No Canoe Today. Insulation Instead.

[catsittingstill]

I made arrangements to have the insulation in the attic brought up to R38 which is recommended for this area.  That means blowing in an extra R-19 over the living spaces (we already have R-19 which was standard in the 60s when the house was built) and a complete R-38 over the garage (because now it is a woodshop and needs insulation.)

I had expected them to come Friday but they started today instead.  They have been perfectly nice, but I kind of felt that I had to stay home with them in case they needed anything, plus every scrap of material going into the attic had to move through the woodshop first so I moved the canoe out onto the lawn. 

They admired the canoe very much.

I have not been able to work on Constance at all, and I feel very strange about that.  But I do need to get the insulation done and if this is when they can do it, this is when it needs to happen.

I got a lot of League work done instead--wrote an article for the local paper about the candidates who are coming and called five more people and invited them.  I am running out of people to invite.

I sure hope we get more people at this Candidates' Forum--if all this inviting doesn't make any difference I don't know that I will be up for doing it again.

Comments

[judifilksign.livejournal.com]

Well, you'll be warmer in winter, and cooler in summer, right?

Re: League: It's like planning a wedding without the RSVPs, huh? And will the Candidates show up, do you think?

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Oh, the insulation is a good thing. I just hadn't thought about not being able to work on the canoe while it was happening. Once I actually made the arrangements it happened pretty quickly :-)

The Candidates' Forum is a bit like planning a wedding. We do have RSVPs from the candidates, though; if we don't hear back from them a week after the first invitation, we call them. So it's not quite as bad as you may be imagining.

And all we need for the audience is enough chairs (and index cards and pencils, but that's pretty easy.)

[boywizard.livejournal.com]

In January 2008 a friend and I blew twelve inches of cellulose into our attic. Our autumn heating oil bill through December '07 was about six hundred and fifty dollars; the bill for Jan, Feb, and Mar was about five hundred, even though those were the winter months. I really wish I had done it fifteen years earlier, but for some reason I never actually looked in the attic to determine how much insulation was up there. (Just R19 - our house was built in 1962.) Now we are heating primarily with wood, and have cut our bills by an additional fifty percent, and reducing our carbon footprint.

My wife will be working the LWV Candidates' Night next Thursday; sounds to be similar to your Candidates' Forum. The turnout is never very large, but it is broadcast on the local radio station, so it is difficult to know how many people it reaches. It's a valuable service to the community, nonetheless.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Oh, wow--your heating bills make mine look like nothing! Or are those totals for the season, rather than monthly? That would still be quite a bit, but not five times what mine are.

Thanks for your encouragement about the Candidates Forum. I do think it's a valuable service, and we try to hold it early enough that people who attend have time to talk to those friends and neighbors who did not before the elections, though this is partly just a result of wanting to have it before most of the early voting--which in Tennessee starts 3 weeks before Election Day and ends one week before Election Day.

I really like early voting myself, but it does complicate the planning a bit, and drag out the election season.

[boywizard.livejournal.com]

Season totals - autumn and winter. If they were monthly it would have broken me. Those were the values when oil was running upward of $150 a barrel. We are now spending about $100 a year for fuel oil, and about $600 a year for firewood.