Wrapping up Insulation

The temperature chart in the root cellar

My insulating get-up. Note fangs

Insulating the walls and ceiling of the root cellar

The rim joist area before blowing the cellulose in the hole

Insulating was a lot of work and we finished it up on Thursday. This included insulating the root cellar roof and walls so that the earth temperature is the predominant heating/cooling force in the space. I tracked the temperature in the root cellar over the course of the spring and stopped early in July when it seemed to have leveled off around the high 50's/low 60's. I'll be very interested to watch what happens to the temperature now that the surface earth temperature is mitigated and the deeper-down earth temperature remains unhindered in its exposure.

After a couple of different tries I finally settled on wearing a dust mask, swimming goggles and a cycling cap to ward off the worst of the cellulose insulation blow-back in my face. Just as the cavity being filled nears capacity, there is often a powerful backwards shot of insulation that shoots right back towards the person doing the insulation. Its only manageable if you are well protected.

The last bit of house insulation was doing the spaces around the rim joist under the first floor--basically the band of area that is the first floor/attic ceiling around the perimeter of the house.

At this point the house is finally insulated, but we are going to do a just a little more cellulose blowing-in in a couple of spots, namely the walls of the bathrooms and a few inches under the second floor. This will be done for sound attenuation purposes. We want to minimize the sound transfer between the first and second floor and the bathrooms. Its not too much work and we decided that we'd just do it even though its a little more effort.

Way deep in insulation

Me, in a state of dusty exhausted misery

Nance getting in on the action gluing the Insulweb on the first floor

Apparently the newspaper is pulverized before becoming cellulose to the point that you aren't supposed to find individual letters, but Joe found this plus a couple of other semi-discernible bits of type. I love that our house is going to be kept warm by newspapers

Before we started blowing-in on the first floor

We've been working really hard on the insulation process. At first it seemed easy, just blowing in tons of cellulose and filling up all the wall and roof space, but then it got much harder when I went back to do the second pass where we bring the cellulose up to the optimal 3.5 lbs. per cubic foot density. This requires reaming the 2" aluminum supply tube into the same nebulous mass again and again and again until you feel like you can't do it any more and then doing it a little more on the chance you missed something.

This is all done at really awkward angles either above your head or at your feet up in the rafters with dust everywhere, an inadequate dust mask over your mouth and a plastic face shield on to keep cellulose from blasting into your eyes when you pull the insertion tube out of the ceiling for the millionth time. Blech! I'm not really for complaining, but this was one job where I just felt like it was an act of will to keep going and do it as well as I could.

The second floor is basically complete, and that was the worst of it. We are in the middle of insulating the first floor and there is much less volume to fill, so its going much quicker, plus its easy to do this work when you just need to stand next to a wall--unlike the complicated mess upstairs! We'll have the first pass on the first floor done tomorrow.

Insulweb instal

I had to go to an office supply store to find gallon quantities of Elmer's Glue, our current means of attaching the Insulweb to the framing

Putting up the Insulweb fabric

The second floor almost complete

We are continuing to put up the Insulweb retaining fabric and its going just fine. The second floor is the more complex part of the house to do and we have just a little more work to do there tomorrow morning and then we'll start actually blowing in the cellulose insulation. For those who may be unfamiliar with cellulose, it pulverized newsprint that has been treated with a borate for fire retardancy, mold and pest control and just small amount of mineral oil to help keep dust down.

Goodbye framing

Before starting the fabric installation

The Insulweb fabric stapled in place

Applying the glue

Ready for insulation

We are beginning the insulating process.

On Friday I put up the first large areas of Insulweb, which is a retaining fabric that will be attached everywhere that we'll be insulating--along the exterior walls and second floor ceilings.

The key is to get the fabric quite taught, so I stapled it up neatly at each corner and then carefully worked it along the whole perimeter. Once the fabric is hung, I come back with a roller and an adhesive glue that I then roll along all the framing members under the fabric. This fixes the fabric wherever it comes in contact with the wood. As soon as we've got the fabric up throughout the whole house, we'll start blowing the cellulose insulation into all the wall and roof areas through small slits in the fabric.

Its such a relief to finally be moving onto this work after a long haul leading up to this point. I expect this work to go relatively quickly and then we'll be on to sheetrocking.

