hi I'm Bob Vila welcome home again to our colonial construction project and today we're very far along with the frame so we're installing some of the details we're putting in a beautiful heat and Glo fireplace and we'll spend a lot of time with our shingles we have Maybach shingles which are white eastern cedar and they're pre treated and we're gonna show you how to install them stick around it's good to have you home again okay well before we get started shingling on the back side of the house I thought we'd take a good look at the front facade of our Center entry colonial and the features are still hard to distinguish because we're still looking at all the house wrap the white clappers won't come on for another week or so but the porch is just the right shape the right pitch on the roof the angles are very appropriate we're still holding this up with a 2x4 because we haven't received our our columns yet but they will be very very simple columns composite columns other materials coming into play that are appropriate at the front door of course are a nice water struck brick like this and this will clean up all red and then other features of the house that our colonial are coming together to although we have these very contemporary windows when you look at the size of the trim it's a good you know 1 by 6 board that's being used when you look at the header it's been trimmed out with the molding detail that is very very appropriate if you look at the corner boards very often a builder's corner board might be just one by four here we've got a good 10-inch spread so that you've got an authentic look and at the bottom two other wooden elements the water table which runs across the whole front of the or rather the whole perimeter of the house and then you'll have a water stop here another small piece of wood that the the actual collaborates will rest on and then the rest of the house here is really the garage wing which has a couple of similar windows similarly detailed but you know the the actual overall look of the house breaks up a little bit here the symmetry is different so that it looks like it was added on to and of course on this end over here on the working end of the garage you've got a fair amount of treatment as well I mean how often do you see a garage door that's been framed out so that the casing really looks like a fluted pilasters with all these grooves that are routed into it and at the very top there's a nice molding that's been applied as well across the whole width of our double garage door opening and the single door down here another element that will be going up on the roof of the garage shortly is this cupola which has red cedar shingles on the top and will be trimmed out and right now let's go around the back and talk but these guys here these are Maybach and they've been pre stained and we're gonna get together with Keith ball hi Keith all right good how are you Bob great now tell me a little bit about the the shingle that we're using here is there eastern white cedar shingles the wood is actually grown in Maine and it's manufactured in Quebec yeah let's take a moment to see how they're made here in Quebec Canada at Maybachs American classics mill Eastern white cedar from certified or responsibly managed forests is milled into three grades of cedar shingles only the best grade of wood available in large diameter sections is used in the shingle mill the slasher is the first step where the logs are cut in multiples of 16 inches may vex debarker is especially modified for eastern white cedar the bark is removed and used for mulch nothing is wasted in the manufacturing process here after debarking the stripped logs are trimmed and cut into 16 inch sections called butts the butts move into the main saw room where there are 17 workstations on the main production floor these machines feature stellite tip blades to cut the shingles efficiently and accurately the stellite tips keep the blades sharp or longer and eliminate raised grain and roughness in the finished shingles the blades are sharpened every two to eight hours as needed and the stellite tips are replaced every two weeks in order to keep the blades in top condition and ensure quality consistency the experienced Sawyer's cut the butts into shingles and trim and sort them according to grade the specialized automated saws cut the butts into shingles at the correct angle in the most efficient way all maybach shingles are Reese on Andry butted using a proprietary process that ensures that the bottom of the shingle squares with the sides for a more exact fit without hand shaving on-site the process adds a little to the cost of the shingles but saves time and money on installation and produces a cleaner finished look a random sample of shingles is selected from the production line for quality inspection maybach uses the principle of quality at the source each worker is responsible for the quality of their work the goal is for the shingles produced at the factory to be as free of defects as possible each finished bundle of shingles is labeled with the appropriate grade and secured for shipping ours are their premium grade Nantucket William II Pool series and they're actually pre finished right here at the plant now what are the different types of finishes that you can get okay we have a bleaching oil finish which is that's what we're using here exactly and then we also have a solid latex acrylic stains which are what the gray the beige and all these other fancy colors are so the big difference is do you want to see the grain of the wood still coming through or do you want an opaque finish either in the gray or the tenn or some of these coats down here that's correct this will give it a nice silvery gray tone in about three years and you can get decorative shapes like this - exactly great now Keith what is the the dipping the pre-finishing add to the cost of a