stop gap stuffing the gaps

We've long had issues with the pipes that run up to the third floor freezing if temps dip below zero.  This has confounded us, as the pipes are in an interior wall running through the middle of the house.  On the first floor they run through the curved wooden chase that everyone's so fascinated by in the dining room, and continue through the guest bedroom wall and third floor bath.  When the house was built they connected the in-ground cistern to the attic cistern, which provided water pressure through gravity. 

Now that the beadboard ceiling is down on the old front porch the reason for the problem has become a little less mysterious.  For no particular reason, it appears that whoever built it ripped off the moldings from around the base of the roof and box gutters.  This left an enormous gap all the way around the perimeter of the bay, which opened directly into the floor joists of the second floor, explaining both the floor of ice in the guest bedroom and the frozen pipes.  This whole section was closed off only by the new porch roof above, and the beadboard ceiling butting up to the bay below where the moldings should have been.

Obviously we had hoped to have this demoed and repaired in the fall.  While the demo work could easily get done over the winter, there are a lot of elements that need repair once the porch is gone.  In addition to the new shingles over the little bay, there are also bricks to repair where pockets were created for the joists, repairing the box gutter and downspout and refinishing the doors. 

So in the meantime I crept up the ladder before the current storm hit to try and close up what I could.  When I went out it was 63 degrees, when I came in two hours later it was 40, raining, and windy.  You know what spray foam doesn't like?  The cold.  Also, the wind.  The spray foam I had planned on using wasn't curing, and the draft blowing into the house was so strong it was sucking the foam through.  If I had had more time I would have cut foam insulation sheets down to size, but I was in a rush.  And when in a rush one stuffs fiberglass batts wherever they can and hopes for the best.  It has to be better than nothing right?

where angels fear to tread

It's really not that things haven't been happening around here, it's just that they haven't been happening on MY schedule...  But finally, walls are all up, likely for the first time since the 40's.  That's a lot of decades to not have walls and ceilings (and to see blue sky though), it boggles one's mind really....

But since I'm still stressed out over the plastering, lets talk about what the plastering made possible, namely, attic insulation.  Believe it or not, we bought all our blown in insulation nearly five years ago when we first bought our house to get the 25% discount running at Lowe's and to beat that years tax rebate (an additional 30 percent I think?).  Installing it was not only dependent on ceilings, but also on new electrical, new roof, siding and gutter repair, as well as proper plumbing venting.  All those things have been done for years now, with over a hundred bags of cellulose and fiberglass taking up two full rooms of our third floor.

The space they took up made working on those rooms impossible, and to add insult to injury about 20 bags that were in front of windows exploded from the sun degrading the plastic bags, and a certain cat decided that all that fluff made an excellent litterbox before we discovered the issue.  

Knowing that the plastering would eventually get done I began working on the attic a month ago. Work that had already been completed included removing all the squirrel, raccoon and bird nests, insulating and sealing the third floor knee walls, and running/fixing some wiring.   The plan had been to do all this while it was still cold out, with the plastering delays the attic became my personal hell on earth.  Well over a century of household and Pittsburgh soot, soaring temps, cobwebs, rusty nails and tiny confined spaces made this one of the worst projects yet (second only to deconstructing the schoolhouse).

In the attic, first I stuffed unfaced batts into the stud bays so we didn't lose the blown in down the walls and ceiling slopes.  The knee walls that I had been able to close up were vented with Styrofoam baffles to connect them to the attic - keeping them as cold as possible in winter will hopefully help with ice dams.  The knee walls I didn't have access too (I didn't take down any plaster that could be saved) were kept cut off from the attic to cut down on chimney effect.  For those who are curious, we have an unvented slate roof.  We made no effort to seal the attic off from the exterior, so the whole house fan and small (watertight) gap between the flat widows walk and the rest of the roof provide more ventilation than we really need, but again, a cold roof helps with ice dams...  We also spray foamed all the wiring and plumbing penetrations.  We went ahead and screwed down boards to walk on, they'll be mostly useless since they'll be buried under more than a foot of insulation, but they at least make installing it easier.  Last but not least we built a platform around the attic hatch and surrounded it with an osb wall to hold back the drifts.  This will give us a place to sit on the way to accessing the roof hatch.  And last but not least, blown-in fiberglass (varying between R-38 and R-49)...

Still to do are cutting some additional batts to sit on the platform, and restoring and insulating the original beadboard attic hatch.  Now, if only I could fast forward to fall and winter to see how effective all this is.

back upstairs

As much as finishing the schoolhouse is key this fall, also key is not freezing to death this winter.  Would you believe a pipe going up the center of our house managed to freeze during last year's polar vortex?  We don't need a repeat of that performance.

Now when we bought the house (almost four years ago now), we promptly bought all of our blown-in insulation before the tax credits ended.  Between the gift card offer at Lowes and what we got back on our taxes, we paid less than half price.  Of course, we expected to install it by the following fall, and, of course, we're still not ready to install it this fall, 3 years later.

What we have left to do includes stripping one last room of wallpaper, running electrical for two lights, plastering two rooms, installing baffles in the attic and plywood to hold the insulation back from the attic hatch.  It may seem like a long list, but given how far we've come, it's ceased to terrify me.

We've moved all the insulation and cleaned out the hallway to make room for the work to be done.  Hint - don't store insulation in front of south facing windows for 3 years.  The bags all exploded from the heat.  It was a cataclysmic mess that ended with my mom shoveling it all into contractors bags.  Not the best use of time...  Now I just need to finish stripping wallpaper.

every trash bag is full of insulation

completely filling the tower