All-Calls Weekend| Hour 2

A tricky one. She needed a fence for privacy outside her bathroom Aria and yet she wanted to take full advantage of the view of the ocean that she had in the distance. So she needed a fence that could do both privacy, open up for view, closed down for privacy. We talked about kind of a shutter system. But but you know, like treating a fence like a shutter. And but I was talking to her on the phone, I didn't have a chance to actually do any research. Andrea,

you know how I hate being stumped by things. I got it. I got it for you. The company name is pilex p y l E x p y l E x and Uh, I want you to look for the deck sun blind system. It comes in stainless steel, it comes in powder coated metal. It is literally literally, you know, this is the world that we live in. Literally, if you're looking for it, probably somebody has worked it out. It is literally mounting hardware. Take a look at that, Tina.

It's mounting hardware for slat boards on a fence. That will that is specifically designed to turn sections of your fence into essentially an exterior shutter. Okay, so this mounting hardware you mounted against the Tina's pointing, She's like, we should put it on that part of the fence. You you mount this hardware against the posts, and then every slat mounts into screws into these hardware turns. It is a shutter. It's a shutter system, and it's a it's

about forty dollars for each section of shutter. So it's there, there, it is, and this is this is so it's so simple, it's so easy to look at. You would just basically in between two posts, cut the slats and uh and screw them into this system. So, Andrea, I hope you are if you're still listening, call me back, just because I want to be able to confirm that you got the info. But it's PILEX p y l e X and look for a deck sun blind system and you're

you're gonna find it. You're gonna find it. I did a quick search, and you know it's not That's not the only product on the market. There are. There are some very similar on Amazon. This particular one is sold at home depots, so you know it's been product tested and it's worth You know it's money because home depot doesn't carry junk stuff that they get tons of returns on.

So check it out. I'm very excited. I wish I had found it before your call, but you know what, this is the commitment that we have to our listeners. I will figure it out for you. So give me a call back Andrea to let me know that you heard the answer, and check that out online because I think I think that's the solution that you are looking for. All right, when we return more of your calls, it's an all call Saturday morning. The number to reach me

eight three to three two. Ask Dean eight three to three the numeral two, Ask Dean, we will do more. Can't buy Dean sharp the house with her at your service. Thanks for joining us on the program this morning. We're doing an all call Saturday morning, as is our growing custom. I just love it. I love talking to people trying to figure out what's going on with your home, helping

you with it. And you know, right before the top of the hour, I had Andrea on the phone and she really kind of stumped me as far as putting together a tricky fence. Is she back? Andrea? Are you there?

She needs a fence that that can be both privacy when she wants it to be privacy and view when she wanted to be view. And we were just kind of banging our heads on the table, thinking, Okay, maybe the best way to do that is to create kind of a shutter system, like a shutter blinds out there. But I personally was this was new to me. I was not aware that there was already pre established hardware out there and not expensive stuff, and so everybody, I'm

just I'm excited about it. I literally had Andrea callback because I just wanted to celebrate with her the fact that during the break I found this and other people are like, yeah, I've seen that for years, Dean, Well, you know what, there are things that are brand new to me too, and so from now on, I'm just

gonna dub this Andrea's fencing system. And so yeah, there are these pre pre built rackets that basically will turn slats of wood or metal into a fence shutter system that you can open and close like a like like plantation shutters. You can get your view or you can close it down and have your privacy, and I was just excited that I found it. And it's simple. I mean, you can get them on Amazon, you can get them at home depot. I've never seen them before, and so

we're celebrating it together. And that that was all. So thanks for calling back.

in that spirit, let's take another call. We may not get all that, we may have to go to break, but I want to talk to Mohammed. Mohammed, welcome home.

do whatever they do. What I understood that they putting some sort of sheet that is like fifty years a life and the shingles goes on top of it and that has usually thirty year life. So now you go.

These are the three big names in asphalt composite roofing, and you really can't go wrong with them, with any of them, and they have highering little bit but I will tell you this just FYI, just so you know, my friend, that my own home, my own roof, has the certain teed Presidential shingle on it. Tina, and I searched the world over to find you. I mean, I don't think there is a more gorgeous, more beautiful asphalt composite shingle from a from a design point of view

than the Presidential series. It's random, it's randomized, it's got beautiful shadow lines to it. It is. It is just and the quality of the roof is outstanding. So I have the Presidential series on my own roof. And yes, I would like Certainty to call me and pay me for that endorsement. But there you go. So so the key is and I don't want you to worry about the the the differential in warranties. Of of yes, you're

going to find the shingle on the outside. You can find those that have lifetime warranties, fifty year warranties, forty year warranties, and then the the layer underneath, the moisture layer underneath. You'll find those at various warranty levels as well, and there sometimes will be a differential. But trust me, if you buy a good quality membrane for underneath your shingles, whether it's a thirty year or forty year, and you put a fit fifty year shingle on top of it.

