Brent Hull is the owner and founder of Hull Millwork & Hull Homes in Fort Worth, Texas. He is a Master Builder and Craftsman who is passionate about beautiful architecture and the art of timeless building. Hull's period-authentic architectural millwork and window restorations adorn custom homes and historic institutions across the country. The author of three books, he is a leading authority about building craft, period architecture, and historic preservation.
I have a 1953 budget tract home with perforated gyp board lathe and the living room is the last unpainted room with original colorfast waxed Venetian plaster. The ceiling had a 5/8" border frame and the field is a gorgeous knockdown finish. It was done in an ecru or off white. The bathroom paint is coming off the colorfast plaster which was a very pale orangish brown color. The 1957 addition was done in gypsum wall board, AKA sheetrock. That job looks more like shitrock. Every joint and every nail is visible. You can plaster over gyp board, you can cement over it, you do a 1 inch mud job for tile over it, or you can finish it however, smooth, splatter texture, knock down, orange peel, whatever, and just paint it. Smooth finishes can be wall papered over too. We have classic wood paneling and acoustic ceiling tile in one room, and paneling is REAL WOOD (veneer), but, it's reaaly actual wood. Clean it put some pledge or solvent & dryer cut tung oil on it and it looks fabulous with the genuine mahogany trim and baseboards. It makes it very hard to hate as 1970s icky decor, IF you can overlook the awful ceiling tiles. (chock full of asbestos to boot)
100 years from now... ah see this 3D printed plastic bracket right here. Yep, that is 2000's historic era repair work. Probably means this place was owned by someone at the time who couldn't afford a house. We should save this as part of the historic restoration work. To be real though, the screw types are such a giveaway, I don't care about historical accuracy, I love my starbits. I hate flathead screws.
Hey Brent - On the historic photo, I'm surprised to see that the siding in the gable just stops in a random location and not extend downward covering the entire gable. It looks incomplete.
@@BrentHull I guess but it lacks punctuation and doesn't even have a piece of trim at the base separating it from the stonework. I guess it is a modernistic twist. I advise my clients of it as a no-no. It may have been done historically but lots of things were done historically in the 20th century that can upset the balance of a house. Maybe if it stopped at the window sill with the apron of the sill extending across it would feel more connected. Just my 2 cents.
Geothermal is great stuff, but there some issues in this video. 1) Freon is just a brand name for some old refrigerants that are no longer in use. 2) Using geothermal does not get rid of compressors. Some limited cooling applications (perhaps common in Texas, I don't know) can use the water directly from the geothermal loop. Most geothermal cooling systems use a compressor and reject heat to the geothermal loop. Any kind of geothermal heating uses a compressor to pull heat from the geothermal loop and reject the heat inside the home. The geothermal loop makes heat gathering and heat rejection more efficient - that's the reason to use geothermal over air source heat pumps.
The older I get, the more I realize the older guys were right - "Silence is Golden™". I generally prefer a quiet well designed hydronic system to a force air system and something-to-air condensers outside the house pushing heat into the immediate area and adding to noise pollution. As long as your water table is high enough, a ground loop geothermal system is going to be ideal of most small to large properties. Water has a much higher thermal mass than air, so you need to move a lot less of it to transfer the same amount of BTUs/hr. That is the reason I prefer an HVAC&R design based on a "spine" hydronic loop - using smaller, higher efficiency, reversible heat+cool units to do the final push to what is needed in a local zone. The Mitsubishi CityMulti system is built like this, but rare in North America in smaller scale projects. Because the individual zones have their own unit and the hydronic spine passes all of the units (in larger buildings there may be an intermediate floor management unit), it allows pushing heat pulled from one zone into another - before having to reject it outside the building envelope. I've been begging companies like Mitsubishi and Carrier to integrate more and more thermal devices into their hydronic type platforms - think of having a refrigerator/freezer and a water-heater connected as loads to a hydronic system. You're already doing the same thing on a larger scale with your house and the outside environment. Extracting heat from one side of an insulated volume and rejecting that heat to the other side (heating versus cooling just changes the direction of the heat flow). Imagine how the total efficiency of a water heater would increase if it was sourcing heat from the room the water heater was in that escaped the insulation barrier and then pumped it back into the water heater - but that's only the second order efficiency improvement. Not being a load that has to be calculated for that room is the first order efficiency improvement! thinking the refrigerator or freezer example, a normal appliance must extract heat energy from the inside of the insulated box, and then reject that heat into the room via a coil that is either integral to the appliance (right inside its skin) or right up the back (getting covered in dust, because when is the last time you remember pulling out your fridge to clean the coils?). If that heat energy isn't getting pushed into your kitchen, then you don't have to remove it with an HVAC system - that's where integrating the R (refrigeration) into the overall Heating Ventilation Air Conditioning & Refrigeration (HVAC&R) pays off. Unfortunately, doing this with modern refrigerators and freezers pretty much requires the commercial sized ones that were designed to be serviced and have fairly common off-the-shelf parts like compressors that can be swapped with water-loop plated heat exchangers. Bigger houses only need apply for this modification right now.
