Sunday, February 27, 2011

Insulating, insulating and more insulating.

Piece of ice found on a corner of a bag of insulation!
Enjoying the deep window sill.


Basement cavities filled!

More basement cavities filled!

Loft floor looking good!

How best to insulate behind an electrical panel?

Stair well done!

Blown-in foam failure.
We are getting close to finished on the insulation. I was happy with the good progress made over the past week. It's now mostly the main floor and basement that need the last bits stuffed in and the last interior stud cavities filled!  With some luck, we'll wrap up the last of it this week.

We did have one hiccup. The Dow froth-pac spray foam insulation didn't quite work. We wanted to insulated the small gap created between the I-Joist and the cross framing of the roof deck. It did all of two I-Joist cavities and then one of the canisters jammed up and it was too late before we noticed it wasn't working. So there is a tonne of goop dripping to the ground that didn't work.

I had a great deal of help on Saturday!  Thanks to Eleanor & Leendert for showing up after a morning cross-country ski. Matt, Derek, Deanna, Nadir, and my neighbour David, and Zoie & Doug all came to help too. Not only did we get a good amount of insulating done, they also helped scrape the last of the ice out of the basement, sort the recyclables/usables [metals, wood, etc.] from the waste and cleaned upand organized the mounds of scrap stuff everywhere!  I am very thankful great friends and family who aren't afraid to get a bit messy for us. Cheers!

2 comments:

  1. Hello Serena and Shafraaz.
    You are making great progress. Congratulations.
    I have a few questions if you have time to respond.
    Did you get the roof/window leaks fixed? What was the cause?
    When you were installing the middle layer of Roxul in the double walls, did you run them vertically or horizontally? Did you have any challenges inserting this insulation layer in between the two stud walls, and how did you solve them?
    On postings on Joe Lstiburek's Building Science Corp site and the Cold Climate Housing Research Center's Remote House project, when the walls are thick, the window openings are boxed with plywood, then the windows are installed. How are you planning to finish the window opening detail? How will you seal the vapour barrier from the interior plane to the window frame to ensure a vapour proof interior envelope?
    Thanks, Jim

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hello Jim!

    To answer your questions:
    I believe the roof/window leak is because the tyvek is not sealed to the underside of the roof flashing! It's been ridiculously cold this week- and has snowed even more, so I haven't had our helper get the peel and stick seal on.

    For the middle layer of Roxul was installed horizontally. And yes, there as a bit of a "friction" challenge of stuffing 2 pieces of Roxul in the middle layer. We found that using a bit of plastic helped get the Roxul inbetween the studs.

    And we haven't put in the window bucks [usually plywood] because we haven't tied the vapour poly barrier to the window frame yet. We plan to tuck tape the poly to the perimeter of the window, after it has been spray-foamed. Hopefully that will create a decent seal!

    ReplyDelete