It's a fifty year roof okay, so you don't have to worry about that differential between the two. But when it comes to underlayment, and that's that underneath layer, my

recommendation is that you don't go with a standardized roofing paper. Now, I don't know what the Home Depot is recommending for their stuff and how they do it, And there's still plenty of roofing companies out there that on the low end of things that say, yeah, we'll just put down two layers of builders, you know, roofing paper fifteen or thirty pound roofing felt and then you're you're roof right over. It's going to last for a long time, and it will.

It will. But the question is is that the best

that you can do? And the answer to that is always no. The best that you can do is to have an underlayment system underneath your your roofing material, underneath the shingles themselves, have a underlayment system that is self ceiling, and that meaning around nails and perforations, and that is stretchable, that has some actual pliability to it, and that when you roll out one course of underlayment onto the next, it seals onto itself, so that by the time you're

done rolling out the underlayment, you essentially have a single membrane covering the entire roof that will stretch and that's important for heat and cold differentials in weather. It won't grow brittle, it won't crack. And then on top of that you put a good quality asphalt composite shingle, and that, my friend, is your best system. There are various underlayments out there, and I haven't found one that I hate yet. Okay, I just don't like going old school with asphalt embedded

roofing paper myself. Neither do any of our best roofers. They all prefer the self ceiling underlayment system because they last longer and they perform better. And so that's the combination you're looking for. I don't want to get brand specific, because there are a lot of them out there, but that's what you're looking for. A self ceiling, rubberized stretchable underlayment system and then a good quality asphalt shingle on top. All right, my friend, thank you so much for your

call and for the question. Hopefully that just simplifies the process for you more of your calls when we return. You're listening to Home with Dean Sharp The House Whisper. You're listening to Home with Dean Sharp on demand from KFI AM six forty AM, I AM forty live streaming and HD everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. You are Home with Dean Sharp the House Whisper. That is me. It is an all Calls Saturday morning. We're just taking calls. You're setting the agenda for the show. I want to

go back to the phones. I love love talking to you about your home. I want to talk to Scott. Hey, Scott, welcome home.

type tile. And how can I determine whether I got these or not because they're essentially invisible.

a dormer, a copper dormer or something like that. But most of the time we are attempting to hide such things, like, for instance, in a brand new asphalt shingle roof assembly, most asphalt manufacturers manufacture a ridge top vent that literally goes right under and sort of hides underneath the top ridge shingles, and it runs the entire length of the roof ridge. And it's not really a visible thing. I mean, it doesn't really change the look of the roof at all.

So but the key is this, whatever the venting is in the attic can be seen from inside the attic. Okay, that is where it is obvious, and so that's what you're going to have to get into the attic or get somebody in the attic to evaluate if it's got vents,

where it's got vents. My assumption is now it's an interesting thing that a that a home inspector would make this observation for a home that's only twenty years old, because you know, for the last few days, three decades, you know, the building code has been just stickler about vents. And by the way, as far as what you need, there's a different solutions. But let me explain to everybody

what the attic vent code requirement currently is. Okay, and I don't know if the home inspector wrote this in his report, but it can be a little confusing for people. But I want to try and make it as simple as possible. In fact, you know what, Scott, can you hang tight because we're running a little along in the other segment. If you can hang tight, I'm going to explain this to you right on the other side of the break, So can you hold on with me for

a second? Absolutely awesome? All right, you stay put and we'll come right back to Scott's question about attic venting and kind of hopefully I can dispel the confusion about what's required and where, and we'll do that. Caym Byean Sharp, the House Whisper. Welcome home, Thanks for joining us on the program. On this lovely spring Saturday morning, here the twelfth of April twenty twenty five. We are coming to you live as we always are. Today's show. All your calls.

I've got Scott on the line and get to get back to him in just a second with his roof vent question. And I just want to remind y'all that we've got another show, the Big Show tomorrow three hours. We're going to spend together tomorrow from nine to noon.

And this weekend our theme is sometimes it's the little stuff, fix it tips for you, because you know, spring has definitely sprung, and I can always measure by the amount of emails and listener questions and comments that we get on social media throughout the week that this is the time of year, this is the week that the worm has turned. Everybody's like, all right, I got no excuse now.

