until next fall

I finished bagging up the last old insulation this week and pulled all my tools out for the summer.  I will be adding a storm window on the east side and I have to finish building a wood storm window for the rounded, skinny, cool window on the west side.  (I gotta get a pic of that.)  Besides it gets way too hot up there to work, plus I have a ton of work outside to work on now!  Painting, re-glazing windows, oh and I will be adding the soffit vent for the attic on the south side of the house.  Hopefully today Shawn and I will get all the gabs of insulation out of the attic and in the garage so I can slowly throw them in the trash each week.  Until the fall then!

making some progress

So the other day I started to build and knee wall.  I was about to put the top on it and realized that a number of the studs were on the wrong side of the line.  Anyways I ran out of time and needed to pull it apart and I did that today.  I then put it to place.  After much frustration I think it is pretty much level!  Once this this knee wall is completed I hope to some shelves for storage in front of it.  This is going to be a constant battle due to the fact that the house is not level.  Today I also added some truss cords (a ceiling board between two trusses).  This should put the ceiling, once finished, at just under 8 feet tall.  So the framing is coming along nicely.  I am pretty sure that I do not have enough lumber yet, but I am still scanning for more on Craigs list.

This past Tuesday I started bagging up some of the old insulation that we need to throw out.  I would have done this last weekend when I had the dumpster hear, but it was 80+ degrees out and it would have been 110+ degrees in the attic so I choose to wait.  Its a bummer cause that stuff, when bagged up is heavy and going to hard to get out of the attic.
So I hope to be getting a bunch of this framing completed yet this spring, but it is going to get too warm out to be able to work up there, and I have a BUNCH of stuff to do out side of the house!

the list is getting smaller

So we had a dumpster delivered yesterday and Shawn and I cleaned out all the stuff I had torn out of the attic and the closet where the stairs will be.  It took all of an hour to do this, which was much less time than I thought.  I also have finished all but two baffles on the south side, torn up the floor boards (south side) and brought up a bunch of lumber that was crowding the garage.  Today I hope to get the rest of the lumber to the attic, clean up some of the old insulation and get ready to move the other insulation over to the south side.  I hope to get some more pics and up load them as well.

List of things to do before Spring....

In no particular order:
1.  Finish baffles on south side
2.  Remove old floor boards along the roof/ceiling line
3.  Move all the loose insulation over to the south side
4.  Get a dumpster and clean out all the waste in the attic
5.  Move all the 2x6 and 2x4 lumber that I have gathered over the winter into the attic

Once this list is all done it will be too warm out to work up there and i will be spending my time in the garden!

how it all got started cont'd

 So it came down to getting some venting via the soffit.  There were 1x8 pieces of wood nailed between the rafter joists, and I thought I would just have to cut/knock these out and the baffles would fit right down to the edge.  Little to my surprise the roof joists do not line up with the floor joists.  So first I had to pull a bunch of insulation back from the edge, then I had to build a baffle type space with scraps of wood so that I could attach the purchased baffles to the roof and there would be adequate venting.  This proves to be quite time consuming and difficult since in order to do this I have to lay on my side and work in about 8-10 inches of space. 
 I have been able to do and good chunk of the south side of the roof so far.  My goal is to have the south side vented so that I can move all the loose insulation over to that side.  The reason being is that we need to have the rest of our roof finished this year.  It needs to be tore off and sheeted.  While doing this a lot of crap will be falling into the attic.  I am trying to avoid having to sift through all the insulation and pull out broken up shingles.

  Anyways, now that the baffles are in on the south side I need to pull up a few floor boards that go right up to where the roof meets the floor.  This way I can blow in or add insulation and after it settles there will be no air space. 

So there is lots to do and it is quite time consuming.  I will be dding more pics here as soon as I get up there again with a camera. 

How it all got started....

So about 7 years ago, or right after we bought the house we started to think/plan about what we wanted to do in the attic.  Lucky for us, the person who rehabbed the house in the 80's planned the area where the original stairway was to the attic.  It was not rebuilt, be the stairway can easily be put back in.

 

Anyways, back to when we moved in.  After our first heat bill we knew we needed to add insulation to the attic.  So we cleaned out all the old wood that was stored up there (old door frames from the rehab that I later ripped down and built a wine rack).  We added 70+ bags of cellulose insulation into the floor and our heat bill was much more manageable.
Then came the debate, how should we insulate so that we can finish the attic into livable space?  Cellulose or fiberglass?  Closed cell or open cell?  Baffles or no baffles?  Foil or no foil?  I did massive amounts of research and invited a friend over to consult with.  So I started to tear out the "stuff" out that was up there.  It was a type of hard board that had a ton of nails in it!  On the bright side I did tear out some shelves that was made of tongue and groove bead board.  (I plan to reuse that on the ceiling or the stairway.)

Well gotta go for now, I am almost to the present but had a few more details to add.       

Blog about it.

So I never thought I would start a blog, but the other day my wife and I were talking about documenting the progress of refinishing our attic.  We thought that blogging about it would give me the outlet to get thoughts out, get input from others and it would be a great way to keep a running document about the whole experience.  So hear it goes!