January 9, 2012

Happy Wife= Happy Life

This is a motto that my husband likes to live by. We all joke but it is true in many ways. So when I told my husband last winter that there is a definite draft in our house and we need to insulate, he happily agreed. :) Then life happened and we delayed the project. Now that the weather is getting colder (this has been our mildest winter yet!), we decided to revisit insulation and tackle the project ourselves.

We live in a 1940s style bungalow. There is no basement or attic. Just crawlspaces. We decided to head down there and see what type of insulation they had down there.


Don't worry- since we have no idea what is down there, we took precautions with gloves, a mask and goggles. I also wore long sleeves and work jeans to make sure I was covered.

When we got down there we realized that the insulation was old and falling apart. So everytime our radon system fanned out the air in our crawlspace, it took all the heat with it. Bummer. So whats the next step?

We hit Lowes and got new insulation. We went with R30 16 inch insulation.


Not only was it a little safer for us to use but it is also an Ecotouch product. That means we get to save a little green in our pocket come tax time. So needless to say we were a little excited about that.




We have a 1,000 sq. ft. house so we got enough to cover the lower part. That came out to 30 rolls. I wish I took a picture of it all stacked up in our dog room. It was pretty ridiculous. Here is a shot of the crawl space. It's not the easiest spot to take a picture so sorry for the bad shot.


First the Hubby ripped out the old insulation. We took that right out to the garbage. Then we rolled out the insulation and began measuring each above section and started stuffing. That's about it. Some parts might not stay up on their own so we use wires to hold them up there. It started looking really good.



About 2 days and 6 hours later it was all up and looking great. I swear it feels warmer already. I can walk around without multiple layers of socks. It's great. The next step is putting up the vapor barrier to seal in the insulation and protect it. That is going to take a little longer but I hope to be back in the next couple of weeks with that update.

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