incredible. Thank you so much for your help, Jenn. Hey, no problem. Nice to meet you. What do I love my job? When you actually get to build what was in your brain on a piece of paper and then it comes to life as someone's garden.

Man

It's awesome. It fits with the house. It wraps right around, and it looks good from every side.

Jenn

And it's elegant and simple. So in a couple of years time, it's going to fill in. Just keep on top of the once-a-year pruning, keep it watered, and I think you're set.

Man

Awesome. Well, thank you very much.

Jenn

You're welcome. Thanks for having me. Some of my favorite materials -- I'm a boulder girl. I love natural stone and rocks integrated into whether it's the edge of a patio or to retain a slope and plant around it. And then go-to plants? I might abuse a few hydrangeas because I love them so much. Limelight hydrangeas -- they're dwarf hydrangeas, and this will be the backdrop for those perennials in the front of the bed. I love ornamental grasses. There are so many different elements in vertical and sideways growing, and you just have to look at the texture and the vibe that you want for the space. These are called hakone grass.

It's a pretty yellow. Jenn

It's gorgeous. I think in 2015, I got a phone call from the producers to say, "Hey, you know, we know you were on "This Old House" in 2010 and 2011.

Kevin

what is this tree?

Jenn

This is a sugar maple.

Kevin

Right. And where the other four going?

Jenn

This is the first one. The second one's going down here on the island, and the other three are going to be dispersed around the neighborhood.

Kevin

Oh, right. No cost to the neighbors. No cost in the neighbors. That's a nice civic gesture, alright. And for me, I was like, that's something I never expected to do in my life, and I was honored. Great, done, over. And they're like, "Well, what do you think about "Ask This Old House? So that's how it all kind of began.

Roger

Jenn, I know you designed some new beds, but how do the old beds look?

Jenn

Well, the old beds -- great start to your outdoor classroom.

Thank you. Jenn

But I think we need to build some new ones that are just a little bit bigger so you can put more stuff in it. Something that people might not know about me is, I like to travel. I'm married to a really cute Brit. Or I do love pottery. I don't have time to do it anymore in my life and career and kids and everything, but I'd like to get back to that someday. For me, I feel grounded being outside. My kids, when they were little, we always planted the vegetable garden and planted the seeds. So they have a definite appreciation for the natural world and being outside. Whether they go into my profession, I'm not sure. Moby -- He's my Bernese Mountain dog. 9 1/2, and he's come to work with me since he was like this big. He's a truck dog. He doesn't feel complete in his day if he's not in my truck. He's so awesome. He's a good boy.

Kevin

Two Tretheweys in one place. Who's minding the store?

Richard

Well, Kevin, this is the winter of everybody's discontent.

Yeah. Richard

You know? The fuel bills are crazy. And so we thought we'd take a few minutes just to go over some issues around the building, mostly about the shelter side of the building.

Okay. Richard

So our lesson starts with, in a typical house like this, there's a couple of acts of physics, some laws of physics that come into play. One is that heated air wants to rise. So, no matter how you deliver heat into the building, it wants to move its way upward. You know that a hot air balloon will lift, and that's the same thing that happens inside the house. It'll also be directly driven by the temperature difference between inside and outside. If it's zero degrees outside and 70 degrees inside, it's gonna fight like crazy to go up through the building. The other thing is that it's gonna try to go towards cold in any direction. So, if it's heated here and cold here, it's going to go this way. This is our sort of model. So in typical wood-frame construction, we have to think about, how do we put a hat on this building?

Kevin

That's the first place you guys think about.

Absolutely. Ross

Get a hat on the building. Get that airtight and insulated as best as possible.

Richard

So in typical joist construction, right here, we've seen fiberglass, bad insulation. In an ideal world, it'd be perfectly installed insulation in between every single joists, perfect, except that's not what happens. You know, sometimes you look up there, and you see that 10 years ago, somebody came up to add a bathroom fan and they pulled the insulation up,

and it's sitting like this. Kevin

Hmm.

Richard

So, you?

Kevin

Well... I'm not gonna admit to anything.

Richard

So it starts with an inspection. Get up the top of the attic stairs and look inside and just say, if this was a boat and this was upside down in the water, would this house sink? Would this boat sank? So it means close inspection to insulate really well. You also can look at other ways to do it. There's all kinds of tools nowadays. There's rigid foam like this that we could cut to fit in between the joists, even on top of the fiberglass insulation. So you could still put a deck here. And they also make this bubble pack insulation. Right? You can't insulate enough.

