Video #7 in our ongoing series of Renaissance Homes quality construction. President Randy Sebastian talks about Rain Screen siding, and its benefits. Renaissance Homes have never had a leak in the past nine years because of our rain screen siding. Randy will show you the whole system, its design, how it works, and why it’s the best rain screen siding for new homes in the Pacific Northwest.
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Intro
Hi, I’m Randy Sebastian, President of Renaissance Homes. We’re doing a video series to explain to you guys exactly why Renaissance Homes are built better than any other builders and then detail the construction process of what we do to build you the most energy efficient, best built home in Portland. We’re in fact the number one LEED builder in the state, no other builder builds as many LEED certified homes as we do and there’s a reason for that: Renaissance Homes are just built better. So I want to show you guys exactly what we do.
Rain Screen Siding
Now we’re going to talk about our rain screen siding system. We’re the only builder in Portland and really the northwest that goes to this extent. We haven’t had a window or door leak in nine years. And obviously we live in the rain belt where it rains probably too much. You want to make sure your houses are weather tight. So what we do, we put our Tyvek house wrap around the outside of the house and then we put these slats, these are 1×3 slats all the around on sixteen center vertical all the way around the house. And then what we do, we take our Hardiplank siding and horizontally put the siding on.
If any rain gets in, by wind blown rain driving this way [upwards] or any leak around the window it has a place to go. It goes into these rain channels and comes out the bottom. Now we have screen here that stops bugs from getting up and we have a screen on the top that stops bug from getting behind the siding. What that also does is it creates an air flow so that you’re not gonna have dry rot. Now, dry rot’s not covered by homeowner’s insurance and that’s sadly something people don’t realize until it’s too late.
Our houses don’t dry rot, and they don’t leak. And we are the only builder in Portland, really the Northwest, that I know of that does this. We hired envelope engineers nine years ago to come up with this system. And really if a house is not built with this rain screen siding system in Portland, OR, it’s gonna leak. Our houses don’t leak and that’s the number one thing.
I’ll show you around the windows, we use extra flash around the windows. It’s not in yet but there’s a nice big head piece of flashing that’s gonna come out, it’s gonna extend beyond all this wood so it’s a drip edge it’s gonna keep all the water away from the window. Away from coming in behind. If in fact it does, again you have these rain screen channels where the water drips out, it doesn’t get locked behind the siding and cause dry rot. You can see the dryer vent right there, we extra flash and I don’t know if the camera can show it but there’s extra tape around that so there’s no way that is gonna leak.
Outro
Thank you for joining us today. You can go to our website Renaissance-Homes.com for more information.
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Renaissance Homes is an award winning Street of Dreams custom home builder specializing in green building, remodeling and renovations for the Portland market.