A few last pieces in place

Baffling at the top of the first floor wall

Nancy working in the basement to avoid the heat in the yurt

Bill doing the blower door test

The insulation unloaded outside the house

Working in temps up around 100 the last couple of days we are finally ready to begin the insulation. The insulation is all here and loaded into the house; we did the blower door test and were able to get a benchmark for air infiltration into the house; the last couple of in-wall details are complete and we really are ready to start putting up the retaining fabric tomorrow. I'm really excited to finally be getting off the ground with this phase of the work.

We're ready

The insulation in our local supplier's warehouse pending delivery tomorrow

Cleaned up

We cleared everything out in order to store the insulation shown in the top photo inside the house once its delivered

Joe finished off the last of the baffles in the roof over the 2nd floor guest room

After what seems like such a long time we are finally ready to insulate.

On Tuesday morning, Bill Hulstrunk is going to come and perform a blower door test on the house to check for air leaks. From what I've read, air leakage can cause anywhere from 30 percent to 50 percent of the heat loss in some homes.

The blower door test is a proceedure where you negativly pressurize the house and measures the rate of airflow required to maintain the building at a certain pressure. We'll be able to quantify the area of leakage. Vent ducts and other intentional openings are all closed so the house is otherwise sealed.

Typically a blower door test is done after insulating has occurred, but I want to know what leaks are present before we insulate while we can still get at them. Whatever the result, the cellulose insulation will be working for us as an air barrier in the walls, so its a sure thing that our numbers will go up. I would expect most leakage would be around the windows and doors, so we'll be checking for that.

Joe finished up the baffles in the long roof rafter bays and I spent the better part of Friday sealing every imaginable air passage around the windows and doors. I've been half-joking with folks that I'll pay $10 bucks to anyone who can find a hole anywhere in the house.

The first batch of insulation will delivered tomorrow.

Pre-insulation and other news

Stops in the rafter bays. These are meant to create smaller compartments into which we'll be blowing in the cellulose. The smaller spaces help to avoid settling in a really long uninterrupted bay

Joe installing the fabric stops

Expanding foam installed between the window frame and the framing

Checking to see what sun is available when. The solar hot water panel will be placed at the upper right hand corner of the roof on the right. The key hours for solar activity are between 10:00 and 2:00. We'll be in good shape with this location

Like the first few raindrops before a shower, there is tangible evidence of our being very close to insulating. I've been spending time installing insulating foam around the windows, Joe has been installing fabric stops in the roof framing cavities, I have the cellulose blower on site, and our supplier is due to deliver 450 bales of cellulose on Thursday. Yes, 450.

We are busily checking off the last few items that need to be taken care of before we start sheathing the walls with Insulweb fabric, which is the first step in the insulating process. Its felt like we've been so close to ready for a while but there are seemingly always a few more things needing to be cleared up.

In other news, we have done some research and have now worked out the arrangements such that we'll be able to install a hot-water solar panel on the roof. This will supply hot water to our boiler so that it does not need to heat the otherwise cold water all the way from cold up to hot. With the collector in place there may be times when the boiler does not need to heat the water at all.

We are really excited about this development, thinking it would be something we'd plan for in the future but couldn't do now. Knowing we wanted to do it eventually, I installed the necessary copper lines so we wouldn't have to open up the walls later on. As I was doing this work it seemed like maybe we should just see what it would take to do it now, knowing it would save some headaches later on. One thing led to another and with the Federal credit it looks like its going to work out.

Water!

Today was a milestone.

Thanks to the work of our plumbing contractors, the boiler was installed, providing us with both heat (in the form of radiant heat under the floors) and hot and cold water. We've been waiting a long time for this and it was a moment of joy to witness the cascade of water pouring out of our garden hose hook-up on the side of the house. We now have the potential to hook up any old fixture we want and will be thinking about how we may do that, and when.

Meanwhile, Joe has begun work on the exterior window trim project. He's set up a work station and begun cutting the pieces. It'll be really satisfying to see the outside start to transform from green Zip-system to finish trim and clapboard.

I've been busy wrapping up the seemingly endless details before we begin insulating. I expect we'll get going on it next week.

All in all a good week of progress.

Glass of water anyone? Here, let me get you one.

A hole in the wall

There have been very few genuine screw-ups thus far in the house building process.

