Tuesday, December 21, 2010

Attic Insulation

This is one of those projects that I'm extremely glad is over. With the cold weather back for the winter I finally decided that I had to do something about the insulation. Our heating bill last year was sky high. I've already noticed some difference since I caulked the entire outside of the house but I knew we could do a lot better.

The attic was a huge mess.


It seems that over the years when the roofers would replace an old cedar shingle roof with a new one they would leave whatever dropped in the attic. There was also a ton of old coal dust. This was the worst. It has the consistency of baby power so it gets all over everything. I was completely black from head to toe for the three days it took to clean the attic out.

I started by using a large metal dust pan to scoop up piles of the debris and dumped it into a trash can. Then I would cart the trash can down stairs and outside and dump it into large contractor trash bags.

Once the large debris was removed I vacuumed up the rest with a shop-vac. When doing this it's imperative to use vacuum bags, otherwise the coal dust just clogs up the filter almost immediately.




 After three days of this hell it was finally done and I was ready for insulation. The insulation only took about an hour and a half.



I think I have close to an R-19 value right now. In a few weeks I'm going to double the amount and go to R-30.

5 comments:

Jessie said...

You'll see a big difference with the attic insulation. We did that a few years ago and it really helped. We're preparing to spend our spring caulking the outside - I wish we'd done it over the summer like you did!

Anonymous said...

That looks like it was a lot of work! When we re-insulated our attic we just put it on top of the old stuff. LOL! But we didn't have have that much of a mess up there. R-38 is good. Which state is Woodbury in exactly? It's not in MN is it? Because I'd recommend more for a MN home.

Deb said...

Well, this picture looks like my attic! We put rolls of insulation over the old rock wool, making sure there weren't gaps between the insulation types. I have an old slate roof, so wind does get through, and it blew the rock wool around a bit. 12" of fiberglass bats on the top helped so much. The house stays much warmer now.

Good luck! I enjoy watching your progress.

lauren said...

wow, only an hour and a half is impressive. kind of makes up for the days of preparing.

Lauren from www.charlesandhudson.com

Mac said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.