Day 3 of Our Summer Week of Reno’s

After a lot of discussion we decided that there were no major problems with the roof and we would fix the small stuff ourselves. Maybe this will backfire on us in the end, but small repairs combined with more vigilant snow removal from the roof are the only thing we can afford at the moment. If more water comes in this winter then at least I am turning in to a pro drywaller.

Off to the local Home Depot we went for supplies including lots new insulation and some spray foam gap blocking stuff.

One of the suggestions we were hearing over and over was to better insulate the attics so we decided to start with the one underneath the problem area. This attic runs along the back eave on the house between the master bedroom/bathroom and the attic of the addition. We got into our head to toe suits, goggles and masks and started shovelling out the old insulation.

Now we had picked a super hot day, over 30 degrees plus humidity and also my lovely husband is claustrophobic, the night before he woke up suddenly in a panic at just the thought of going into the tight dark space. So we spent a fun couple of hours in there emptying out the old insulation. Frequent breaks were needs for air and water. It was brutal in there; you overheated so quickly and were dripping in sweat after 5 minutes. We finished by mid-day and decided to install the next day as the afternoon was even hotter than the morning.

We did find a fun ‘artifact’ buried in the insulation: an unspent 45 bullet. I can only imagine the story behind how that go there…

In the afternoon, my husband busted out the spray foam and the caulking. We discovered that on the south side of the back room there was a gap where the wall met the roof that was a few inches wide. Thinking this was probably an entry point for squirrels, Tom filled it a huge chunk of spray foam. He also got up on the room and added foam to the joint where the two roofs meet.

While he was up on the roof (yet another job that was not great is the heat), I installed the new drywall on the walls and ceiling. Hopefully this is the last time I have to patch a ceiling in this house but I wouldn’t bet on it.

And now we know: this spray foam stuff is great, we bought chicken wire type stuff to plug the hole with, thinking the foam would not be enough, but the foam did a great job and expands a crazy amount