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Insulation done yesterday and some canoe
Oct. 9th, 2010 06:46 pmYesterday the insulation guys finished putting in the insulation.
Pretty much all of Thursday was taken up with putting in the soffit protectors. Okay let me explain what that means; soffits are vents into the attic from the outside of the house--they look like little grills under the eaves, and they (combined with either a ridgetop vent or vents in the ends of the gables) make sure that air can flow through your attic so moisture doesn't build up in there and cause rot. So you *don't* want your soffits blocked with insulation, and that's where the soffit protectors come in; they are stapled between the rafters and basically turn the rafters and the roof between them into a tube that runs to the soffits. They are a couple of feet long, so when the insulation is blown in, they still stick up over the top of it, providing little tunnels for the air from the soffits.
Our roof isn't very steep, so there isn't much room down by the soffits. There's a reason why I paid good money to have someone *else* do this for me. The whole thing was complicated by the fact that the kitchen and 2 bathroom fans vent into the attic, and I insisted that they be protected with some sort of baffles too--I need my fans to actually vent. At one point we had to establish where the guest bathroom vent came up into the attic, because when I went up to inspect they'd only fenced off two vents. I crawled back to the ladder, down it, marched through the house, dripping the old insulation (cellulose) as I went, and turned on the guest bathroom fan, while the master carpenter hung out in the attic, trying to see where the air came out. He eventually found it way over by the outside wall--it had been hidden by a little fiberglass batt, probably when the first insulating job (a piddly R-19 but standard when the house was built) was done.
Since this new layer of insulation was going to end up well over the level of the joists, I insisted that they prop up a crawl-way on 2 x 8s so that if we ever needed to get to, for example, the dryer hose, we could, without swimming through the insulation. That probably added several hundred dollars to the operation, as they had to put 2 x 8s all the way to the back of the house, blow in the insulation, and then nail 2 foot wide lengths of OSB over them--it's not so much the materials, though that probably was a chunk--but it takes a while to do something like that.
Actually blowing in the insulation (I was in the woodshop, puttering around designing the thwarts for Constance) probably look less than an hour.
And now our house has a very fluffy white blanket in the attic. Which I hope will help reduce our heating and cooling bills for the lifetime of the house.
And Thursday I made cardboard patterns for the back thwart and foot thwart respectively, and drew out the back thwart on the ash I had (several times, actually) and established that no, I absolutely could not fit the foot thwart on it too, and (after the insulation guys were done) went to Jeffries and bought a piece of ash for the foot thwart. Which only cost me $ 2.43--I actually regret losing the driving time more than anything else.
And today I drew out the foot thwart pattern on the new piece of ash, and thought about bandsawing everything out but decided that I really needed to work on the seat because the thwarts would be much quicker than the seat. So I planed the seat some more and got the pieces closer to level and square and the same height as each other, and laid out the mortises and tenons. And right about then I wanted a break (laying out mortises and tenons is harder than it sounds) so I went off and cleaned out some more driveway cracks and sealed them and then Kip came home and I remembered I needed to fix the mower flap back on the mower so I did that.
And then I thought I should clean out under the house because all the junk we had to take out of the attic for the insulators is waiting by the curb for junk removal on Monday and wouldn't it be clever to get the junk out from under the house too? But I'm too tired.
Tomorrow I need to actually *cut* the mortises and tenons. And possibly the thwarts too. And putty some driveway cracks and clean out under the house.
Pretty much all of Thursday was taken up with putting in the soffit protectors. Okay let me explain what that means; soffits are vents into the attic from the outside of the house--they look like little grills under the eaves, and they (combined with either a ridgetop vent or vents in the ends of the gables) make sure that air can flow through your attic so moisture doesn't build up in there and cause rot. So you *don't* want your soffits blocked with insulation, and that's where the soffit protectors come in; they are stapled between the rafters and basically turn the rafters and the roof between them into a tube that runs to the soffits. They are a couple of feet long, so when the insulation is blown in, they still stick up over the top of it, providing little tunnels for the air from the soffits.
Our roof isn't very steep, so there isn't much room down by the soffits. There's a reason why I paid good money to have someone *else* do this for me. The whole thing was complicated by the fact that the kitchen and 2 bathroom fans vent into the attic, and I insisted that they be protected with some sort of baffles too--I need my fans to actually vent. At one point we had to establish where the guest bathroom vent came up into the attic, because when I went up to inspect they'd only fenced off two vents. I crawled back to the ladder, down it, marched through the house, dripping the old insulation (cellulose) as I went, and turned on the guest bathroom fan, while the master carpenter hung out in the attic, trying to see where the air came out. He eventually found it way over by the outside wall--it had been hidden by a little fiberglass batt, probably when the first insulating job (a piddly R-19 but standard when the house was built) was done.
Since this new layer of insulation was going to end up well over the level of the joists, I insisted that they prop up a crawl-way on 2 x 8s so that if we ever needed to get to, for example, the dryer hose, we could, without swimming through the insulation. That probably added several hundred dollars to the operation, as they had to put 2 x 8s all the way to the back of the house, blow in the insulation, and then nail 2 foot wide lengths of OSB over them--it's not so much the materials, though that probably was a chunk--but it takes a while to do something like that.
Actually blowing in the insulation (I was in the woodshop, puttering around designing the thwarts for Constance) probably look less than an hour.
And now our house has a very fluffy white blanket in the attic. Which I hope will help reduce our heating and cooling bills for the lifetime of the house.
And Thursday I made cardboard patterns for the back thwart and foot thwart respectively, and drew out the back thwart on the ash I had (several times, actually) and established that no, I absolutely could not fit the foot thwart on it too, and (after the insulation guys were done) went to Jeffries and bought a piece of ash for the foot thwart. Which only cost me $ 2.43--I actually regret losing the driving time more than anything else.
And today I drew out the foot thwart pattern on the new piece of ash, and thought about bandsawing everything out but decided that I really needed to work on the seat because the thwarts would be much quicker than the seat. So I planed the seat some more and got the pieces closer to level and square and the same height as each other, and laid out the mortises and tenons. And right about then I wanted a break (laying out mortises and tenons is harder than it sounds) so I went off and cleaned out some more driveway cracks and sealed them and then Kip came home and I remembered I needed to fix the mower flap back on the mower so I did that.
And then I thought I should clean out under the house because all the junk we had to take out of the attic for the insulators is waiting by the curb for junk removal on Monday and wouldn't it be clever to get the junk out from under the house too? But I'm too tired.
Tomorrow I need to actually *cut* the mortises and tenons. And possibly the thwarts too. And putty some driveway cracks and clean out under the house.