square because I know that a standard square is usually just under 100 bucks well our kiln dried stain shingles are about two hundred and twenty-five dollars a square if you bought that natural it would be about a hundred and fifty dollars a square and that would be for the Nantucket's okay well how do we get started Kevin have you made yourself a story pole here yes first thing we do is we want to make sure that everything lands even at the top of the headers and at the bottom of the windows so in other words that you want the shingle bottom to sit on top of a header on a door or the window or the shingle course to come right underneath the saleable window yes that way we don't end up with any small pieces or cut corners which can leak this is story pole we set it up we're trying to achieve 5 inches to the weather we'll go from 5 s and then mathematically we start dropping each one a quarter of an inch so they're four and three quarters so that it lands perfect at the top of the door okay so there's a lot of arithmetic involved yes and what about your first course how do you go with the first course this first course is set an inch below the plywood and the plywood is set right on the pressure treat itself when we originally frame the house all right we're hanging down an inch below it so that way there's no water can penetrate and go up underneath okay and you've got a chalk line in place there what's that for while we're getting ready to snap our line we've done our first course and doubled up on the next one okay we're gonna snap the line and we're going to take the the straight edge off move it up and get ready to do the last course okay so will the straightedge I mean the chalk line be used for each and every course yes and also it gives us a little bit of guidance so that we don't end up shooting the staples too low and the straightedge then continues to move along with the job yes now Kevin what kind of fasteners are you using here basically we use in the 7/16 by inch and a quarter stainless steel wide crown stapler it is stainless steel yes and the wit to the crown does that make a difference in terms of the shingles splitting it grabs it a lot better and that way it won't yeah the skinnier ones that they have will split the shingle mm-hmm so we try to go as wide as we can and I notice that when you're setting them up you butt them all together pretty much you don't leave much space in between them well these are kiln dried product and they're sealed already mm-hmm so we don't bottom tight we leave a little bit of space just a little just a little bit to allow them to grow a white cedar shingle sidewall up in New England here I always think you're gonna get minimum 15 or 20 years out of it is that right correct it's 20 to 30 years without doing anything to it at all okay so when you've treated it with something like a bleaching oil does that increase the life expectancy yes it does and then you can actually add more bleaching oil to it as time goes on and add even longer thank you thank you very much Bob when we come back we'll look at some efficient direct vent gas fireplaces today's gas fireplaces are clean and efficient Ross Morrison from heat and glow is here to tell us more tell me a little bit about the design the technology behind these all right well this is actually a gas insert and all of our products are made or for the most part are made as direct vent fireplace --is mm-hmm this is important for us in that for safety and efficiency reasons direct vent means that it's a sealed glass chamber if you open up the front doors here there's actually another panel of glass there what that means is that there's no interplay of Rohmer you're not going to bring any products of combustion into the room and you're not gonna be using any of your already warm room air for combustion but does it still need a chimney flue it runs a flue yep in the case of an insert it's gonna go up an existing chimney with two collinear flex vents okay on a standard fireplace it would be a coaxial vent eight and a half on the outside and a and a five-inch inner pipe that could go straight out the back straight out of the wall you can go up through the roof some of our products you can actually vent down and then out if you needed to alright so in terms of it being used as a retrofit product though if you have an old mantelpiece in an older house will this work absolutely yeah it's designed actually mostly for a masonry fireplace the beauty of this product is it's made from ceramic fiber rather than sheet metal what the ceramic fiber allows us to do is not only give you the traditional brick look that you already have in your masonry fireplace so you get to keep the look but the ceramic fiber is also a great insulator and so rather than the heat escaping through layers of sheet metal it's gonna push that heat back out into the room sure that's interesting because I've always thought of gas logs as just being there mostly for romance but this is putting out a fair amount of heat quite a bit of heat yes and we have several different models that can there be different sizes you can have fans built-in or not if you want to to control that heat level and safety is just not that much of an issue in terms of pets kids or sparks coming out into the room you've got an extra layer of protective glass there yes and a lot of our products also can have a mesh screen as an option just to make sure little hands don't want to get up to the glass okay well tell us a little bit about the the different styles all right well we have a lot of different looks we'll show you a few of them today what we're trying to interested in here is making this appear to be a real masonry door right here the masonry look inside and out and then we take real logs that we mold into a ceramic fiber log so it's really lightweight on the beauty of the ceramic fiber again is that