The weather's great and it's time for me to get moving on some of these Honeydew projects I've got around, and I find, in general, when it comes to DIY projects that it's not the big scope of the project that really befuddles you or gets you frustrated. It turns out to be small, little unspoken skills and bits of knowledge along the way. And so I've assembled a list of such things that will help you out. And that's what we're going to be talking about tomorrow. You're not

going to want to miss the show. And if you're a podcast listener, I'm talking about the next episode, the very next one, And of course every broadcast that we make is also the HOUSEWI was a podcast what you can find wherever your favorite podcasts are found anywhere. You can find of course on the free iHeartRadio app, but you can also find them on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts. You just search for Dean Sharp or Home with Dean or The House Whisper. You'll

get it. You'll find me, You'll see it. There hundreds of episodes, all listed by topic. It is your home improvement reference library, including today's show, this very show right here. You can listen to anytime, as many times as you want. Anywhere on planet Earth whenever you want on demand. That's

the house whisper of podcast all Right. Scott called me and he is in the middle of buying a home and the home inspector who did the inspection on the home informed him that even though it's just a twenty year old house, it has inadequate attic ventilation. And he was asking me, how do you find out where where the vandalai is because so many different styles of attic ventilation are designed to go away and not be visible

from the outside. And so my first advice to him is you got to get in the attic because you definitely see them from the attic space. And then there's the issue of how much attic ventilation. And I wanted to take a couple of minutes and try and explain the code requirement for attic ventilation. And so Scott, you still with me, Bud, I'm sure they are, okay, thanks for hanging on through the break. So here is the This gets a little confusing, but because it's basically there

are two different conditions. The basic bottom line code for attic ventilation is a ratio. It is basically for every one hundred and fifty square feet of attic space square feet, not cubic feet square feet. So once you get up in the attic and you're measuring the floor of the attic as you would measure the floor of any room. So to get the square footage up there, for every one hundred and fifty square feet of attic floor space, the code requires one square foot of ventilation for that attic.

So if it was one hundred and fifty square foot addic, obviously you would only need a total of one square feet of a ventilation and doesn't have to be a single vent. It could be broken up into ten different vents. You know, you just want a cumulative total of one square foot for every one hundred and fifty square feet of attic floor space. Now that's the base code. That's a lot of ventilation. You know, you got a two thousand square foot addic and you're like, wow, that's that's

a lot of vents. But the code has an allowance, and this is where people get confused about this, this ratio number. The code has an allowance that if if you are able and willing to place half of the vents low and half of the vents near the top of the ridge at the very highest part of the attic.

In other words, if you place fifty percent of them low and fifty percent of them high, then you can cut the requirement for vents in half, meaning that with a series of high vents and low vents, instead of one square foot for every one hundred and fifty feet, you can have one square foot for every three hundred feet of attic floor space. And that's the one that

we normally target. Okay, so both are true. The baseline is one to one fifty, but if you're willing to go half of them low and half of them high, then you can go one to every three hundred. And how do we do low and high? We do kind of you know, we're talking about the standard kind of roof vents up up high and down low. Those would

be typically vents that we cut into the eve blocking. Okay, they can either be slot vents or most typically they're like two inch round holes that we drill into the wood blocking right under right at the top of the wall, right underneath the eves into the attic space, and then you can insert one of these little two inch insert vent you know, pre done vents. And if you do that in every single eve bay or every other eve bay that adds up because a two inch diameter circle

is well, it's actually pi. A two inch diameter circle has three point one four one six square inches of area to it. So for every two inch event that you place around the eve you get three inches of attic vents three square inches of attic ventilation. And that can add up really fast too. So fifty percent of them there and the rest as high up up and close to the ridgeline of the roof as possible, and

whatever the vent may be. You could use gable end vents, you can if you do need to use low profile Like people look at my roof and they're like, you don't have any addic vents at all, Like not true. Under all of those solar panels are a series of low profile what we call O'Hagan vents, and they get my venting requirement handled underneath my solar panels. So, Scott, that's the that's the formula, that's the ratio, And as far as which vents where and what have you got?

You got to get account of what you have so far to find out how much you need to add. And you're only going to be able to see those from inside the attic space. Does that make sense? I hope that kind of clarifies that all right, Because I'm here to help you out. I'm here to translate complex building and design issues for you into terms that you can embrace and understand. And if I'm not doing it right, then that I'm failing at my job. But I don't

think I'm failing today. In fact, we even had Andrea. I had her call back because she stumped me for a bit, and I found an answer for it during the break and we came back on and solved it. Because I care. I love doing this and I love

helping you out with your home. And we're going to continue to do this tomorrow on the Big Show, where we talk about these little fix it tips that can make all the difference you understanding them in your next project, this spring project that's coming up for you here on all the little things that you need to handle around the house. So join me again tomorrow morning from nine to noon Pacific time, nine to noon Pacific time, and we will take that on and of course more of

your calls as always. Until then, my friends, get out there in this beautiful spring day and get busy building yourself a beautiful life. We'll see tomorrow. This has been Home with Dean Sharp, the House Whisper. Tune into the live broadcast on KFI AM six forty every Saturday morning from six to eight Pacific time, and every Sunday morning from nine to noon Pacific time, or anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio app