Bourbon, Horse Racing, and Building - BUILT HERE KENTUCKY

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[00:00:00]This episode of Built Here is brought to you by Huber Engineered Woods. When I think about the blueg grass state, two things come to mind. First, horses.

[00:00:14]Expensive, pampered, well-trained, and bred with intention. Animals worth more than I can imagine. Second, bourbon. Barrels and barrels of bourbon. the history, the science, and the patience that goes into the production.

[00:00:35]Lexington is our destination today. For a while, folks referred to Lexington as the Athens of the West. For those of you not well-versed in history, Athens, Greece in its time was the cultural center of the world. architecture, art, literature, the literal hub of knowledge and culture for the region and literally most of the world. Philosophers and thinkers from all over traveled there, originated from there, shared knowledge from there.

[00:01:10]Lexington became that for this part of the country. With prosperity early in our country's history due to the incredibly fertile land, hemp and tobacco production in the area brought great wealth. And with wealth always comes culture, art, and of course, architecture. As with other parts of the country in the early 1800s, architecture was decidedly European influenced was based in classical design and respected mother nature's effects on a building.

[00:01:39]Unlike some of the northeast, Lexington, much like the south, understood the heat of the summer and the front porch a little bit more. The connection to nature and the overall aesthetic became locally influenced to reflect the climate as well as the wellto-do nature of the area.

[00:01:59]Over time, hemp and tobacco became less of a driver of the local economy and production of whiskey became something that most folks in the region became famous for.

[00:02:10]Bourbon is uniquely American. white oak barrels, charred interiors, and an aging process that relies on understanding how wood breathes, expands, and contracts with seasons. It's craftsmanship built on knowledge, how materials respond to their environment, and legacy of time.

[00:02:32]What do horses and bourbon have to do with building?

[00:02:37]Maybe nothing, but maybe everything.

[00:02:40]Because in both there's kind of an obsession with control and performance.

[00:02:47]It's not necessarily about doing something fast. It's about doing it right with the right materials, the right understanding how they'll age, how they'll move, how they'll hold up over time.

[00:03:00]That's what drew me here in Kentucky.

[00:03:04]The story of what's built here isn't just about architecture or structure.

[00:03:09]It's about legacy. It's the people who shape their work the same way they shape bourbon. Patiently, deliberately, with an understanding that real quality can't be rushed.

[00:03:35]Standing in here, you can feel the weight of the building, its contents.

[00:03:40]The whole building breathes heat, humidity, a lack of air movement, even silence working together to shape what's inside each barrel.

[00:03:54]Seth Debolt. I'm a professor here at the University of Kentucky and I am the director of the James Bbeam Institute for Kentucky Spirits. I've been at UK now for 18 years.

[00:04:04]Before that, I was working on wine as my subject area and coming to Kentucky and knowing the rich history of Kentucky bourbon and obviously being Australian with Kentucky bourbon being huge in Australia, I started teaching classes on distilled spirits and really with an emphasis on this incredible industry and legacy industry for the signature Kentucky whiskey.

[00:04:31]And so this is the largest teaching distillery in the world, but it's also a really important part of the fabric of Kentucky and opportunities for the next generation of distillers.

[00:04:52]Cooper select top-notch barrel from ISC and finish it in one of those for a couple of years or maybe longer. But in the meantime, I'm going to leave it in here for doesn't matter. It could sit in here a decade.

[00:05:08]Quick tour then. This is a warehouse that we can fit about 660 barrels in. It was designed and built with the the ricks and the dunages being accessible for students to load them but also we wanted to consider when we were doing that uh just optimal safety and an understanding of the system as we went through it. So this is a really interesting structure as you were talking about the first of its kind of of the Krax variety and that's where they use glue lamb kilried lumber to build the structure out of and you imagine if you build a very large warehouse 660 barrels but if you build a 78,000 barrel warehouse or 48,000 barrel warehouse at 20,000 barrel warehouse that's a lot of green lumber if you didn't have kil dried lumber. And so then you've got all that moisture entering the air and interacting with everything that's going on in interesting ways that we do not know. So I don't know how that would change things. But the kil dried lumber has kept this noticeably a dry environment.

