Exterior Door Insulation

[Music playing] The exterior door installation is going pretty well. The door is now in place, the shims are tight. I have trimmed them all off so they do not stick out and now see this gap between the door jam and the rough framing? Now it is time to fill that and I like to use two different products. You might choose to only use one. I use fiber glass on the inside like this but I also use spray foam on the outside. Let me show you how to install it. The spray foam insulation that I am going to use to insulate and seal this exterior door is very important. Get one that says it is flexible on the label. As the foam expands, you want it to stay flexible so that it does not squeeze the door too much and make the door get tight and not fit in the jam. Also be sure that you only fill the gap about half way. As the urethane foam cures, it actually expands and if you put too much in, it will come oozing out of the crack. Let us get started. I will show you how this works. It is that easy to use the foam look how quick that can happen. Now there is one last thing I want to show you, once the foam cures and it gets hard, I am actually going to seal the gap between the door jam and the sheathing was some of that special sticky flashing tape and I have cut a small piece here just to show you exactly how I am going to do it. I will peel of the back and it is a special silicon paper and then all I am going to do once the urethane is cured is I do not want come over all the way to this edge because there will be some reveal. I just want it to lap about a quarter inch onto this prime surface and then the woodwork trim here will eventually cover it but it will completely seal over this gap and remember once it is all done, I will have one continuous piece all the way up to the top but I just I want to show you how we are going to do it. So imagine if this was one giant large piece. Now you can see how is that going to work because that if any water were to ever get behind the trim, there is no way it would get between the actual sheathing, the rough framing and the door and it completely weather seals this opening in case any driving rain gets back behind that trim. Let us go inside right now and I will show how to put the fiber glass insulation on the inside of the door. Okay we are getting ready to tape inside to show you the fiber glass and while we were doing that look what happened. Here are some of the foam insulation I actually put it in a little heavy to be able to show you this. It is expanding out beyond the door jam. It is very sticky, I am going to leave it alone and once it cures in several hours, what I will do is just take a simple razor knife and trim it off and then I will put that flashing tape on top of it. It is that easy to correct but do not freak out if you see it oozing out like this. It just tells that you put a little bit too much in. It is not the end of the world. I have to tell the truth. We finished putting the door in yesterday and it got a little late to finish the job. I went ahead and already insulated with the pink fiber glass so that cold air would not pour in through the night but I want to show you how I did it. So I went ahead and removed some right here. What you do is you take fiber glass insulation narrow strips like this and you rip off a piece that is a little bit longer than the gap that has to be filled. And then what you do is you want it to be kind of loose. You do not want to pack it into tightly and I like of just use a wood shim or some small stick like that and you just start to stuff it in very easily and the key is not to push it in too tightly. In other words, you do not want pack it in and you just fill the gap like that and depending on how deep the door jam is, you might have to put in two or three inches. But remember what I did, I put about three inches of foam outside and we are going to have about two or three inches of fiber glass on the inside and this door will be sealed nice and tight and there will be minimal air infiltration. One final step too if you are living in a cold air and you are worried about air infiltration, you can do the same trick inside. You can take a masking tape and you can actually tape over the seam before you put the woodwork on to block other air that might get inside the house. It is that easy to seal an exterior door, I am Tim Carter for askthebuilder.com. [Music playing]