New Year

Yes, things are happening in the house after a nice holiday break.

The roofers completed the last of their work a few days after Christmas on a breezy morning when the temperature was, if I remember correctly, around 10. It looks great and we are glad to have that part of the project wrapped up.

After some satisfying time off, both Joe and I got back to work on Monday building the secondary interior walls. The result is to make our current 5 1/2" deep walls effectively in to 12" deep walls. This requires making walls that parallel the existing walls and are attached at the top, bottom, and at various points between. Hopefully the photos show this better then I can describe it.

The point of this work is that when we insulate the house with the blown-in cellulose, there will be a full 12" of insulation thickness. It used to be that 3 1/2" was considered acceptable and nowadays 5 1/2" is considered good.

In our situation, the two walls have minimal connection, so there is very little thermal bridging from the outside to the inside. In conventional walls the studs create direct thermal bridges from the outside to the inside--the cold passes through the exterior sheathing to the wooden stud and then to the sheetrock on the inside. Our wall system puts cellulose insulation between the outside wall and the interior sheetrock. Breaking that connection is the major advantage of this method while allowing lots of space for insulative fill.

I think we'll wrap up the first floor tomorrow and move upstairs on Friday.