when the flame hits that you get a nice glow on the law so that's what I'm seeing on the bed here on the base right right it looks like embers but in fact it's just this exactly and it doesn't weigh much and it's not gonna break not at all you get a lifetime long they're terrific let's look at some of the ones you've got over here in the corner all right this is called our Crescent and again we're using ceramic fiber technology here this gives that nice full curved brick look so again we're trying to emulate what a real masonry fireplace looks like not a sheet metal one okay so you get the nice look inside and out and again we have the ceramic fiber it's a great insulator we have quite a few of our fireplaces are actually rated as furnaces and this is sort of the creme de la creme of the line this is called our 6000 TR X I the beauty of this is again it you have a view a beautiful look inside we have the the brick look so you get a real masonry appearance but this unit is also rated as a furnace so again we have a it's it's seal combustion you're not using any room air for for combustion but you're pumping a lot of heat into the room rated as a furnace absolutely or how big a room or how big a place it depends on the house but it could be up to between 12 and 1500 square feet that it could heat some other opportunities for you though are both to shut up flame off if you'd like and then turn the flames down between the two you can drop the heat value by over half if it's still also getting too hot we have what we call a comfort or climate control damper down below opening that damper will allow more heat to be dissipated to her venting system so again if you have a party going and people are getting a little bit hot you want the ambiance but you don't want the heat we have a number of ways to eliminate that problem for it's the price tag Russ this unit runs to about twenty two hundred dollars terrific thanks a lot my pleasure thank you Bob coming up next we'll be installing a gas fireplace at our construction site don't go away most colonial houses will have lots of beautiful fireplaces and in this modern-day colonial we've got well we've got one back there in the great room one here in the den one in the dining room and a couple more throughout the house but they're all heat and glow gas fireplaces let's learn more about them Dan de magistrate is here from he can glow and we're gonna learn a little bit more about how these units are made the other way around that's right well they usually are the other way around this is the only fireplace in the hearth industry right now that actually is taller than it is wide interesting this kind of looks like the old Rumford style help rums for design which would have had the flared sides exert a lot of heat now what are we looking at in there what we're looking at here is because this fireplace is higher than it is wide we have and actually have a raised burner because aesthetically we want to bring the flame up to fill the area so when you look at you have that nice full flame look gotcha and this is all kind of like one ceramic panel or three rest this is a three separate ceramic panels that actually radiate the heat and trainers here to help us install it what's the first thing once you've unpacked it like this just shove it into the whole place okay and is it very heavy guys yeah oh yeah so maybe 150 or 200 it's a little less than that but yeah so you don't need to put it into a framed enclosure that's been fireproofed in anyway do you know you don't you can mount this right into combustible opening it just requires a 1/2 inch clearance all right so once you've put it in this is the type of material that is used to exhaust it right that's correct what do you call this this is an 8 inch direct vent double uh double wall pipe double wall pipe so how does that work actually it's a twistlock pipe that you connect connect each section together and it actually the exhaust carries out from the inside pipe to five inch the exhaust carries out to the outside of the house and it draws the fresh air for combustion through the outer wall into the combustion okay so these are simply placed together right on top of the collar there what is that rope like the rope is an air barrier to stop if there's any air drift and there it stops any leak of cold air into the chaser so this woman is being placed in a framed area that's contiguous to the garage and actually kind of cantilever it into the garage and the ductwork part of the ductwork then will be exposed in that area okay then Dan down here you are arranging the logs right I'm putting the logs in for the setting up the burner so we can put the glass on and well that was the next thing that I wanted to ask you we can't put it on just yet but the the remaining elements here involve a frame with a last panel a decorative trim can there's the glass panel which is part of the direct vent fireplace because it's sealed combustion really does let the heat pass right through it it doesn't restrict the heat and does it get very hot itself to the touch oh the glass does yes it does it would be very hot to the touch okay and now this particular model does not have any kind of convection system it's not blowing any of the heat into other parts of correct this is a totally radiant fireplace I can see it now colonial dining table the candles and the fire right here thanks Dan thank you we'll be right back with a preview of our next show so stick around and that's the way the shingles look once they're all completed this is a wrap come home again next time when we'll be building a set of steps up to the backyard deck and painting the front facade introducing the Bob Vila signature line of paints till then I'm Bob Vila it's good to have you home again for lots of information and resources for your home improvement project check out my website at Bob Vila com you