Kevin

And in this case, when we think about the hat, the roof, it is okay to insulate the floor of the attic because that serves as the effective top of the house.

Richard

Well, it's not the best place, It's not the best place. Meaning, if you insulate here, and then many people have their HVAC system sitting right above it, right? Think about that. It couldn't be in a worst place. Couldn't be a worse place. In the summer, It's the worst place for air conditioning. In the winter, It's the worst place for heating. So what I'd love to see, if we could, if we could change the world locally, in cold climates, we would actually insulate here to make a beautiful hat over the top of the building.

Kevin

And that means that this space right here is now going to have the conditioned air.

Ross

Right. So here's a thermal imaging camera looking at the roof, and what you're looking at is surface temperature. And if you look at the greens and the blues, those are actually good. That means that heat is being resisted to actually coming out of the building, and you can see what they did here is they actually insulated the roof rafters.

Kevin

So all the red it means the heat's coming out of the gable, which isn't good, but at least we know the roof has been done properly.

Ross

That's right. We can verify the roof has been done properly. The gable wall still needs to be insulated, and you can see that there's an old gable vent there that was sealed up. But it's a serious air leak coming right through the attic space.

Richard

And that's that point about heat going to cold. It'll go this way through the sidewall, too.

Ross

Right. The other thing is air leakage. A lot of people don't understand the difference between insulating and air sealing.

Kevin

Yeah, I mean, it's a key point because I mean, this stuff is good, but we know air will move through this. And to your dad's point, if it's out of the way, air is definitely going to move through those gaps.

Richard

Don't forget the ceiling lights up here in the second floor bedroom, right? There's all sorts of holes and ducks.

Ross

Right. It's vitally important. Every one of those recessed cans, the duct work, all that has to be sealed so that you can create an air barrier at the ceiling plane and prevent it from coming up to the building. This is DIY friendly, right? You can get up there. You can seal up all the gaps and cracks on every penetration in that ceiling plan, and you can re-insulate with fiberglass, you know?

Kevin

Sounds like I'm going up to my attic.

Richard

That's right.

Ross

The other thing is windows. So this is a double-hung window. You can see it is leaky. It has a meeting rail right here that's a gap. And most people don't understand. If I had a 1/4-inch gap across that entire meeting rail right there, that would be equal

to the area of a hole this big. Richard

How about that?

Kevin

So that puts it into context.

Ross

If you saw that, of course you'd seal it up, right?

Kevin

Get my duct tape out....

That's right. Ross

So what can you do? One, you could install sash locks, right? So you can tighten this upper sash and lower sash and tighten the gap.

Kevin

I don't think people realize that the lock does more than secure the window. It actually pulls it together.

Ross

And this right here is a thermal image of a window, and you can see the purple and the black right here and right here. That represents the air leakage. That's actually the cold air infiltrating, and getting in through the meeting rail the the gap between the upper and the lower.

Kevin

Keep your camera away from my house.

Richard

That's your hard-earned money going out the door.

Ross

But there's other ways to do it too. You can install a shrink wrap kit, right? So the shrink kits go up and over the window, like this. They're double sided tape that secures the shrink wrap there. And you can use a heat gun, you know, and seal it up nice and tight.

Kevin

Kind of like an interior storm window, right? Put it up at the beginning of the heating season, take it down at the end.

Richard

Air is a really good insulator if you can trap it it and hold it into that place.

Kevin

Yeah. Gotcha.

Richard

You think the windows are bad? You think the windows are bad?

Kevin

I thought the windows were bad.

Richard

That door right here -- Now, if you can see underneath a door, if you could see a gap that's like that thick, half an inch, and that's not unusual, this is the equivalent you're gonna see. So, that means the boat would sink, okay? So you should, at least case, put some sort of doors st-- There's a million of these in the aisle at the home center, you know, just a million different styles.

Kevin

This one actually gets affixed

to the bottom of the door. Richard

Yeah.

Kevin

So as the door opens and closes, it's good.

Richard

If you can't get one of those, you can't figure out the right ones, at least get something for the winter just to block that cold air. You've got to keep that from leaking out through the building. Heat will go to cold air.

