Here we go!

It's insulation day! (1 of 3, anyway.)
We discovered fun things about the construction of my house, and what outlets are on the same circits as other outlets. It was exciting!

Working their way around the house.

They have been really good about trying to keep clean.

Hole waiting for insulation.

White paint over burgundy paint over white paint.

Well, there's your problem

See the little louvered vent above the second floor windows, right under the roof peak?
That's a gable vent.

Ian and Windy were over the last two days getting the ventilation set to right in advance of the insulation people coming on Monday. Part of the deal was to make sure that the gable end vents, visually obvious from the ground, were wide enough to ventilate correctly.
I got a text this morning, as I was on my way into work to call about the vents.
"It's blocked" he said, " the one in the old side of the house, away from the driveway. With drywall and insulation."
"Huh?"
"The opening. Is blocked. Also, the "opening" is low."

Ah. To open it completely would expose the gable vent to an area that is currently the master bedroom.

"Send a picture?"

Bonus: abandoned wasp nest.

The solution (of which there are no pictures) was to open as much as could be opened above the ceiling level, to at least get SOME airflow in that end of the house.
And other bonus: They left the clapboards on and just vinyl sided over it, so I know the house was white, and the trim looks burgundy*.

*Edit 10/17 - The more I look at it, it appears that the house was burgundy and then painted over white. I think that's siding, not trim.

What the heck

The neighbors were setting off fireworks after the end of the game last night, so I dealt with the 2 roller shades and the curtain rod at about 10:30.
Something to note! In the kitchen, I'd replaced one roller shade (black out weight) with one from Lowe's. Then last night, I installed a new one over the kitchen sink that I got from Home Depot. At night, there's no difference. When it's light out, the Lowe's brand shade has a blueish tone while the Home Depot shade has a reddish tone. I work in print production. I know vinyl can carry different temperatures. I just didn't expect it in window shades for some reason, but I'm not surprised.
I'm going to see if I can move one of the kitchen shades to the stand-alone window in the upstairs hallway so that at least all the tones in a given room match. The whole house doesn't have to be match-y, but at least all in the same room should. My preference is for the cool tones from Lowes.

This morning I was hit with a wild hair - I wanted to know what was behind the mirror left behind by the Fords, screwed to the wall in the dining room.
I was hoping for something interesting.
A hole to access long-forgotten plumbing or electrical?
A gap to see the framing?
Buried treasure?
I got out my trusty screw gun, (let's not kid, I hadn't actually put it away), and got that sucker off the wall.

Pooh.

Nothing. Nada.
Just 4 little drywall screw holes (now).
Oh well.
I might just put it back up for now. It's an appropriate piece for the house.
But I was pretty disappointed in the lack of... anything.

A long weekend

It's been a couple of days. A lot of typical housework - cleaning the bathroom and vacuuming, etc.
There's been some seasonal work - shoveling the rest of the driveway, filling the bird feeders. Then some monthly upkeep - change the filter on the cat fountain, filter on the fish tank, putting a pack of enzymes down the drain for the septic, checked the furnace filters (it's fine), checked the water filter (it's fine).
I confirmed that the floors are only finished around the edges. (Not uncommon - The same was true of my Grandparent's house.) I found where Ms Mary had been using newspapers to pad under the carpet. Interesting, but nothing older than 2004.

She cut out the carpet pad so the basement door would clear the carpet,
but didn't want the carpet to damage the unfinished floor.

Saturday I decided to make two fakey storms for the kitchen. I sort of got sidetracked by scraping the flaking paint off the mantle, and then (since the flakes fell down the heat register) I disassembled the heat register, vacuumed the heck out of it and scrubbed the metal register housing. Then I remembered I had to deal with a crock of saurkraut that's been needing tending since November.

I eventually got to the storms.

Still not perfect, but functional

This time I found some 1x2" firring strips at Home Depot. They were more robust than the molding I'd been using, and cheaper. The width allowed me to use two screws in each corner, so that negated a lot of the rolling. Only issue is, where the molding was decently square, these firring strips are glorified wooden noodles. Doing this with hand tools, on the dining room floor, with stock that is fighting back, is proving to be a challenge.

I love that little Disston dovetail saw.

The nice thing is, by the 4th window (the second in the kitchen) I sort of worked out a system. It looks like this:

It might be hard to tell, but this shows the top and bottom, then the three uprights, then the two cross pieces next to each other. Setting it out this way made visual sense to me.

Another view - three uprights, the top and bottom, the two cross pieces.

I hammered out two more Sunday morning, so now the kitchen, dining room, and office that I'm using as my bedroom are done. Next up - the 5 windows in the living room. Then there's one window in the bathroom and the first floor will be done. The bedroom is already less drafty.
I've figured out that these cost roughly $12 to make - 3 firring strips at $2 per, 2 rolls of foam weatherstripping at $2 per, and the window plastic which comes in a kit of three for $6, so $2 ea. Then 12 screws and a nail (with the head cut off).
They aren't super pretty, but they seem to help. The bed room is already less drafty.