[00:06:16]But it also will not bow. As you know, wet wood when there's knots and deformities in that wood can change its shape just a little bit. I mentioned those really big warehouses. brings me to some of the research that we do with the industry and on things like warehouses and barrel corrosion because those barrel houses are a huge amount of liquid. We have just 660 barrels in here. You know that early summer heat that you get coming in through June.

[00:06:46]It'll still be cool and nice and cold in here because all these barrels are holding that temperature of the spring in the cooler temperatures. And then, you know, they'll hold the warmth coming into the the winter a little bit more and they eb and flow. It's like having a lake inside of a of a building. And when you have a very big building with a very large lake in it, what we found is cases of we even found a case where acid rain was taking place. And I can tell you a little bit about that. That was a very large warehouse, but they were seeing a lot of corrosion on the barrel hoops.

[00:07:21]They're wondering why. And it was because there was a an incomplete flow of air through the building. So moisture was building up, but ethanol is heavier than air so it would form this cloud on the bottom of the warehouse. So what he did is sealed off all the windows, drew a vacuum, pumped this gas in there. It's visible. And you could see this complete cloud of non-moving air that had a high proportion of ethanol in it. Ethanol converts to asil vapor. Isil vapor converts to acetic acid, which is vinegar. And when you walked into this place, you were like, "Oh, where's the fish and chips at an English pub?" You know, it was like salt and vinegar chips. It was smack you in the face. It was wild. And that was a causing a lot of corrosion. Even pinpointed the time of day at which the rain would occur >> and that was causing then those barrels to fail and they would lose all their liquid.

[00:08:19]But the problem with that is then that ethanol vapor caused a bigger cloud and sort of a rolling problem at that point.

[00:08:26]And that those are sort of very interesting problems that we tackle and um we try to try to help the industry with. It was a mining engineer that helped solve all those problems and say, "Ah, this smells like vinegar. I'll tell you what's happening here."

[00:08:40]>> Yeah. They deal with indoor air quality issues all the time >> with highly explosive environments. Yes.

[00:08:45]>> Yeah. that lake effect of all the liquid being there. It's one of the things that pretty interesting when we talk about mechanical design for buildings. Um you have a tendency to want to design for the longest day of the year being your heating day and the shortest day of the year being your cooling day. But the Earth experience >> experiences the same drift where the coolest day of the year is actually a couple months after December 21st. It's it's beyond that because it takes that long for the Earth to cool down. It's the exact same effect. Y >> that we see in lakes or that we see in hundreds of thousands of gallons of barrels of of liquid stored in in one building. And so >> they're they're buildings that in this sense it feels like this building is conditioned even but a lot of rick houses are not conditioned. They're open to the elements. Talk to me about how air moves through a traditional rick house that's open to the elements and what that means for what happens inside the barrels and what happens inside the building both. So these actually this is not conditioned. This is a that's a great point. So off you can steam cycle or actually condition your warehouses because that thermal shift when the barrel is getting cool and warm is uh where it's actually expanding and contracting and the liquid is moving into that this beautiful American white oak and bringing out those vanolins and those lovely wood sugars that give a lot of character and color and and quality to the liquid. This is a really important process. But that process can be either accelerated by steam cycling.

[00:10:25]But a lot of people don't do that. They just use the age-old cycles of the spring, summer, and fall. And Kentucky is really good in that way because it is a very humid climate in the summertime.

[00:10:36]And so that that's really important to retaining a lot lot more liquid from those barrels. If you were say in the dest zone of Arizona, you might lose a lot more of that liquid in four years than you would here in Kentucky.

[00:10:50]Back to the the the overall thermal battery component of that, it does have a you can imagine it holds an enormous amount of temperature. It is it's a a huge slowm moving target there and you can see this when you track the temperature inside the liquid. It's this slowm moving wave.

