Ask Your New Home Builder: What’s Behind The Walls?

Quality you can’t see makes all the difference in your new home

We love it when people walk into one of our model homes and are wowed by the beautiful selections they see – included quartz countertops, large closets with built-in organization, and the welcoming covered back patio that’s perfect for watching Oklahoma sunsets. We love those things too. But we are just as proud of everything you don’t see.

Behind the walls is where the real story of your home is written. These places you don’t see are where some builders cut corners, but what’s behind the walls determines whether your gorgeous new home is still efficient and structurally strong in 10, 20, or 30 years.

Senior builder Grahm Hornsby shares what makes an Ideal homes such high quality behind the drywall. Grahm serves as an Ideal project manager for about fifteen new homes under construction at a time, overseeing the schedule, quality, and budget. Ideal Homes & Neighborhoods purposefully limits the number of houses that each project manager handles at one time so that each new home receives careful attention. 

As the most nationally recognized local home builder in Oklahoma, Ideal Homes & Neighborhoods leads the way in quality, energy efficiency, unique style, and neighborhood design. 

The Ideal Difference: Interior Walls

Drywall Gaskets

Drywall is the standard board that is nailed to framing for your interior walls. It also provides some sound reduction, fire resistance, a small amount of inherent insulation, and acts as an air barrier. However, drywall is also a pathway for heated or cooled air to escape from the home.

Grahm explained that air leaks through light switches and plug cutouts, travels behind the drywall, and escapes straight out through the attic. 

That’s why Ideal Homes & Neighborhoods installs gaskets at the top of all drywall throughout our homes. 

“The gaskets are an extra way to seal our walls by preventing air from leaking into the attic. They’re one of the best technical differences Ideal does with drywall installation,” said Grahm.

Blown-In Insulation

Behind the walls of Ideal homes, you’ll find blown-in insulation instead of batt insulation. Whereas batt insulation comes in large sheets cut to size, Ideal uses blown-in insulation because it is 22% more energy efficient than batt insulation. Where some builders may cut corners here by limiting the space to include insulation in the corners of their homes or behind showers, Ideal has built frame plans specifically to increase the amount of insulation in your home.

“Even though batt insulation is what has been traditionally used, we’ve switched to blown-in insulation because it gets into all the nooks and crannies, behind pipes, and into unique shapes,” explained Grahm.

Foam Insulation

Grahm said there are a number of things both small and large that Ideal does differently to make a home safe, reliable, and efficient. The small touch he’s most proud of is the foam insulation on the door from the house to the garage.

During the drywall phase, a rough opening is cut out for the door. Spray foam is critical because it seals up every tiny crack and gap. The result is a tighter, more energy-efficient home.

Many builders simply install the door into that rough-cut hole and cover any exposed gaps with trim, which leaves the door connecting the garage and house unsealed, leaving it vulnerable to fire spread, air leakage, and bugs.

It's a small step. But to Grahm, it represents something bigger: building homes the right way, making small changes that make a home safer and more reliable, even when no one will ever see it.

The Ideal Difference: Exterior Walls

Continuous OSB Sheathing

Sheathing is the layer of material that goes directly on top of a house’s wood framing on the exterior. According to building code, only certain parts of a house are required to use a robust engineered wood sheathing called oriented strand board (OSB) for structural support. The rest of the sheathing can be made of less robust (and less expensive) products like thin fiber board. This cost-saving measure is called discrete bracing.

Ideal does not use discrete bracing, instead covering the entire exterior of every home entirely in OSB, in what is called Continuous OSB sheathing. 

“We’re not willing to do that,” Grahm said.

Ideal’s decision to use continuous OSB Sheathing was made for two reasons. First, it mitigates human error by eliminating miscommunications between construction crews and engineers on which parts of a home should have OSB sheathing and which should have the less expensive product. 

Chris Ramseyer, the Ph.D. structural engineer for Ideal Homes, explained this further. “Essentially, you have an OSB box – walls and ceiling – so there's no confusion with the person putting up the sheathing on which parts should be structurally reinforced with OSB. It is all reinforced.”

Second, continuous sheathing allows for more structural stability and higher wind tolerance. Or put another way, at Ideal Homes, we are Oklahomans building homes for Oklahomans. High winds are not an afterthought to our building processes, but a driver in our decisions.

Moisture Barrier

Tyvek is a house wrap made of a breathable material that prevents water and mold from getting into the home. The material’s pores are so small that water cannot pass through it, but air can, making a home both sealed from moisture and breathable. 

Ideal uses Continuous OSB sheathing in conjunction with Tyvek to make a home strong and sealed. Many other builders use products similar to Tyvek, but with much lower performance. We often see other products being used that don’t perform as well in third-party testing. 

We take an additional step to further seal homes. Between the OSB and Tyvek wrap, we install a strip of moisture barrier on top of the foundation so that any water that hits the wall will run out past the foundation.

Brick is installed with an air gap behind it so that when moisture comes in behind brick that there is continuous airflow to help it dry.

A Note on Other Products

There is a new “premium” product that other builders may boast about using. It combines OSB and water-sealing technology. We do not use this product for two important reasons. First, when it’s nailed into place, if the nails don’t go into it at the perfect pressure, the waterproof seal is broken. 

“Your home has thousands of nail holes in it,” said Grahm. “The potential for the seal to be broken is too great.”

The second reason we don’t use this “premium” product is that it’s not compatible with the plastic barrier system we use along the foundation. If water gets between the foundation and this product, it creates the potential for moisture and mold problems. 

Imagine having really nice rain boots, but if you step into a deep enough puddle, your jeans will get wet and stay wet without airflow to dry them out…no matter how waterproof your shoes are.

Ideal Innovation

Ideal Homes & Neighborhoods is a leader in the industry for innovation. We test new products without blindly following trends and seek to build the highest quality home for the price for our customers. This commitment has made us a national leader in residential construction. In fact, many of our past innovations have been adopted into the building code.

If these walls could talk, they'd tell you exactly how much we care. Ask your builder about what they do for quality even where you can’t see it. 

Find IDEAL new homes in Norman, new homes in Edmond and Deer Creek schools, and more.