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[ned]

Boxers or Briefs?

What kind of question is this for a Sunday morning? Let me re-phrase......if you were to denude your house removing the overcoat of bricks or vinyl siding or stucco or ...well after they are removed what will you find underneath? The answer is sheathing.

This is really quite an interesting subject. When you see homes being built you will frequently see the rough framing built with the wooden skeleton for the walls and the roof. Then you may see the builder nailing plywood around the house over the walls. Sometimes however you’ll see a little plywood and then a lot of Styrofoam plastic or even gypsum board. What’s the point for this?

Consider this.....if the framing of the house were standing there with exposed 2x4 wall studs and rafters looking like a skeleton and then you added the weight of the roof above-then if you gave the house just a little shove then the entire structure would fold up and hit the ground with a crash! You have seen this effect when you have some cheap open book shelves leaning against a wall- when you load the shelves up with books then the shelf will begin to sway to the right or the left. This is called “racking” (very technical). Having a bookshelf fold up and collapse is one thing but the whole house is another.

So to prevent “racking” the builder will nail sheets of plywood or OSB board onto the walls- This will prevent the studs from folding up. Building code says that at least twenty percent of each side of the house must have sheathing so as to keep it from collapsing. Some builders will nail plywood sheathing over 100% of the house (which I prefer) but others will fill in the rest of the walls with Styrofoam boards or gypsum. The more plywood sheathing you have then the stronger and tougher your house will be. Imagine if a piece of wood was blowing through the air during a hurricane and hit a wall that had vinyl siding on the outside and Styrofoam sheathing underneath? That piece of wood would be inside with you in a jiffy! If the house had plywood or OSB sheathing underneath then you and your family would have more protection.......so what kind of underwear does your house have.