Fill 'er Up

With the roof taken care of it was time to cross off the last Eco project

Yup, it was time to tackle the attic insulation.  Initially H and I had geared ourselves up to do it ourselves.  With the untimely demise of our roof, we were trying to be very $ conscious and were willing to sacrifice our time and energy to save a few bucks.  While we were doing the basement insulation we decided to do all of the house's fiberglass  insulation jobs at once so we cleaned out all of the wet insulation (due to the leaky roof), drilled soffit vents, and added the Styrofoam ventilation chutes to the attic, and re-located all of the good "modern' insulation into the area above our cathedral ceiling as we figured due to the slope in that area that batts were better than loose fill.



That's my biggest brother G helping drill the soffits

So, the next step was the blow in insulation in the flat area of our roof, so we scouted out all our supply options and figured out where was the cheapest source.  Then... at the 11th hour, I was poking around online and on some forum read that due to their buying power, getting in the pro's can be not much more expensive.  So, with that glimmer of hope that I may not have to kill my knees and itch all over from crawling around in the attic, we decided to put our insulation purchase on hold while I just checked to see what it would cost to have someone come in and do it for us.  A few home visits and a little negotiation later, we had a quote to have our house professionally insulated for less than if we were to do it ourselves!!  Yup, you read that right less $ and no work, for two rookie DIY-ers in the middle of our first big reno it was like music to our weary ears!!   

So, we booked our appointment, and in less than 2 hrs, while I lounged on the sofa got in their way taking pics and being nosy, they were in and out, easy peasy!  

With two guys and a nice long tube (eeerrm... that came out wrong!), they were able to get into all of the nooks and crannies.  See how terrible our old insulation was?!  All the pros we had quote told us to take out any wet (leaky roof induced) and gross (hello petrified pigeons we found in the attic I'm talking about you!) areas out but leave everything else.

That's our chimney poking out of the fluff and our cathedral area beyond

 They filled the flat and cathedral area with over R50... a big improvement from our original R4 (boo!).  And more than required by the BC and Canadian governments for our Eco Credits.

They even batt-ened down the hatch (bada-bing!) for us to make sure that there were no weak areas in our insulation for air to travel.

In addition to doing what would have taken H and I plus a few willing guilt tripped family members a whole day to figure out, they also made sure our ventilation was correctly installed (we got a gold star from the installers for our handiwork, booyah!), and left the place immaculate, not an insulation fluff to be found!

And temperature-wise it's made such.a.difference.  Post insulation we noticed that the heating came on much less (in the winter -and even into March when this was done- our forced air heating was running pretty much the entire evening).  And... last summer our living room was like a furnace with all the south facing windows.  Now, well it's still sunny and warm, but I no longer break a sweat coming into the house after work and need to fling all the doors and windows open.  Score!

Note: Again no perks were offered by Knights, they know nothing about this post.... I'm just a dorky blogger with a camera who likes to document these things for posterity and the next time I need to remember who we used.