Ross

Same thing with the door, right? And so you can see the door right here. The black and the purple around the bottom seal. That's where the door leaks the most, right here. And you can see all that cold air coming in right along that gasket.

Kevin

Okay, alright.

Ross

Another thing that people don't realize is electrical outlets, receptacles. So if you take this cover plate off, there's always a gap between the actual electrical box and the sheet rock. It's never going to be perfect. And if you're looking at an exterior wall, you might see fiberglass like this, And of course, they're not gonna seal up nice and tight. I mean, this is just for demonstration.

Richard

This is really well done. You know, a lot of times, you'll see this, where it's missing altogether.

Kevin

So if any of the cold air from outside is getting into this wall, it's not gonna want to get out of the wall into your space through that outlet. That's right. So, I mean, if you look at it, here's again thermal imaging camera. Look at the electrical outlet. Look how leaky it is, right? Oh, yeah.

Richard

So, you're not going to be able to get in there. and add more fiberglass insulation. So in the least case...

Ross

Just use some caulking and seal around that opening, and seal up the gap between the sheet rock

and the junction box. Kevin

Just to be clear, you're not asking me to seal the gap between the actual outlet in the box. You're asking me to seal the box in the drywall.

Richard

And you're trying to seal -- just like those window kits -- you're trying to seal the air to let the air be the insulator. You don't really want to fill that with foam

inside that whole space. Kevin

Okay. You get the house tight, your air is sealed, you hunker down, and people are going to end up using clock thermostats and turning the heat back. And that's okay.

Kevin

Yeah, it's not a bad idea, right?

Richard

Correct. It's going to save some energy. But there's also some cautions we got to put out, and that is that there are parts of the building now -- If you're not gonna heat this wing of the building, there are pipes that may be in peril, and they can freeze in cold climates. So pipe insulation is really important. You may have to actually drain down some of that piping. If you've got a wing you're not going to use or you've got a baseboards -- We see issues with people having a wood stove where the thermostat is, and, all of a sudden, the baseboard freezes in the other part of the building.

So you've got to think about it. Kevin

Okay.

Ross

Another thing about furniture placement and making sure that your heat emitters are not blocked, right? Make sure the furnace vents, make sure your radiators, make sure that's actually giving heat to the room.

Kevin

And hopefully we can be more comfortable and save a couple bucks for the winter.

Spring is coming. Kevin

Good information, guys.

Thank you. Richard

Alright.

Kevin

So is Evan the designated survivor?

Richard

He's home,

yeah. Kevin

In a secure location.

Laughs

Ross

Yeah.

Kevin

Hey,

Nathan. Nathan

Hey, Kevin.

Kevin

And how's that mailbag looking for you?

Nathan

It's looking pretty full. I've been going back and forth with a homeowner, Mike, and he's got the old-school vinyl flooring.

He wants to swap it out. Kevin

Okay? And so you're up for a flooring replacement job, aren't you?

Nathan

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. There's a lot that goes into flooring. There's a lot of things to consider before you ever do the demo. Materials is tough. You need to build the sub floor up after you take the old stuff out. Is there asbestos under it? So it's kind of like opening up a can of worms.

Kevin

Right, and what are you thinking of putting down for Mike?

Nathan

Luckily, he likes this new luxury engineered vinyl plank flooring, which I like to. It's really easy to install. He can get in a million different colors, and it's really durable and stands up to kids and pets.

Kevin

I mean, it's bulletproof, right?

Nathan

It really is. But one thing I want to do -- Like I was saying, there's a lot of things to consider before -- is I want to get this material to his house before I even get there. I want to give it some time to acclimate.

Kevin

So I've heard that for hardwoods, obviously experiencing contraction. For vinyl, too?

Nathan

Yeah. I think it's the best practice.

Kevin

So, that's been sent to him.

Nathan

It's already been sent to him. It's already acclimating to the space. So I just got to pick up a few items, grab a few tools, and I'm gonna head to his house.

Kevin

Looking forward to seeing it done.

Nathan

Alright.

Mike

Oh, hi, Nathan.

Nathan

Hey, Mike, nice to finally meet you.

Likewise. Nathan

We've been e-mailing back and forth. It's nice to finally see the space.

Mike

Thank you.

Nathan

Did you get the materials I sent over?