[00:11:11]And I'll tell you a funny story about the that slowmoving wave. What we did when we studied dissolved oxygen inside the barrel which is important for aging maturation reactions we actually saw this bottoming out of you know when it gets at its coolest. We saw this spike in dissolved in oxygen dissolved oxygen in the liquid like that's really important to esters and aging and all these delicious unexpected fruity notes you get in whiskey. Why is that happening? We're stupid. So we forgot all our intro chemistry. oxygen becomes more available in lower temperatures in liquids. And so it's like, oh, so those really cold temperatures that Kentucky gets are very important to the quality and aging of the liquid that's in there.

[00:11:57]So that was an unexpected result. It just shows you why what we do is kind of interesting. But then you see all these little these moving areas where you would roll the barrel through here.

[00:12:08]There's some on the edge there and then there's windows throughout the structure.

[00:12:12]It's just a shell around the building.

[00:12:15]The structure is this thing. Your ricks are your structure. Your dunages, your whole, this is your structure of the building. Then you've just wrapped it in a shell. It's often just a thin metal cladding or just nothing really really uh dense that's needed there. And so air moving, you would think, oh, it's flowing in and moving in throughout all these barrels. But if you were to be in a big barrel house and take a a meter and measure air flow, you don't have to go more than six feet from that window and it's dead still.

[00:12:51]There's a really complicated, delicate balance there. And you're not definitely not trying to exhaust anything out.

[00:12:56]You're just trying to hold as much as you can in that barrel and have it taste as good as you can in however many years you want it in there. In larger rick houses, I mean, even in here, we get an example of we're six high probably.

[00:13:09]Yeah. But in larger rick houses, there's substantially more floors a lot of times. Some places are not any taller than this. But is there a difference in what we get depending on location of the barrel in the rick house? And why is that? If that's true.

[00:13:24]>> Yes. Yeah. So, the higher up we would go, if we were going seven stories high on a summer's day, we'd be pretty warm up there. would be well over 100 degrees. Whereas down on the very bottom level, you might feel a lot cooler, maybe mid70s, you might have a 30 plus degree shift in your in your temperature. And temperature is important. It's really really important. And that's that um as I I was mentioning actually you can impose a temperature um addition to wood in contact with spirit and you will see different reaction chemistry taking place. So we know that's important and then you've got humidity changing whether in more humid environments you know you've got an effect on what is being retained in the barrel. Certainly a huge effect on temperature and placement.

[00:14:22]Do windows have an impact? Does photons of light have an impact? Does But this is just a thin shell on the outside of these structures trying to promote that heat in the summer and that cold in the winter. Try to get that big temperature fluctuation and really help the maturation process.

[00:14:42]You realize these folks are engineering an environment. It's passive. It's predictable and patient. They don't fight time. They use it. They design for it. That patience shows up everywhere in Kentucky. The horses take generations of breeding before they reach their peak.

[00:15:04]Bourbon might age for decades before anyone tastes it. The work here isn't about instant results. It's about building something for future enjoyment.

[00:15:16]prosperity or simply for those that come after us.

[00:15:24]The same thinking drives the team at Helerbuilt. Every detail they sell isn't a cost, it's an investment in the future of the home. Because real builders know that performance, like bourbon, improves time if you start with the right ingredients.

[00:15:43]My name is Max Heler. I am a partner with Helerbilt in Lexington, Kentucky.

[00:15:52]Helerbilt is a boutique firm. So, we are a family business. We are not a large business. We only focus on a few projects a year because we're extremely committed to quality and our clients service and their experience throughout the entire process. So, what we do is go the extra mile to make sure that homes are being built beautifully, that our clients enjoy the entire experience, and that at the end of the day, these homes are standing the test of time, and we truly feel like we're building the historic homes of the future.

[00:16:30]Kentucky in general has an incredible agricultural history and we in particular function in the equin agricultural world here in Lexington. We focus a lot on horse farms, estate homes, really anything involving land development and turning some of these beautiful bluegrass acres into true family farms.