Great idea for larger homes but I don’t see the capex coming down much cheaper. Drilling costs money.. I believe something like what gree and others are doing with vapor injection on heat pumps is going to be much more mainstream. VRF is much more cost effective for one large residence
When you said styrofoam 20 seconds into the video, my heart sank.😂We've lost our architectural soul in the US, and I hope your great work will help help bring about a renaissance. I'm in the process of learning Classical Roman and Greek design from the ground up. I want to be able to calculate and draw out columns, room sizes, mouldings, etc. following correct proportions. I want to be able to identify, properly proportion, and describe the purpose of each sub-component of a design.
You have captured my imagination with traditional building techniques, proper moldings, wood paneling, shadow lines, classical greek/roman proportions, etc. Lately, I've been watching college lectures on these subjects and more. Though I'm just a non-rich homeowner and a layperson, I share your passion for building excellence and it's my dream to work with you one day.... even if it's to make a tiny shack with an old soul.
Serious mis-use of the term Freon. Freon is the trademarked name used by DuPont de Nemours and their successor Chemours for their older refrigerants R-12, R-13B1, R-22, R-410A, R-502, and R-503. Products created by any other manufacturer are not Freon. Newer natural gas based refrigerants are not Freon, even when made by Dupont or Chemours.
In Sweden, northern Europe, it's common for heating in houses from around 1500 square feet (150 square meters) and up. It has been common for the last 25-30 years. After about 20 years you have to change the indoor part of the system. Otherwise it's a problem free setup.
Not an engineer, but with clay soils (which Texas has a lot of) it makes sense to start the lines 5 feet below grade as clay soils tend to have less evaporation 5 ft down, which means less contraction of soils, which = more stability. If expansive soils can lift fountains. Causing damage to a water line is also possible. In fact, I've seen it happen. If the lines do need to be replaced/repaired, are they accessible, or does it require drilling a new well?
Wanted to do geothermal on a newbuild but waiting for my state (California) to catch up with the times and not require prohibitive specialized engineer. More videos like these go a long way towards educating people about the existence and benefits of these systems.
Agree 100%. We live in a large community that requires geothermal for all new homes built. It has been a big win for us for all the reasons you mentioned - no ugly outside compressors and electric costs much lower.
Good video. I’m an engineer. I have geothermal in my house and in our office building. Here in coastal virginia it is easy to drill wells in the sandy soil, so the well costs are reasonable. A rule of thumb is one well per ton of A/C. Thanks for addressing this subject !
I would love to see the cost come down even further on drilling and installation, it seems it is still a niche and therefor each job is custom. Probably still have refrigerant gasses somewhere in the system, just don't have to have anything outside. Our refrigerators and freezers have compressors for example. The high efficiency house competition in Washington DC has showcased A/C systems hooked to hot water for decades, but good luck finding an A/C manufacture who will let you take a tap off their unit to capture waste heat and still have a warrantee. So many technical possibility, but still so far away from the average homeowner.
I'm a huge fan of geothermal. Makes me wonder if we'll ever have a community scale geothermal heat pump wells like a public utility connected to the whole neighborhood.
@@BrentHull there is one that was built in Alberta Canada. It seems like it worked alright but the idea was abandoned when the heat pumps reached end of life. The project is called Drakes Landing. There were a lot of mistakes made but it was also a first of its kind project. Also the fact that it worked well for so long with all the mistakes in an area where it reaches -40 during the winter shows it would be possible to make work in many areas.