Mike

Yes. They arrived the other day.

Nathan

Perfect. Good to let those acclimate to the space for a little bit. So how long you guys been here for?

Mike

We've been here for about eight years, doing a lot of projects around the house and the kitchen's the last step.

Nathan

It's always the last thing. I can see you got the vinyl. It's curling up a little bit on the corners. The new stuff's going to lay nice and flat. It's a really good product, very durable. But any time you work with floors, it's a lot of work. There's layers to it. Are you up for it?

Yes. Nathan

Alright. Let's clear this kitchen out. One, two, three. The best place to start with any flooring project is actually by pulling the baseboard off, so we'll pull the pieces off. we'll number them, and we'll put them aside, and then we'll start attacking the floor. Alright. So we'll label this one one. We'll go on to the next slide. Here's number seven. One thing we discovered when we were pulling up the base and pulling the appliances out, that we actually have two layers of flooring here. We have vinyl luan, another layer of vinyl, and another layer of luan that builds up this floor. But one good thing is, there's no signs of asbestos here. If we did come across it, we'd definitely have to stop and call a professional to get that out of here.

Okay Nathan

But we will want to take up all these layers to get back to the sub floor. It'll be a smoother transition out of the room.

Okay. Nathan

Alright. We're ready to start removing the flooring. But since we're cutting, and we're making a little bit of dust, we'll put on a mask, eyes, and ears. We're gonna cut it with a circular saw. I set my blade depth to the thickness of the two floors together. We'll cut it into small, little squares and pry it out with a pry bar. Then what I do is, then I start pulling them, and I start handing them to you. This CDX looks great. I don't think we need to add any luan to it. We'll put it right on top of this floor. Alright. So, here's the product that I picked out for you. This is the engineered vinyl plank flooring. Really good product, very durable. With a couple of kids, it'll take the wear and tear. Easy to clean. And what's nice about this product, too, is it has a built-in backer, so it absorbs the sound transmission. So it won't really sound hollow underneath it. It really will be comfortable to walk on. So it is a floating floor. It'll float throughout the room. But it connects together through a tongue and groove system -- really easy to install. We're gonna have to make quite a few cuts as we go around the room. First off, we're going to have to cut a third off of the second one and two-thirds off of the third one to stagger our joints. And then as we make our way around the cabinets, we'll do custom cuts. So, I want to show you this tool that I brought along with me. It's called a flooring cutter. It's really fast. And what's great is, it makes no mess. Shares it right off, so it's really easy to use. Slide it over up against the fence. Grab the lever. Pull it down. Snap it, pull it away. Makes a really clean cut. Want to give it a try?

Mike

Yeah.

Nice. Good cut. Mike

Thank you.

Nathan

So, we have our first piece in. We have a quarter-inch spacer on the wall. We'll tuck our next piece in here. And we're looking to maintain that quarter inch as we work along the wall, so we'll keep adding a spacer every time. We're running with the kitchen, long ways. I'll give it a nice,

long feel. Mike

Okay.

Nathan

And then I have all these packages cut. We'll just keep working our way out. Then we'll come back with a full piece.

OK. Nathan

Alright. As long as we keep this seem tight, it'll lay nice and flat across the room. We're locked in along the length if you want to tap it to me. Good. More. One more. One more. Good. Alright, Mike. Last piece. Tap. This on it. Alright, nice and tight. Get the thresholds in here and there, baseboard around.

We're almost done. Mike

Nice.

Nathan

Base back in. Nail holes right there. Alright. Right there. We're going to add vinyl transitions where the flooring meets the hallway in the living room. Slide this in. Alright, Mike. You're all set. A little bit of homework, though. You got to caulk and paint the baseboard.

That'll tighten it right up. Mike

Okay.

Nathan

But I wasn't lying. Today was a lot of work. What do you think?

Mike

Yeah, it was a lot of work, but it looks great.

Nathan

Yeah, it's going to last for a long time. Be great for the kids and the family.

Please enjoy. Mike

Thank you very much.

Kevin

Next time on "Ask This Old House," we'll create a stone water fountain that will add interest to any garden. Then on Tool Lab, we'll break down miter saw blades and help you select the right one for your next project. And we've convened our team to explain how issues in the supply chain are impacting both contractors and homeowners. On "Ask This Old House."