[00:16:58]Being a family business in Lexington means that we're extremely invested in what we do because it means more than just building a home. This is our town and our city and something that I've lived in my whole life and I plan on being here for the rest of my life. And we are trying to grow a reputation for our business that is synonymous with quality, with taking care of our clients and building significant homes and structures in general in our town because we care about where we live and how it looks and the quality of things that are being built here.

[00:17:42]Building architecturally significant homes is only part of the equation. It is our job as the builder to make sure that these homes are built with the intention of lasting for lifetimes.

[00:17:57]We are trying to leave a legacy of craftsmanship and quality that we don't think our town has seen before.

[00:18:13]When we talk about high performance buildings, people have a tendency to think about insulation and mechanical systems. But in reality, it's actually more about control and how air flows through the building. Just like in the Rick house, it's about how the air flows through the building or doesn't. It's about how the building materials respond to seasonal changes or shifts in the weather. Every joint, every seal, every line of caulking becomes in a sense an investment in durability, an investment in the long term, an investment in the future. You don't notice it right away necessarily. You notice it when the building's occupied. You notice it decades from now. Or in some cases, you'll notice it generations from now.

[00:19:09]On job sites in Utah, there is no telling what kind of weather we can expect. And today is a perfect example of the fact that one day it can be 60° and the next day it can be raining and snowing. That's why our team chooses to use Hubert Engineered Wood products on all of our builds. Whether it's the zip system sheathing on the exterior of our house, including the roof, or the Advantec subfloor, and in most cases, Advantec X Factor. These are the products we use when building these custom homes to ensure that our clients have a superior quality product for years to come. This gives us the ability to dry in the house at very early stages during construction. We can get the roof taped, get it dry down, get all of our windows installed, keep moving through the process. But even on days like today where it is pouring rain and starting to snow, when the Advantec X Factor gets covered in water and rain, we're not at all concerned about the quality and the future readiness of this floor. When we get to installing the final floor product, we know this is going to withstand all of this moisture. We're not going to have buckling seams and it's going to be perfect for what we have to come. Our team loves the Huber Engineered Wood products. We would always recommend them on all of the builds and quite frankly, there's not a huge cost difference from what we used to use before we became big Huber fans.

[00:20:44]So, go over and check out Huber's website for more information. Now, back to the programming.

[00:20:50]Austin >> Jake, >> thank you for uh allowing us to visit today.

[00:20:54]>> Absolutely.

[00:20:55]>> The place is gorgeous.

[00:20:57]>> Thank you.

[00:20:57]>> It looks like we're about to turn it over. Obviously, that's why everything is covered in protection.

[00:21:02]>> Mhm.

[00:21:03]>> Talk to me about where we are.

[00:21:05]>> Location-wise, we're in Versales, so we're on the outskirts of Lexington.

[00:21:09]This is what, you know, we call horse country. Um we're on a family farm.

[00:21:13]We've developed a relationship with this family over the last seven, eight years.

[00:21:17]the house specifically. This is Georgian Architecture. Uh we're working with TS Adams, which is an architectural firm out of like 31A in Atlanta. And uh the client has known for the past 10 years that this is the style house she wants.

[00:21:31]She has a lot of uh inspiration from Gil Schaffer and uh just a perfect kind of client for us because she's dedicated to the architecture. She's passionate and intentional about what she's doing. And like we're curating and creating something that I think they would say the same thing that will be here for three, four, five generations. And I know that sounds ridiculous, but that's the idea behind this property.

[00:21:54]>> Yeah. And when you pull up the drive, I mean, the the way everything is set up, you come straight up the driveway and you're looking right at the house. This house looks like it was here 200 years ago. And if you didn't know it was a new home, you would think, "Oh, you guys are here making sure that this thing doesn't get bulldozed because somebody's moved out of it or something." It looks like it's been here for 200 years. They've nailed the architecture. You guys have nailed the architecture. Talk to me about uh like the history of the architecture in the sense of they knew how to do things.