One exception was communication around routing the electrical and phone lines into the house. In short, when we went to put the permanent electrical conduit line into the house the porch was in the way. This really hasn't turned out to be that big a deal, but it did require me to drill a new hole through the foundation through which to route the electrical and phone lines.

I thought it would be fun to show the process of making the hole and closing it back up.

The corner of the basement wall where the lines need to come through

Cutting the insulation away to reveal the plastic vapor barrier which I cut so as to be
able to re-attach new plastic at the end

Drilling multiple holes to make one big hole. Daylight is showing through on the left

The hole complete. Not yet drilled is a second, smaller hole for the phone line
conduit to come through to the left of this hole

The electrical conduit coming through the wall

The view from the outside. Electrical on left, telephone on right

Same view after patching concrete with hydraulic cement and then coating the whole area with foundation tar

The view from inside

Re-installed vapor barrier

Re-installed insulation. That wire there is our phone line and that's what connects us
to the internet, so this blog is going through that line

Raidant tubing

Joe wrestling long red snakes!

The radiant tubing stapled up to the underside of the first floor

The special stapler used to attach the radiant tubing. You have to contract the handle three times to insert one staple --which might seem cumbersome-- but it goes quickly

The power company dropping off our new telephone pole

Joe came back yesterday morning after a break of about 2 1/2 months. Its good to have him back.

He and I tackled installing the remaining insulation in the basement yesterday and today set to work on installing the radiant tubing underneath the first floor. With any new project I always feel a little apprehension about getting up to speed and working out the inevitable questions or unknowns that arise. Starting on this project was no different, but after a little time to get going we worked out the routine and it went quite smoothly.

Tomorrow we'll finish up the radiant and if we have time switch out a two windows. One is a bigger window, the other is one that needs to be lowered. Its supposed to be a really nice day.

Oh yes, the power company came and dropped off a new telephone pole. They were going to install it, but the ground was so wet from the recent rain that the decided to come back early next week to actually put it up. So for the next few days we have a telephone pole in our driveway.

Plumbing continues

How to get a pipe in the house. Note the second hole to the left of the pipe

The pipe in place on the inside, one each through the two holes on the outside

The rigid insulation in the basement. You'd be surprised how many times I've whacked my head harder then I'd like on that white plastic pipe coming out of the wall.

I've been plugging away at the drain and vent lines.

What surprised me was that in order to get certain lines into place in the floor joists, you have to continue your line of holes right out through the side of the house. What do you do if you've built a house out of concrete?

I've been enjoying the plumbing work; you basically have a pile of fittings and you dry-fit them together with lengths of PVC pipe and when everything is good and they are pitched the way you want them, you glue them all together with nasty smelling solvent glue.

I've also been continuing with the insulation of the basement in advance of our HRV unit being installed. (HRV stands for Heat Recovery Ventilation and is the mechanism that will supply us fresh air, since the house will be highly air-tight and super-insulated. Without this system there'd be no opportunity for fresh air to enter the house, or stale damp air to exit. More on this later.)

Anyway, the HRV unit will be installed soon in the back corner of the basement and I want to have the insulation in place so I'm not trying to fit it behind the unit after the fact. Putting up the insulation requires hanging sheet plastic from the sill , taping the overlap seams of plastic (the red tape in the photo), then cutting the boards of insulation to fit over the pink board coming up from under the slab. I then drill a pilot hole through a piece of strapping and the insulation into the concrete and finally screw a concrete screw to hold it in place.

Installing boxes

Today involved installing electrical boxes where I'd located the marks throughout the house. These are the housing for the outlets, switches and lights that will eventually inhabit them.

The boxes that are mounted on an exterior wall come with a rubber flange that helps to seal the connection between the electrical box and the sheetrock that will eventually be installed around it. This is an infamous point of entry for air infiltration and I think I might still try to get a little caulking in around this connection if it doesn't seem like its going to snug up.

The blue boxes are located within the house, so do not require the rubber flange.

Whats becoming apparent is that we need to make decisions about things that we haven't dealt with yet, such as what fixture do we want to have in the bathroom over the mirror? There's a million details like this and its a little overwhelming. Any eager interior designers out there?

Slightly off topic: I figured out today that by placing my stainless steel coffee cup on the woodstove I could reheat or keep my coffee warm. Also had a brief and friendly visit from two women who wanted to introduce me to the lord. I let them know that I'd already made his acquaintance in my own way and so no introduction was needed.