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Hi I'm Tim Carter from Ask the Builder.com and today I want to talk a little bit about wall sheathing
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Wall sheathing is a material that's nailed to the exterior studs on a home
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And here you can see it on this particular home. You can see these giant sheets of material and really all it is, this happens to be a unique material
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It's a plastic-coated, oriented strand board. And here, I've got a small piece of it right here in my hand
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So you can see it right here, same material. And it's about a half-inch thick, you can see right here
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But on the side that faces the inside of the home, it's pretty normal
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That's just regular-oriented strand board. And, of course, the advantage of using this plastic-coated material
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is that it's, well, it's pretty much weather-resistant. If water should get behind the wall of the home, the siding or the brick
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this plastic coating's going to do a pretty good job of making sure that OSB doesn't rot
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Now, another really important aspect of the wall sheathing, and this is something that a lot of people don understand is that it also strengthens the house so that the house doesn fall over As crazy as it sounds if you just built a two by four wall or a two by
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six wall, you could go to the top of it and just kind of push it and collapse that wall down
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I'm not talking front to back, I'm talking sideways. Well, imagine if you nail this OSB sheathing
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every six or nine inches on center along each of the wall studs, it makes the wall. It makes the wall
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very rigid. It's almost impossible to push it and collapse that wall. It's engineered
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wood. It's a really good product. Make sure you have wall sheathing on your home
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And for historical purposes, many, many years ago, back in the late you know
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1900s we used to use tongue and groove one-by-sixths for wall sheathing and
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then that's switched over to plywood and now here we are 2010 using oriented
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strand board. Wall sheeting, very important. I'm Tim Carter for AskTheBuilder.com. If you want to discover more home improvement tips, go to askthebuilder.com
