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A sea of wonderful pink stuff

0
4 weeks ago
by uncommonguy in ,

I've been work­ing really hard get­ting ready to insu­late our attic. The insu­la­tion was min­i­mal, barely up to the top of the joists in most cases, so 6–8 inches in most places. This was awful. Last year we had Home Depot come out and give an esti­mate for insu­la­tion work and they big $2000 which was a let-down as we didn't have the cash at that time.

We finally had the extra money to try again this year so got an esti­mate from a com­pany my father-in-law rec­om­mended, Williams Insu­la­tion. Esti­mate: $425. Yeah, 25% the amount of Home Depot's con­trac­tor. The esti­ma­tor also did a walk-through energy audit and sug­gested some really use­ful things.

The esti­ma­tor actu­ally found a whole sec­tion of attic we had never known about. He real­ized there was a gap along two whole sides of the house and sug­gested we cut a hatch to check it out. He turned out to be right — we found a space 40'x5' with even less insu­la­tion than the other main attic area. This was along the whole front and kitchen sides of the house.

I reported my find­ings and he came back for a free re-estimate. Amaz­ingly, this added only $100 to the esti­mate, bring­ing it to $525. Frankly, we would have paid twice that and been happy about it. Five hun­dred bucks is a no-brainer!

The main prep work was to imple­ment his main sug­ges­tion. He told us to tape up all gaps in the metal cas­ings of can lights and ven­ti­la­tion fans, and encase them in sty­ro­foam to fully air-seal them. He sug­gested the $2 sty­ro­foam cool­ers from Wal-mart, which turned out to be the per­fect shape and size for most of them. We had one larger fix­ture — the heat lamp in our shower — on which I used a larger, bet­ter cooler meant for ship­ping frozen goods.

I spent many hours up there the past few weeks, but par­tic­u­larly the past week­end. I spent half of Sat­ur­day and almost all of Sun­day skit­ter­ing around in the tini­est cor­ners seal­ing every­thing. It had to be done care­fully and cor­rectly to make it per­ma­nent, at least until the fix­ture itself fails. I wanted to never have to crawl through all the new insu­la­tion to reach and work on this stuff.

Over­all I sealed up 4 can lights above the kitchen, the rest being below the floor of the lit­tle play­room. In the main attic I replaced the non-working bath­room fan with a new one and sealed it up, and sealed up the other one that I replaced last year. I also ran duct­ing from the fans to exhaust out­lets in the roof. There was one reg­u­lar can light to enclose, then one huge heat lamp to enclose. All of those took a lot of work because of the cramped space. Much of it I had to work one-handed, hold­ing myself on a joist with the other hand. It was brutal.

Mon­day night I worked from 9pm to 3am fin­ish­ing up the var­i­ous bits, includ­ing seal­ing up the huge hall­way fan. It was quite a trial after a full day of work, boy scouts, and hang­ing out with Asa (my Lit­tle from BBBS). I was a mess of insu­la­tion, sweat, Great Stuff expand­ing foam, and grime.

The big pay­off was Tues­day morn­ing when the insu­la­tors came. In just an hour they crawled to all the dark cor­ners of the attic and blew in insu­la­tion to the 20" mark. This gives an insu­la­tion of R-60, which is higher than even the lat­est stan­dards for this part of the coun­try. The work was fast, effi­cient, and looks great — a uni­form sea of pink energy and money-saving fluff.

We've noticed our fur­nace run­ning much less and the house feels warmer, par­tic­u­larly the upstairs office. We are super happy about the project. In fact, it's kind of embar­rass­ing how excit­ing the insu­la­tion is to us. The insu­la­tion plus the work involved in prep­ping for it was really reward­ing and feels like the best improve­ment we've done to the house since we replaced the doors. And the energy-saving aspect makes us feel gen­er­ally good about our­selves and our house.

Home Improvement Todo

1 year ago
by uncommonguy in ,

Here is the cur­rent todo list Rachel just sent me. Later I should post the list of what we got done over Thanks­giv­ing. We had an insane 3 days of home improve­ment work. Really, this is just fin­ish­ing com­pared to the bulk work.

