Life of Riley

Maybe it was the unusual occurrence of two sunny days in a row and a day off, but today it really struck me how I am just living the life of Riley.

I submit as proof:

1. I wanted to do laundry today and the weather was so great for hanging clothes outside they were dry practically before the next load was ready to go up. Love it!

2. The weather being so lovely, I wanted to spend time outside, and what do you know? a bunch of firewood presents itself to be split.

(As an added bonus, the splitter acts up and I have to quit after just one stump/wheelbarrow load!)

3. When I was hungry and on the road, I see my favourite meal of all time is on sale!

4. I go to the (not-quite-) local bead shop to buy a couple of chicken wind chimes. I had to ask the owner to set a price because they were actually shop decorations (not for sale). She told me she'd sell for $3. Three dollars! I double checked she didn't mean $3 per chicken, but no, really, $3 total. Don't tell her but she could have easily charged $20. Well, lucky me--like I said, call me Riley. (I bought both--one for me and one for me mum.)

5. I have time today to work on knitting, crochet, quilting, and blogging!

6. And then tonight when I was running out of steam, and was able to force myself to go with Troy to work on some plastic, I am rewarded with being able to COMPLETE the plastic.
Woo hoo! no more!! None! Nada! All done!

The "Snowbirds" are Back

Antonio and Gertrude are back from their winter locale. Antonio says, "Hi," but Gertrude doesn't have time; she's running off with things to do, things to prepare. The forecast for snow has her worried. Antonio is just concerned about what the snow might do to his pretty feathers, but Gertrude knows if his feet are cold and wet for too long he will catch a cold and she will have to take care of him. (And he's such a baby.)

After we welcomed them back, Troy and I got back to work and finished the overhead plastic tonight. Just the west wall to go!

Keeping your walls dry, a tutorial

Keeping your walls dry on the inside is important for all buildings, including our shop. I noticed from Christina's last post, that there is a slight inaccuracy, which leads to this brief and important tutorial.

Most residential structures are built using wooden framing. A few use steel studs. Neither one like moisture inside the wall cavity and both can be totally ruined due to moisture problems. Here's how to avoid that.

In the old days, they just built houses that were really leaky to air infiltration. In an old farm house on a windy cold winter day, it is entirely possible to replace all the air in the house ten times an hour. These houses are about impossible to heat in any affordable fashion, but they were very resistant to moisture damage. Any moisture that got inside the wall got dried out by the huge volumes of air passing through.

These days, for energy and comfort reasons, most houses are considerably tighter than the drafty old farm house. The good news is that they use far less energy and are more comfortable and far more affordable. The bad news is that if moisture does get inside the wall, it will takes weeks or months to dry out. This can cause the wooden framing to rot in a year or two, or cause scary amounts of mold to grow, which can make a house unlivable and is very expensive to fix. The moisture also usually damages the insulation so it never works right again, raising energy use and cost forever. So, what to do?

In new construction, we use two different sheet plastic products. On the inside (warm side in winter) we install 6 mil (that's 0.006", or six thousands of an inch thick) polyethylene plastic sheeting. It's installed on the studs right before you do the drywall, and right after you do the wiring and plumbing inside the wall. Polyethylene is, for all practical purposes, impermeable to moisture, either liquid water or gaseous water vapor. It is commonly called a vapor barrier for just that reason. It prevents warm moist air from inside your house from migrating out through the nooks and cranies in your wall. If we do not prevent that moist air from getting inside the wall, the warm moist air eventually gets cooled off as it gets closer to the outside cold part of the wall.

When it cools off sufficiently, it suddenly can't hold all that moisture and water will change from a gas or vapor into a liquid. Now we have cold liquid water inside our wall where it can do its damage. A good vapor barrier prevents it from ever getting inside the wall in the first place.

A good installation will have every seam/overlap sealed with caulk and stapled. Every penetration (electrical wires, plumbing) sealed with caulk, or mastic or something. This is where good workmanship really pays off.

But, in this world, hardly anything is perfect. There are always little holes and tears and gaps, and perforations from the staples. So we must assume that small amounts of moisture can still get in the wall. That brings us to Tyvek or house wrap. That's the plastic sheet material on the outside, installed on top of the plywood or osb, just before the siding or bricks go on. House wrap is a peculiar polymer. They have discovered ways of manufacturing it so it has pores. The pores are generally big enough for gaseous water molecules (water vapor) to go right through it. Like heat, water vapor tends to go from areas of high concentration to areas of low concentration. In the winter time, the area of high concentration would be the errant water vapor inside your wall and the area of low concentration would be the great dry cold outdoors.

Tyvek allows any trapped water vapor to escape to the out doors. But the really neat trick is that the pores are generally too small for liquid water drops to penetrate much. So, liquid water can't get it, but water vapor CAN get out. Tyvek also serves as an air intrusion barrier, to prevent cold air from entering the wall, and discouraging warm conditioned air from leaving the house.

