Fairytale Ending for SPF Dream Home
 

Calling it a DreamHome could have been a stretch. The house would need to make the owner’s dreams come true, whether that be from top-of-the-line materials, energy efficiency, or even a frog-prince. It could have been an evil plan by marketing agents.

However, for Black Diamond Builders, designing and completing a 5,280-square-foot (490.5m²) dream home (excluding the prince) was not only a possibility but a reality.



The house, which was built in conjunction with a local radio station in Houston, Texas, included such commodities as an automated electric lawn mowing system, energy-metered outlets, and spray polyurethane foam (SPF) insulation.
   
An Un-Evil Plan

Built in an upscale subdivision, the house was designed to fit in with the existing properties. That meant that the exterior and interior had to match the surrounding affluence.

To achieve that, Black Diamond Builders brought in an SPF renaissance man. Diversified Thermal Inc.’s Operations Manager, Carlos Bales, came in with his three-man team to help control the temperature, energy, and sound needs of the newly built house.

Over the course of two weeks, the SPF crew sprayed inside the outer walls, under the roof deck, above the garage, along the overhang of the back porch, under the staircase, and inside the inner walls. As Bales says, it was sprayed from slab to roof, covering everything from oriented strand board (OSB) to plywood.

Sprayed in the thick of the August heat, it was a gift that the application went smoothly.

Starting on the first floor, three members of the crew took three hours to prep the house. Although Bales assures that spraying foam isn’t as messy as it looks, he made sure to anticipate excess foam.

“The first thing we do is polyseal around all the windows and all the door jambs, and we cover all the windows with plastic to protect them from overspray,” explains Bales.

Meanwhile, the fourth crew member began spraying in the attic area. Wearing a Tyvek hooded suit and Bullard independent-supplied fresh air with a North respirator mask, he started at the bottom and worked his way to the roof deck. Covering the four-to-eight-inch (10.2-2.3cm) gap, the crew member sprayed five-and-a-half inches (14.0cm) of Icynene’s LD-C-50 SPF in the entire area, completing the roof deck in a day and a half.

Being the only trade on site when they sprayed made safety a bit easier than many other new-construction residential jobs. For Diversified Thermal, that meant a more relaxed atmosphere.

Perfect Partner

While the SPF crew continued spraying, KTRH 740-AM’s “The Home Improvement Hotline with David Yates” followed the progress of the DreamHome. Along the way, the radio show host — a registered builder — completed interviews with the contractors on the job site, including Bales. A local news station took that one step further by interviewing the owner of Diversified Thermal inside the attic. This enabled the news station and its viewers to see the cured SPF.

“We got advertisement out of it while we were doing the house,” Bales says. “A lot of this was done for very minimal cost.” That meant that any marketing they could get out of helping create this DreamHome was a good thing. It helped support the SPF company and the industry as a whole.
   
Simple Strategy

On any job site, the potential for a wicked stepmother or vengeful opponent are present. Misunderstandings with an inspector, miscommunications with a general contractor, or the changing desires of an owner can be quite common. These are all very real possibilities on an SPF job site.

On this job, though, the DreamHome was safe from any twists or villains. All the Diversified Thermal crew members needed to do was focus on their job and continue toward a happy ending.

After a few days of rest, the crew started their next step: spraying the walls that they’d prepared with Hilti polyseal and plastic. (Although the job covered two weeks, the SPF contractors needed merely three-and-a-half days to complete their portion of the job.)

Before the other trades could finish installing sheet rock in the other rooms, the SPF crew came in to insulate the interior of the walls. Within a day and a half, the sprayer applied three-and-a-half inches of Icynene’s SPF. He used a Graco Reactor E-30 plural-component proportioner and a Fusion air purge gun with an .02 chamber. To top it off, the applicator used 300 feet (91.4m) of hose with a 10-foot (3.1m) whip hose.

At Diversified Thermal, SPF must be applied in a very specific method. First, they start at the bottom of the wall and work their way up toward the ceiling. Then, they spray every other cavity within the wall, circling around the room until they return back to the beginning. Although circling the room twice with the spray foam equipment seems like an unnecessary step, the Diversified Thermal crew sees it as time saving in the long run.

While the applicator continues spraying around the room, another crew member — donning a North respirator — follows soon after to shave excess foam out of the cavity.

“As soon as you get down there, someone is shaving off the foam,” Bales explains. Without leaving every other cavity empty, the shavers wouldn’t be able to get the scarfer blade flat enough for an accurate cut against the studs.

“If you fill each one of them, it’s hard to get the blade up and down,” continues Bales. “As soon as you get that done, you come back and spray all the other [cavities].”

With a Wagner Die Supply scarifying blade, the first set of filled cavities was shaved down and the spray-applicator sprayed the remaining empty cavities.

When they finished with the exterior walls, they moved to the interior walls. To help stop sound transmission, they spray-applied the same foam to the floors of the game room, in the walls of the living room, around the walls of the bathroom, as well as around the utility room and master bedroom. Once each of those areas was finished being sprayed and scarified, sheet rock was installed to close the cavity.

A Happy Ending

The final step before the SPF crew could leave their mark on the DreamHome was to clean up. They swept all areas and poly-sealed the base plate around the concrete slab to create an airtight seal.

At the end of the day, the SPF crew knew that they’d done all they could to create an airtight envelope for the lucky person who would be the owner of the DreamHome. They’d completed the work in three and a half days with no hiccups or curses. For Diversified Thermal, not only was this house a dream…so was this job.
 

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