[00:22:27]>> Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. It's funny. It's like >> it takes all the pieces, right? The architecture has to be dialed in, the materials have to be dialed in, the craftsmanship and the builder have to understand the intentions and what what is supposed to be uh made. And I think understanding the way that houses were built 200 years ago and dialing in those details and mimicking those details, it actually does add to that architecture because you don't really catch it with your eye, but the subtleness of the masonry skirt and the flashings and how everything is understood as far as like horizontal trim boards get flashed. It's just all of those little that little minutia, those little details that lead to durability and resilience, you know?

[00:23:10]It's just it's been interesting over my career like understanding when I first started I was just super OCD about all the details like everything had to be perfect from the building science perspective from the craftsmanship perspective but what I didn't understand was the resilience of a building and the and it's fine that materials age and they wear out a little bit but it actually adds to the like feeling of the house and like you said when you drive up on this house it looks like it was the original farmhouse from 200 years ago. And that's something I'm super proud of and is is really hard to nail.

[00:23:46]And our company is getting to that point where you start to feel that way about all of our projects.

[00:23:50]>> Yeah. I think it's like super important to note like those historical details that are tied to durability, they're they're all based in basic physics.

[00:24:02]They're all based in very simple principles about shedding water. that brick or masonry or stone water table that was around the bottom of a building 200 years ago that was there because they understood that putting wood next to the ground was a bad idea.

[00:24:18]>> That putting your sighting right up against the grass meant that it wasn't going to last as long. And so we didn't do that. We put foundation down there and we let it be the foundation and we didn't try to hide the fact that our building was sitting on a foundation like we do so often today. Yeah. uh it's okay for the building to be up a little bit and have two steps to come up to it.

[00:24:37]Uh or that the fact that you guys are highlighting the fact that we're using, you know, copper head flashings that last a little bit longer, they're going to be there for the life of the cladding and it's also appropriate for when the building was built. That would have been an okay thing and they would have done the exact same thing. All of these things are perfectly simple for today and we don't do them. we rely on, you know, sciency materials to try to solve these problems or or or different chemistry that wouldn't have been something that they could get their hands on 200 years ago. That sometimes works, sometimes it doesn't, sometimes it does. Um, or we just make mistakes as an industry, not you and I, but as an industry, where we just do whatever the neighborhood's doing so that the house looks like the house next door, and we don't consider what the house actually should be or shouldn't be, or what architectural style, or maybe there isn't an architectural style. The architectural style of the building is the neighborhood, which is the worst thing that I think you're going to get lost. It's the path that we don't want to take as custom home builders that are passionate about what we do. And I know it sometimes sounds or whatever. You know, we're we're turning our noses up. It's not. We're passionate about what we do and we want to provide a unique service and we want people to see it generation after generation after generation.

[00:25:58]>> And I don't think that that's what most people are getting when they buy a house that's a speck house. That's >> No, I mean that's a great point. There's just so much more depth to it, right?

[00:26:06]Like I know this is on a in the middle of a farm and the community doesn't get to like appreciate this, but how many hands are going to touch this building and and how how will those experiences like further those craftsmen and those people that have touched this house?

[00:26:20]Like all of that stuff absolutely matters and we're creating something that won't get torn down. It'll be here for 200, 300 years. And like to me it's it's I've always struggled with exactly what you said like how do we eliminate the snoodiness? Like for me, it's a part I'm a part of this community and I'm trying to build and develop something that like actually freaking matters, man. And and there's so many people that touch it. And to me, there's just so much depth there that we're not exploring and that we're not talking about. And I think >> hopefully we can continue to push that narrative.

[00:26:52]>> Can I ask you to show us around the house and show us the ugliest room in the house, the mechanical room? the room that I'm excited to see because we're going to talk so much today about control.

[00:27:14]This is an absolutely gorgeous house.

[00:27:17]We're in the least aesthetically pleasing room of the house, but it is a room, not the best.

