Insulation

Progress continues quickly as we finished up all the prep work for insulation and they came out last Wednesday to start the job (they are finishing up today with a few small touch ups and cleanup).  We are seeing a huge improvement in heat retention even with the heat turned off this weekend (we turned it off so we don’t get any of the insulation spray fumes in the air handlers/filters).  We used the fireplace this weekend and today it was still 50+ degrees on both floors!  Once we start running the heat again it will barely have to run!

A few pictures I took last week…

My sewing room

All 2×4 walls have 1.5″ of closed cell, then open cell to fill.  The 2×6 (new) walls in dormers are just open cell.  The attic and basement rim joist were also all sprayed.  The only part of our house without spray foam is now the addition section (over the slab) which is the livingroom, washer/dryer room and the un-insulated garage.

Downstairs bath
Front entry
Playroom
Kitchen

Ryan and his dad worked on the house this weekend.  They got the ceiling between the old ceiling and new dormer section firred out, ready for sheet rock :

Ready for sheetrock

They also got all the rest of the frieze board/trim installed on the dormers as well as the front of the soffit corners covered with white aluminum!

Dormers ready for siding

The hope was to do siding last weekend but the siding that arrived was the wrong kind so we are now waiting 2 weeks for a special order siding.  In the mean time we are getting ready for drywall upstairs – our plumber has started running the lines for the bathrooms and Ryan is finishing up the last bit of framing.  I have a tiny bit of electrical (hooking some lines up to the panel box) and we should be ready to go.  I think if we were doing the drywall ourselves we’d just be going on it already – our hold up is that we hoped to hire someone because the taping/spackling would go so much faster if it wasn’t us doing it.  We’re not hearing back from the one person we found that could do it so we may just have to do it ourselves and hope we can do it quickly enough.

 

Fireplace Insert

This past weekend we had some great weather (what month is this again?!!).  Ryan and his dad got the new chimney liner installed and finished the top of the chimney!  Next up was installing the insert itself which took basically all day Sunday!  It was quite the project.

Chimney finished!
Insert installed!

Other than that project we did get a few other things done – Ryan has gotten the wall to the master closet all framed and the ceiling to the closet. I just didn’t get pictures when it was light out.  We started installing the cover on the boat (we have to install all the snaps all the way around!).

We’ve got to do a few small fires in the fireplace before we can fully utilize it but we need to get some seasoned wood first 🙂  Our new heating system is making great progress too!  The upstairs vents and returns are all in place, pipes are run.  We ordered thermostats and got the wire we needed for wiring the outside unit.  We *may* have heat upstairs before Christmas!

Heat and Windows

This weekend Ryan and his cousin got the new heat pump installed on the outside of the house.  Ryan’s cousin is making great progress on the duct work in the attic as well and once we get the coolant lines run to the two units (attic and basement) we’ll get some heat going in the house!  We are very excited to see how well this will heat the house – of course we need to get the new dormers and attic insulated for efficiency but we aren’t living there this winter so just need it warm enough to work on weekends for now!

Heat pump!!!

Ryan and his dad got the last 3 windows installed downstairs on Sunday!  Technically we have 2 more windows but we have to order them and we have to do the sliding doors so we’ll probably wait and do all of those next spring.  The upstairs were the important ones to get done!  Really great progress all around.  I haven’t been to look at the progress but Ryan also worked on the wall in the master bedroom that will go across the dormer to make our closet!

New windows!!!

I really love the style window we put in with the divided lites on top.  The quality of the windows are also very good – we are quite happy with them!  I’m excited for more progress this weekend!  Time to get some electrical done upstairs so we can get to insulation after that and then start closing things up!