Renaissance House Playlist:
   • Renaissance Project House  
This will be updated as segments are added.

Our Project House is really big – nearly 6000 square feet – and we’ve taped this segment at a time when it’s really starting to take shape. If you’ve been watching the show, you know we’ve followed every detail in the building of this house, from the foundation pour & the ground plumbing, through the framing & the roofing stages, all the way through the walls and floors going in.

At this point we’re about two-thirds done with this house. We’re finished with the framing work, and so this is a great time to see how our plans and details are coming together. We’ll take a look around and show you what we’ve done so far.

Our tour of the house has to begin in the Great Room, the centerpiece of the Project House. The architect (Fred Wynn of Dallas Design Group) designed a beautiful structure with a tremendous amount of interior space. From a building perspective, that volume of interior space presents some challenges. Working together, the architect and builder have to strike a balance between form and function.

We’ve built a lot of open space into this interior, but we still have to make sure the frame around us and beneath us is strong enough to support the weight of the house, and to stand up to the potentially destructive forces of severe wind & weather. Open space means fewer walls, which means fewer opportunities for a frame to support the weight of a floor or a ceiling. One big limiting factor is the maximum possible horizontal span between supports for floor or ceiling loads. We used Engineered Wood products in the Project House to increase that maximum span distance, so we can support loads over longer horizontal distances. We used thicker vertical structural members (2x6 and 2x10 studs, instead of the standard 2x4s many builders use) that allow us to build load-bearing walls that can accommodate the 20-foot tall bank of windows we see in the Great Room.



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