[00:27:22]>> It's a room that I get super excited about. It's actually one of the first places we came when we started our tour.

[00:27:27]run me through like the the basics behind what's in this room, Austin.

[00:27:32]>> So, we're basically living in the brain, right? So, this is where all of our control systems live. So, we're always talking about we want to control the air before it gets into the house. So if we if we actually air seal properly and make sure that we're not allowing the air into the house, then we have to let these systems then take over and provide the fresh air, dehumidifier, and make sure we're considering the fact that we are living in a controlled environment.

[00:27:57]>> Yeah. So we've in effect we've taken away uh sometimes you hear people say the the the building's ability to breathe. I think buildings don't breathe. They also don't sweat. uh they air moves and they condensate and that's the way we should say it. And when you say it that way, you don't want air moving around because that means you don't have control over it and you don't want things condensating because condensation can be bad for the building. And so if you look at it that way rather than breathing because everybody thinks breathing is a good thing because we have to do it to stay alive. You look at it as air leakage and air moving around willy-nilly uncontrolled, then we understand, well, if we can do it under our terms, I keep looking up because there's even equipment above me. If we can do it under our terms, then we have better control. And so, we have three different pieces of equipment right here in this corner of the mechanical room. Let's start with the largest one with all the snakes coming off of it here. Like, >> yep, >> we're we're talking about uh a furnace, an air handler. Mhm.

[00:29:01]>> But it's not traditional. What What do we have here?

[00:29:03]>> So, this is a geothermal system. So, we're actually using the temperature in the ground.

[00:29:09]>> So, basically the way it works is we have roughly six, seven tons on this house, which means we have six to seven loops that go 150 ft in the ground. And it's just simple. We're using the consistent temperature at that depth.

[00:29:21]Okay? So, we have a a really big heat sink in the form of the planet that doesn't change uh temperatures often or very much at all. When you go to 150 ft, it doesn't change at all.

[00:29:33]>> Uh and we're able to steal that temperature and that temperature is way easier to take from 50° or 52 degrees at 150 ft and warm it to 72 or use it to cool things down than it is to take outdoor air. That's I mean today it's 35 or 40 outside so we'd be warming at another 10 degrees so it's less efficient or >> you know here in Lexington we might be 100° in the summer and we're cooling at 30° >> so it just reduces that uh that delta between the two.

[00:30:07]>> This is our heating and cooling we're distributing through the building. We have a really big filter >> in filter. Uh, I mean this guy, the larger you make it, the less it reduces air flow and the better the efficiency of the equipment then as well. And that sucker is enormous.

[00:30:23]We're filtering things as it comes back through, but we're only filtering the air that's already inside the building with this piece of equipment.

[00:30:29]>> Correct.

[00:30:30]>> Talk to me about the unit that is overhead here. It's got four pipes coming in and out of it.

[00:30:36]>> Correct.

[00:30:37]>> What does it do?

[00:30:37]>> So, this is our fresh air system. So basically, we're crossing streams in the system. We're bringing air in from the outside. We're taking air from the inside. We're mixing those streams so that we get some makeup. If it's 85 degrees outside and high humidity and it's 70 and low humidity inside, we get some of that makeup. We're talking probably 50% efficient, but still we we're able to gain some temperature and reduce some humidity. And then we're going to run that back through our dehumidifier and then through our geothermal system and back into the house. And again, it's just like what you said. I want to be able to know what all of the air inside the house is doing. And we the way we talk about it with clients is like the breathing thing is, okay, do you want air coming through the stud cavities that have dust in them or through the attic and through the top plate? You know, we want to control everything that moves through the house, recirculating through the building and filtering what's there and doing some drying just like a traditional AC unit might. We have balanced ventilation in the form of air coming in and air being pushed outside. And we still have bath fans in the house. Correct.