So, Polyethylene on the inside (which is what we are doing now, in prep. for drywall) and Tyvek goes on the outside, which we will do right after we get the big garage door installed.

If you have an old house, there is no good way to fix this without tearing into the walls. You can vent moisture pro-actively from the kitchen and the bathrooms. You can buy special "vapor barrier" paint. You can caulk every crack and hole you can find, inside and out. That will all help, but will not be a guarantee. You could also do an air-to-air heat exchanger in either the old remodeled house or the new-construction house. Both help control humidity levels to (help) prevent moisture damage.

I am very happy to have the roof done and hope to never do another in my life. We'll see, I am generally cautious about using the "never" word, as you never know what God will send your way. I'm totally convinced He has a sense of humor.

Finest regards,

troy

Ode to walls

So yes the work on the dining room walls is moving right along while we still wait for things to come together on the concrete for the shop.

On Sunday Troy interupted some perfectly lovely sunbathing (and you know we don't get much here) to have me help him put up the vapour barrier, or more simply known as plastic. This is really the first of the construction work I have done. [I forgot the first rule of helping (or should I say working with) Troy which is to put on grubbies. So I ruined some nice capris.] But for once I was running the caulk gun and staple gun as much as Troy, not just assisting.

We were working with 8x10' sheets of plastic and I had to agree with Troy that it would have been quite unmanageable with just one. So he was quite justified in drafting me. We caulked every edge and seam and just tried to get it up as smooth, straight, and tight as possible. In the meantime I made a lot of jokes and puns on the word, caulk (who could resist?), and I'm sure if I repeated any of them here we would lose our family rating. But I trust you can come up with your own.

We did get the room done. You'll see in the pictures that it was quite colourful as Troy bought siding caulk (which comes in a variety of tints to match "any" colour). Every new tube was a surprise.

The pictures may cause you to think that where caulk is concerned, Troy thinks more is more, and you would be right. On top of that all the edges were stapled. Troy's new "super-duper" electric staple gun pooped out about half way through so we had to resort to the manual gun. (We are building some strong hands in this house!) Troy later exchanged the gun for a cheaper model (when the expensive one doesn't work where else is there to go?) but it didn't work right out of the box. Wow.

Then, even more exciting, Troy got some drywall up on Tuesday. Look at this:

It really looks like a wall, doesn't it!? With a honkin big window. Yup, that would be about right.

I don't know exactly what's coming up next, but I do know we'll have to blow the walls full of insulation some time soon. Troy promises that's even more fun that working the caulking gun. I don't think I should trust him on that....

-christina

Winning the war against cold.

OK, technical update for those interested in remodeling an old house.

As you can see from the photographs posted by my lovely wife, we gutted our dining room. I tore the plaster off, then the lath boards, then removed the (spotty and inadequate) cellulose insulation. So, right down to the bare studs. There is nothing quite as dirty or quite as satisfying as tearing plaster off a wall with a sledgehammer and a crowbar.

I debated for a time about leaving all the old stuff in place, and just building the additional wall to give us 12” thick walls when finished. The old walls would contribute some insulating power, and the new insulation/wall would do most of the work.

The problem is two fold. First, I really want to control air infiltration. On a windy day, the effectiveness of most insulation can drop dramatically if air infiltration is not controlled. This is especially true for fiberglass insulation. The reduction can be as much as 50% and it happens when you need the r-value the most.

With new house construction, this is easy. Just wrap the house in Typar or Tyvek on top of the plywood sheathing (before the siding or bricks), and you’re done. Of course, I don’t have that luxury since I am not tearing the siding off my house. As an alternative, I put the “house wrap” on from the inside. I cut a piece of Tyvek for each stud bay and staple it up. If you examine the photos, you see that the Tyvek makes a “C” shape in cross section, since it’s installed on the left stud, the wall sheathing and the right stud.

Once the cellulose is blown in, this will push the Tyvek tight against the studs and sheathing, and will help seal the house wrap to the framing, reducing air infiltration. Without tearing out all the old plaster, insulation, etc, I could not install the Tyvek in the proper place.

The second half of the problem is the fact that this is an old house. I really want and need to know what’s inside those walls. So far, we haven’t found any bad concealed termite damage except in the basement. That’s the nasty “swiss cheese” wood you see in the other photo, now gone/replaced. But the previous insulation job was absolutely terrible. Either they did it themselves, and badly, or a contractor did it and figured the owner wouldn’t know the difference because you can’t see it. I would estimate that 30-40% of the wall was uninsulated.

So the general idea is to tear the old stuff out right down to the studs. Line the wall with Tyvek, build a second wall to make the total thickness ~12”, install all new wiring and plumbing as needed, then a new vapor barrier, then dry wall. Then we blow a foot of cellulose into the wall, finish the drywall then paint and trim. This technique works well for big older homes with nice big rooms, since you will lose at least eight inches on every outside wall. For a house with smaller rooms, you need other techniques like adding the insulation on the outside, or using super high r-value insulation where you can get away with a 6-8” total depth.

That's it for now, tune in soon for further exciting developments.

troy