For some reason, when I embed links, they aren't showing up as live unless you hover, so here's the link to the place that I'm cobbing my design from.
http://www.islandinstitute.org/sites/default/files/Interior%20Storm%20Window%20Directions_0%202.pdf

Island Institute uses two layers of plastic. I'm just using one for now so I can use the supports as handles to get them in and out.

Getting better.

I picked up roller shades for the dining room and kitchen. Tomorrow I'll see about putting them up.

Brrr.

When the Mass Save Energy guy came out, I made a point about asking about the windows because they are kind of crap. Sure, they keep the weather out, but not much more than that. I could tell by the amount of masking tape Ms Mary had gobbed on the frames that there are issues. Energy Guy said that there were loan programs, but not much more - Mass Save doesn't deal with windows, really.

Well, the weather has gotten downright chilly. With the temperatures plunging into the negatives last night, I set about turning the house into a cave, hanging blankets over windows that didn't have roller shade, and even over some that did. In the kitchen, one of the worst offenders is over the kitchen sink. The window well is about 10" deep, so I took a tension rod and put a folded fleece blanket over the opening. It's not air tight at all, as you can see from the line of light coming over the top. In some places it's only one thin layer deep, wehre you see it's lighter.

Very fashionable, thanks to my dear friend Monique.

My indoor/outdoor thermometer lives on that shelf, so I can see the temps when I'm doing the dishes. It's where my parents have theirs, so it's a familiar location. This morning, I pulled back the leopard print to see what it was outside.

34.2* inside, -7* outside.
I didn't bother looking for the night time lows.

Please, tell me again about how double paned windows are better simply by the virtue of being double paned? 
Granted, I keep the house at 60 at night. But that's 34.2* in my house. Right above the sink, with pipes and stuff that you do NOT want freezing. I left the faucet dripping last night, and dripping today while I'm gone.

In other news, the breakdown of mold men looks like:
#1 - $1700 (estimate)
#2 - 3900 (quote)
#3 - no show
#4 - $1700 (estimate)

Gutter guys looks like:
#1 - $975 (quote)
#2 - $930 (estimate)
#3 - comes on 2/11 at 10 am

Now there's a roofer in play. He's going to come out when he can actually see my roof (not just snow) and not damage anything when he goes up there. Including himself. I find this approach exceedingly reasonable.

An Experiment

After the first pass of shoveling part of the driveway (a snow blower is going to be necessary long-term) I returned to the house to try out a project.
The windows in this house are not great. Sure, they are double paned, but that means diddly when you can see daylight through the seams in the vinyl. I do not have money for all new windows at this point, and I haven't had the time to make exterior storms. I hate the window plastic sheeting because the double sided tape either leaves an awful sticky residue on the paint, or rips the paint off entirely.
I found these plans at the Island Institute website. I don't have a table saw to rip down 2x4's, so I wandered the molding section and came up with some small rectangular stock that I hoped would work.

Dining room will have to do for a shop.

I made the first one for the dining room window, since it's the easiest to access. Things I needed for this were: measuring tape, drill, handsaw, hair dryer, narrow wood, screws, wood glue, double sided tape, plastic shrink film, and some weatherstripping.
The small stock was good, because it flexed a little to accommodate these not-square windows. But the problem was it flexed over long spans, just under the pressure of the plastic film, bowing it in from the edges.

You can see the bow at the top of this on in the dining room.

I had enough material to make a larger one for the room I'm using as a bedroom.

The center is offset to allow for the screws. Should have just been a through pin.
I measured half a dozen times, and there's still a gap at the top.

So things I learned -
A) These aren't that hard to make, but I need bigger stock (and a better place to work.) There's only one screw in each joint, and that make it so that everything wanted to spin.
B) These can't be made too tight - they need wiggle room to get in. There's where the foam weatherstripping comes in to take up the gap. (Though not as big a gap as I somehow wound up with on the second one.)

I'm pleased that these could be removed and reused, rather than all that plastic sheeting winding up in a landfill.

Energy Audit Day

Yesterday was Energy Audit Day! It was kind of a bust.

I got some free LED light bulbs, a power strip, and a programmable thermostat for my time.
I was hoping for rebates to help with the very small pretty old fridge and the very old range.
Neither item qualified for anything.
I did qualify for a rebate on updating the furnace that is only a few years old, and the hot water tank that only about a year old, though! It all boiled down to how many kilowatt hours things use. Since small fridge is small; it uses about the same hours as a new normal size fridge, so they won't help me replace it. It's "efficient" because of it's size, not it's age. They don't even care about ranges, apparently. The furnace and hot water tank incentives are to jump to more efficient devices - heat pumps and the like.
Energy Guy Nick tested the furnace for CO2 and carbon monoxide, and it was well in the safety ranges. I did confirm that there is 0 insulation in the walls, and only about 6" of insulation in the roof. MassSave likes to see about 12". The cost to me after they do it was quite tolerable, and something I'm likely to do. They also wanted to see insulation on the rim joists, but with all the sill issues, that's not something I'm going to do.
What Nick did find that needs to be dealt with quite soon is mold in the attic. This didn't turn up on my home inspection, (there was staining, but it wasn't active then). MassSave won't put in insulation until it's cleaned up. This was pretty unexpected. Two quotes are being collected next Wednesday. I have no idea how much something like this is going to cost.