[00:31:43]>> But this unit is running non-stop. This unit is replenishing air inside the building. This unit is letting the air move through the building. Uh some people might say breathe like we were talking about a second ago, but it's filtering everything. It's not letting just anything come in. And that's the difference between that top plate error or that bottom plate air that you were just talking about. That's the key feature there. I think that's super important that we sometimes miss when we let it leak on its own terms. We don't have any control over that humidity that you mentioned or the the contaminants that it brings with it. It can even bring, you know, particulate matter that has nothing to do with humidity or or moisture. It can be pollen that affects your family. This thing is sucking that away. And then you said it's feeding to a dedicated dehumidifier. So dehumidification, this guy does it, but because this unit's so efficient, it does it poorly, which is always super counterintuitive to folks. We have to add dehumidification now in our systems because this thing runs at a variable speed.

[00:32:50]>> The coil doesn't get as cold. It doesn't run for as long necessarily. Sometimes they are set up so that the variable speed allows them to run non-stop for longer periods of time, but the coil doesn't get as cold. So the temperature doesn't get as cold, doesn't get as much condensation on it. That means it doesn't suck as much moisture out of the air. So even though it looks like the water furnaces that we put in 25 years ago that are about the same size, actually they're probably almost my height, uh they just don't do the same thing. And now we're adding dehumidification. And we get this push back sometimes in the realm of we're buying another piece of equipment. We're paying to operate another piece of equipment. I thought you were giving us control over our building and high performance mechanicals. And we have to say, yeah, that thing is really good at the refrigeration cycle that pulls moisture out of the air. And it's way more efficient at pulling moisture out of the air than this guy because all it does is get super cold and suck that moisture off of the air and then heat the air back up and dump it into the house.

[00:33:54]>> It's only doing that one thing. It has one job and it's not worried about anything else. It has a filter on it. It probably in this case even doesn't necessarily need a filter because it's pulling filtered air in and it's dumping it through another filter, but it still has a filter on it. Like it's the simplest system that we could ask to operate that procedure and it does it in the most effective way that we possibly could have and that means that it's going to do it in a more cost-effective manner than what the furnace would or the AC would. I mean in in terms of running that guy can run when we're not calling for temperature as well. So shoulder season we're coming into fall.

[00:34:37]We might not be heating.

[00:34:38]>> Yeah. But we might still be humid. Same thing in the spring. We might not be cooling, but we might be humid. I know that at my personal house at night, we get humid while we're not cooling or calling for for anything to happen here.

[00:34:52]>> That dehumidification cycle keeps the house more comfortable.

[00:34:56]>> That that control and that comfort is like the first thing that we're that we're selling buildings based off of is >> if you can't offer that to the clients, they may as well live outside. Exactly.

[00:35:08]>> The whole building is based on control.

[00:35:11]>> One of the biggest things that we battle against is people don't understand that you have to get the oil changes and you have to rotate the tires. And it's no different on our houses like these mechanical systems. Like we're building for the future, right? And we have to adapt and we have to grow and we have to understand how these systems work and our clients need to be good with that too. And it's on us as builders to overcommunicate the hell out of that.

[00:35:32]Like always talking about make sure you hire someone to check the systems three or four times a year. Keep your eye on the dehumidification. Like it's crucial to how this house lives because if this is forgotten about and not checked, >> everything we've designed, everything we've inputed is >> Yeah.

[00:35:47]>> no longer working properly.

[00:35:49]>> We refer to it as uh ownership.

[00:35:51]>> Like the building is great when we turn it over, but it also needs ownership. I also think your analogy of the automobile is a really interesting thing. We have um mutual acquaintance that talks some about I get in my car and my spouse gets in the car and her side can be two degrees different and yet we would expect them to come home and not have a level of comfort that's even remotely close to that but they only spent $60,000 on a car but they spent a million dollars on a house >> and we can't offer that to our clients all of a sudden. That is something that our industry has lost and there are very few builders that do a really good job of offering like total control. And it starts with everything that we saw outside the the envelope the the measures that you take to limit air infiltration and it ends here. Well, it ends here with ownership. Yeah. Like you just said, >> I know we're pulling back the curtains, but you always have to paint the brightest picture, right? Like we're building a super quiet house that has constant fresh air inside of it. they're going to feel good in it. There's gonna be less dust. I mean, it there is some complication that comes along with that, but the benefits outweigh that all day.

