How Josh Views Our House. (What? There's more to this renovation thing than pretty??)

Here, my friends, is a guest post by my lovely husband who, before this, has been uncharacteristically silent, although much talked about. Apparently when I'm away instead of getting some work done, he writes things about insulation. I'm not going to lie, some of you might find this boring. But he's really into it, so bear with him. (If it's really horrible you can think of/empathize with me and how often I am forced into to converse about get to hear all about how energy efficient our house now is. But he tries hard, works hard and he has a really pretty face, so I keep him around.) A bit of it might be overlap, but you can hear it from his non-whiny perspective. Oh, and I took the liberty of commenting twice, which you're probably not supposed to do on someone's guest post, but I felt I could be given a little more leniency because he IS my husband and what-not. One of the comments isn't even sarcastic or anything. Enjoy!

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Guest Post!  This is Josh writing to tell you all about the guts and mechanics of our home.  To me, finishes are nice but the exciting part is what is inside the walls, in the attic and all the systems that keep a home running and habitable.

The walls:

Our home was built extremely well by someone or some people in 1957.  It has a solid frame, the backbone of any house, but when it comes to energy use, it fails miserably.  With no vapour barrier and very little (or sometimes no) insulation, our home would have been a great help warming up medicine hat all winter as our warm air leaked out. 

So we decided that we would gut the entire upstairs walls, removing one inch of drywall, cement and plaster, pulling out nasty dusty old insulation and installing mineral wool insulation called Roxul.  This has an R rating (R being the measurement of resistance to heat transfer - the higher the better) of R14.  This was a huge improvement of the R4 that we took out.  We also installed a vapour barrier which stops cold air from leaking in and heat from leaking out. 

Altogether, this was the most labour intensive part of our whole house redo.

The Attic:

The building code of Canada requires vented attics to be insulated to at least R40 but R50 is recommended for our climate in Western Canada.  Our attic had R4, just like in the walls and in one spot, there was nothing at all.  Heat was just flowing into winter air for over 50 years. 

Fixing this was not fun because it included putting attic baffles up for proper venting and putting a vapour barrier over the whole attic which also turned out to be a 100% unfun couple bonding experience for both Ashley and myself.  This was all prep work and we had no clue what we were in store for when we actually blew in the insulation.

Saturday March 31, I went to Home Depot in the morning and rented a blower machine (just an auger with a really loud fan to blow the insulation) and about 60 bags of cellulose insulation (in contrast to the more standard fiberglass.  The price was almost the same but in my opinion, cellulose has some things going for it that I like.  1) it’s made from recycled newspaper.  We could actually read some of the words from some bigger pieces.  2) it settles (which you need to account for) and stops airflow better than fiberglass and 3) it has a higher R value per inch which is what we wanted.

So we blew in this stuff and man did it make a mess.  In the attic with the hose, it was like being in a blizzard for 4 hrs.  Outside on the ground, Ashley was mashing up bags into the auger which wasn’t as messy but still lots of work. (Curtis definitely took over mashing for me. I felt like I could not, in good conscience, leave that unmentioned.)

In the end, when we got our energy audit done, the insulation level was at R70, well beyond code and well on the way to passive house standards (a whole other post).

The Basement:

Our basement was cold, like many basements,  However, we didn’t like that because we wanted to eventually use that space for bedrooms and play areas so cold would not do.  We went from cold conrete walls to R30 walls in one weekend with the help of family and Don and Mike from the church.  We first put up 1 ½’ rigid XPS styrofoam that acted as a quasi vapour barrier and frost wall and then put up 2x6 walls with studs 24” apart with R22 Roxul insulation and then a vapout barrier and drywall. 

Now the basement is warm - which is very nice. 

Thanks for reading this far.  Energy conservation is not everyone’s cup of tea but it is something I like/am very passionate about.  I’ll write more about air sealing and the furnace another time. (Bet you can't wait, right?)

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And now feel free to let me know how much you miss me, love me and want me to commence writing on this blog... like forever.