Basement Door

With one side insulated (through I think I'm going to put a sheet of foam board insulation over the top of the silver bubbles) I decided to fix the door. Everything's shifted, so the door was dragging when you opened it. I shimmed it up, filled the holes, redrilled for the hinge, primed, painted and gave it some new hardware, since the bolt that was there was useless.

Door before.

Filled in the holes with little bits of wood and wood glue.

Door after, a lovely "thunderstorm grey".

The door is slightly warped, so in order to seal it so that the draft was minimized, I've put a latch at the top and the bottom. I still need to figure out something to do for the gap at the top, and add some weatherstripping. It opens better and is much cleaner now.

I spent the rest of the day cleaning the foundation, preparing for the eventual re-pointing. The shop-vac has been absolutely key in getting in all the nooks and crannies. There's almost no original mortar left, but I did find this one piece left.

The only piece that I think features tooling.
Since new mortar won't stick to old mortar, it had to be removed.

Not sure if this was original mortar, or just left over plaster from when they were doing the walls upstairs.
The brown fuzzy stuff in the plaster is horsehair.

More Insulation Fun

Another area of the house that I wanted to insulate was the door to the crawl space.

That little funny door, upper center right.

There is no attic in this house. I'm certain there's a crawl space over the front of the house that has no interior access, but this door accesses the crawl space that extends out over the addition. There is the original roof that separates the two spaces, with no passage between, as far as I know, though there might be one to the upper right, behind the kind of scary hole. I have no desire to find out right now.

The kind of scary hole.

Little effort to remove the fiberglass.
I just stuffed it in the hole.

What we see here is a combination of some sort of loose insulation and fiberglass. That diagonal line inside the crawl space are two cut boards. I'm not sure if they are part of the original roof, or were put there as part of the addition construction. That angle, seen in the frame and those boards, follow the original roof pitch. The fiberglass was being held to the door with a few staples. The door was repurposed from elsewhere. The cross boards are nicely beveled except on the closing edge of - you can see a cut mark extending vertically where the person trimming went a little deep.

Cut marks line up with the flat edge. Bevel seen on top and bottom edge.
Also, no paint where the board used to be, but hard to see here.

Determining the prior life of the door was not my goal (Though I'm thinking it was part of one of the doors removed when the master bedroom was made by removing a wall between two smaller rooms.) Getting the scary hole from sucking the heat out of the house was my priority. Space age bubble blanket and foam board insulation to the rescue!
I stapled on a double layer of shiny bubble in the center to take up space, and then screwed a sheet of foam on over it and trimmed the foam to shape. I forgot to take a picture of the bubble step, but here's the finished result.

Slightly less scary now. Much more insulated.

Pole Switches and a Space Age Basement

The neat thing about this house is that I can do projects when the time presents it's self or the whim strikes. Last night I wandered around putting foam insulation gaskets behind light switches. I took the plate off the pole switch upstairs, took a picture, and will add it to the list of things Electrician Wayne can address the next time I feel like bankrolling his electrical Honey-Do list.*

I think this should probably be updated.

The nice thing is that you can get modern reproduction pole switches that look the same, but are probably a heck of a lot safer.
"Why have Wayne do it?" you ask. "It's just a switch, and that's easy enough to swap out." It's true. And if this was a regular old light switch, I might be tempted to watch half a dozen YouTube videos, read a book about it, throw the breaker and give it a go. I still might do that for a switch in the kitchen. But in this case, I have no idea what the condition of the wires are behind it. If things start crumbling to dust, or something is super wrong once I get in there... well, I'd have to call Wayne anyway, and he's a busy guy.
I've put the plate back over it and walked away for now.

I insulated the basement door too. I'd picked up a roll of this fun silver bubble wrap and just stapled it to the back of the door that goes up to the bulkhead. I may still pick up a piece of board insulation and screw it on over the back, but for now? Shiny.

The staple gun was a good investment 10 years ago.

I'm not holding my breath for epic energy savings from this blanket and the little foam gaskets, but every little bit helps. The oil tank is at around 5/8ths, but I'm still doing anything I can to slow it's roll. I signed up for automatic fill from the folks that have been servicing the system for the previous owner.
Speaking of furnace systems and chimneys, I've discovered the ash out door is only held on with tape, and there's some concerning cracks that ought to be dealt with. Onward, to masonry! (Eventually)

Hrmm. No bueno.

The more I putter in circles, the more things I notice. Which is fine, it all just gets added to the list.





*Addition - Fun thing I figured out while insulating outlets is that "Bedroom 1" (the funny little room that's hiding behind the stair landing) has no electrical outlets. It won't even function as an office right now. That has to be changed, or it really is just a glorified closet.