According to water intrusion expert Scott Mulholland, nothing is more important when it comes to keeping your home free of leaks and water damage than your home's building envelope. Many homeowners, though, don't understand what a building envelope is and the importance of keeping it well-maintained. In this article, we'll take a look at what constitutes a home's building envelope, the important role that a building envelope plays in preventing water intrusion, and a few helpful tips from Scott Mulholland on how to keep your home's building envelope in pristine condition.
What is a Building Envelope?
A building envelope is defined as the perimeter of materials that separates the indoor portion of your home from the outside elements. This includes your walls, windows, doors, masonry, insulation, and any other element of your home that is designed to seal off the inside of the building from the outside world. Ultimately, the individual elements of your home that make up its overall building envelope combine to protect your home from water intrusion as well as help lower your energy costs. Given this vital role that your home's building envelope plays, Scott Mulholland advises that keeping your building envelope in optimum condition is one of the most important components of home maintenance.
Keeping Your Home's Building Envelope Well-Maintained
Constructing an effective building envelope is one of the more difficult tasks of building a new structure. Unfortunately, Scott Mulholland points out that creating an optimum building envelope is a task that many contractors often get wrong. However, while the overall effectiveness of your home's building envelope is largely dependent on the skill of the contractor and crew who constructed it, there are things that you can do yourself to help keep your home's building envelope in the best possible condition.
Repairing and replacing any damaged elements of your home's building envelope is a great place to start. Take the time to walk around the perimeter of your home and look for any obvious signs of damage that may be a repairable weakness in its building envelope such as missing or broken brick. Effective landscaping can also go a long way toward protecting your home's building envelope by preventing soil erosion and excess water buildup. Lastly, taking a caulk gun to any cracked or improperly sealed elements of your home's exterior is one easy way to improve the protection that your home's building envelope provides.
When it comes to keeping the outside elements outside, nothing is more important than your home's building envelope. With a little effort and attention to detail, you can ensure that your home's building envelope remains in optimum condition and continues doing the job that it was designed to do.
Caroline Hunter
Web Presence, LLC
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