[00:37:02]It's not a cost, it's an investment.

[00:37:04]>> Uh, and when you can communicate that to a client, that's the that's the biggest difference in this is an upgrade or this is the right way. And understanding that it's the right way and it's the right way for your future. That makes a world of difference.

[00:37:19]Where the barrels depend on ambient humidity, this house uses equipment to maintain ideal conditions, humidity control, dehumidifiers, and properly detailed vapor management at the walls.

[00:37:31]It's simple. It's science and it's beautiful in its logic. The same physics that age bourbon over decades can destroy a home in years if you ignore them. But if you build like this, intentional, layered, and aware, you turn physics in your favor.

[00:37:48]I see the same thing I saw at the Rick House. Understanding the environment, using it instead of fighting it, and letting time prove the value of good choices. We're standing in front of a historic restoration in Lexington, Kentucky. So, we are in what we call the Chvy Chase neighborhood. This is a Robert McMein house. So, this house was built in the early 50s. Robert McMein was a really prominent architect in the late 30s, 40s, 50s who did a lot of really amazing, interesting houses in this neighborhood. I think the main thing we want to touch on is how do we think about and honor historical restorations from a preservation standpoint? The reality of a home like this is when we're talking to a potential client, we want to understand, is there a story? Is there a significant architect involved? Is there a significant builder from the past? And it really starts with the story. And then from there, we want to dissect, was the house actually built well? And this is one of those houses that really checks all of those boxes. It's in a really prominent area of town. There's a lineage here with local families.

[00:38:57]There's a great architect. So, we really don't want to think about this house any differently than we do our new construction projects. We want to understand how does the house live? How does the house does the cladding affect the way that the wall system lives? and how does that affect how we insulate and air seal? And we really want to be knowledgeable and understanding of all of that so that before we approach the project, we're putting something together that can last another 200, 300 years. So on this specific house, we have a masonry exterior. We have a brick exterior. We do not want to touch that brick. When we're into a masonry structure, we want to do everything we can to keep the stone and the brick intact. So, what that means for us is we have access to the inside and we want to understand when that brick gets wet that it's going to dry to the inside. We're going to get moisture to the inside. So, that wall still needs to be able to have thermal exchange through the wall. We need to have honestly like a little bit of air movement in that wall. So, when we go to the inside of the house, we're going to use rockwool and we're going to be really understanding of the way that brick and that existing sheathing lives and works. And then we're going to nurture that and make sure that we're putting together a product that can live the way it has for 85 90 years and can live that way into the future for the next 200. So what we're trying to balance is there's obviously a financial implication to keeping houses like this.

[00:40:16]We can scrap a house. We can build new and we may even get to the point where we're a little bit less expensive to do so. But there's value on the other side of the table. There's value in the story. There's value in the community.

[00:40:28]There's value in the beauty. What we always talk about is we can build a house that's super energy efficient, that can last for 300 years, but if it doesn't look good, if it's not beautiful, if the architecture isn't really stunning, it doesn't matter.

[00:40:42]Someone's going to knock it down in 50 years. And that's the fun part that we get to play in this. We're 85 years in the future. This house was built by people that cared about what they were doing that were thinking about, okay, we're going to build something that's monumental to the community and to our legacy. And then we're just going to continue that through and make sure that it's going to be here 200 years from now and people continue to tell that story.

[00:41:10]What I love about Kentucky is that patience is built into its identity.

[00:41:15]People here have a quiet confidence in time. They know you can't rush quality, whether it's bourbon, bloodlines, or building.

[00:41:24]Every builder says they want their work to stand the test of time, but here you can feel it.

[00:41:31]Because in Kentucky, the good stuff always takes time.

[00:41:37]I'm Jake Brutin. I'll see you next time on Built Here.