You mean "again?" We used to do district scale stuff before we started marketing all these electric gizmos... 100+ years ago. A lot of these "everything must go electric" mandates miss a huge opportunity to go back to higher efficiency district scale energy solutions - for example if you have an area with a lot of houses and businesses that need heat and electricity, you could take waste heat from the plant and send that out to the district for direct consumption - this is called combined heat and power (CHP, this one is not the law enforcement agency in California). For any combustion based generator, the conversion from heat+volume expansion is about 33-40%, that other 60-67% is just dumped into the atmosphere as waste heat (so called simple cycle plants - the biggest structure space claim at a nuclear power plant is the familiar cooling towers, just there to dump waste heat into the air), or in more efficient plants exhaust heat is recovered and turned into steam, which turns additional electrical generation, so that as much at 80-85% of the energy is recovered (these are called combined cycle plants). That heat could just as easily be put into a pipe and sent out to do heating work, instead of being converted to electricity and then back to heat, losing a bit of efficiency at each conversion step. There are similarly district cooling plants (still) in operation - all that extra generation capacity at night when the air is coolest is the most efficient time to reject stored heat (or in effect, to store cold). This extra generation can be used to make ice... you remember Ice Boxes? Before everyone had a personal refrigerator? Now we can create that ice in a warehouse-sized water tank at night maximizing the power plant's output and efficiency without a lot of load variation, and during the day that ice can absorb heat from the town/city with a larger water loop. It emulates the work of a ground loop, but on an industrial scale. None of this is new, and I'm glad that Brent is talking about this - I think some of the forgotten building science from back when engineers were steam powered and every bit of efficiency had to be squeezed out of every ounce of energy, is probably worth a come-back story of its own.
People often talk about the cost of the differences, but if they can afford what I think would not be a giant difference in cost, the value of the house itself will become far greater with your design details. Anyone can live in a boring and banal box, but not everyone can live in something truly beautiful. It's a shame that they are rare, actually.
This is a Master Class every architect today should know! The crap we see today is unexcusible for builders and architects. Cheap budgets and high profit have led to America's loss of architecture. We destroy these historic clasic buildings that will inspire future generations to put up cheep housing. Thank you for educating us!
We're wanting to get new 6 over 6 wood windows in our cape cod style house (we currently have vinyl) but are looking for a good wood window with details and depth. Is there one you would recommend that isn't a $5,000 window but also not a cheap $200-300 window? Really appreciate all the videos you make and pushing people to want better craftsmanship! We whole heartedly agree.
I came in contact with wood Lath first hand in my old appartment in the old Pilsen neighborhood in Chicago in the 1990s one day I was putting a nail on the wall for a heavy mirror. It was surprising to see those strips of wood the author mentions here. One good thing by the way is that, with Lath you could hang an elephant no problem 😅 without the need of those accessories they sell for hanging things onto dry wall 😅😅😅
Hard to justify the expense of M&T timbering on an uncovered deck that might last 20-25 years until the wood rots out. I'd be a fan of poured concrete for the slab and piers, and this could be dressed up with masonry, rocks in mortar, or even superficial timbering that is intended to be replaced. The homeowners need to think about the lifetime cost. As with roofing, you can buy the 100 year material or the 20 year material.
My husband and I moved to Texas from California and we bought a 1929 Tudor revival in a small town just outside of Dallas. I’ve never lived in a tutor style, but I’ve lived in Victorian style back in New York. You’re absolutely right that they are very charming. What I find is people are trying to bring them into the modern age and unfortunately they lose a lot of the charm that was put into the building in the first place. I find it sad that people don’t appreciate a home as opposed to having a house. To me those little extras are what make everyone feel comfortable and secure in a home. When I see sadly, some of the older neighborhoods in the Dallas Fort Worth areamowing down these beautiful homes to put in these horrid boxes that take up all the lot crushes my spirit. I’m very glad that you’re around to remind us of the beauty of building a home and not just a house.
No question these changes really will improve the overall aesthetic and bring some architectural consistency to the structure. Those window changes are absolutely necessary, but I’m a major fan of the timbering and stone columns - they make such a huge visual impact to the back of the building. Also, I’ve always despised shed dormers!!! Good riddance lol
Hi Brent! Your "simple" fixes transformed a worker's home into a charming and all well put together home. Amazing what you have proposed. Where can I write to you and send you a request for a video like this? Thank you in advance and amazing work. I have been watching all your videos non-stop!
Great video Brent! Cost is such a major hurdle (thanks to inflation). I live in an almost 100-year-old French Period Revival home. The gentleman who had this home built negotiated the peace terms of the Russo-Japan war. Thank you for sharing your work, it has inspired me to learn more about architecture.
There's no better hands for this house's new future to be in. Passion for the Craft is where its at. There's a night & day difference between a contractor and a Master Builder. 1 in 100,000 can do what Brent does (well)
@BrentHull My wife and have been restoring a pre WW2 Los Angeles bungalow. Your videos are confirmation that I haven't screwed anything up yet. I'm always learning something new from them. I cringe in horror over a friend's decision to change out 58 casement windows in a 100 year old Spanish revival with cheap run-of-the-mill vinyl. If he had only discovered your channel first.