Clean drain in mas­ter shower
Caulk front lights
Move swing from front lawn
Cut down clama­tis
Clear brush from flowerbed (I will do this)
Cut down pep­per plants that haven't died yet (me)
Put up bird feeder
Stain handrail
Install handrails
Install pantry door
Find new blinds for slid­ing door (me?)
Install doors
Paint around trim of doors (me)
Take exacto knife to door to garage (I can try this)
Repair light fix­ture in entry hall, both repaint and rewire
Swap out other light fix­tures
Lower light fix­ture above din­ing room table
I will touch up the paint in the liv­ing room and din­ing room
Hook up speaker wires in liv­ing room

Update list (March 22):
Clean drain in mas­ter shower
Caulk front lights
Move swing from front lawn
Cut down clama­tis
Clear brush from flowerbed (I will do this)
Cut down pep­per plants that haven't died yet (me)
Put up bird feeder
Stain handrail
Install handrails
Install pantry door
Find new blinds for slid­ing door (me?)
Install doors
Paint around trim of doors (me)
Take exacto knife to door to garage (I can try this)
Repair light fix­ture in entry hall, both repaint and rewire
Swap out other light fix­tures
Lower light fix­ture above din­ing room table
I will touch up the paint in the liv­ing room and din­ing room
Hook up speaker wires in liv­ing room

Otters are not funny

4 years ago
by uncommonguy in

I own two stuffed ani­mals. One is a cow­boy teddy bear my par­ents bought me dur­ing my brief stage career in high school, when I appeared in Crazy For You as a cho­rus cow­boy. I also appeared in Inherit The Wind as Bert Cates. I received no stuffed ani­mal for that one because no stuffed ani­mal really makes peo­ple think 'evo­lu­tion' and a stuffed appen­dix would be gross. Or per­haps my per­for­mance didn't rate it.

The teddy bear (no pic­ture at the moment) is wait­ing for a place of honor in the house. I never have got­ten round to putting up shelves in any place I ever lived, but if I change and finally put some up, he will def­i­nitely be in the liv­ing room to inspire oohs and awws from the girls and pro­vide an open­ing to dis­cuss my super­nova of a career in high school drama.

I also have a stuffed otter. The otter is from an excel­lent week­end jaunt down to Wichita where I hung out with my friend Katie. I went to a cof­fee shop and the zoo. The zoo trip was to see my favorite ani­mals, otters, and my sec­ond favorite, pen­guins. These were the lit­tle travel-size pen­guins and I hoped to buy a bag of them at the sou­venir shop. Like gup­pies at the pet store. They didn't have any so I bought the stuffed otter. He is about two feet tall, bal­anc­ing upright on his hind legs and tail. He is adorably cute and soft. I named him Oscar and he watches over my things and guests in the liv­ing room. My guests haven't stolen any­thing, so he is obvi­ously doing a fine job.

Another rea­son for the otter is atten­tion. When peo­ple enter my house for the first time they ask why I have a large otter look­ing down from the fire­place. It seems like a per­fect joke setup with the guest as the unwit­ting straight man, but it falls down because there is noth­ing funny to say about otters. I know one otter joke:

"What ani­mal would you like to be on a cold day?"
"Otter!"

That's it. Otters are funny to watch and they're great at adorable and cute, but they are not funny to talk about. At least not like pen­guins. Pen­guins are com­edy gold. But until I can buy pen­guins at the Wichita Zoo I have to work with the otter. Except I don't have any­thing clever to say yet when peo­ple ask about Oscar. The best I've done so far is "he fol­lowed me home from the zoo" or "meet my hir­sute midget uncle! No jokes, though, he otterly lacks a sense of humor!" So noth­ing clever.

I cover by describ­ing my plans of fit­ting him with a motor­ized roller­skate so he can wan­der about the house. Then there is ten sec­onds of awk­ward silence. Then I say "and let me show you the upstairs" and move on. Otters just aren't funny.

curtains, money, and accidental tax fraud!

5 years ago
by uncommonguy in

Tonight was curtain-hanging night. It's my first time approach­ing this (as with nearly every­thing as a new pseudo-homeowner), and it is going fairly well. I couldn't find much infor­ma­tion on how high off the ground the cur­tains should hang, how far to the sides they extend, or any­thing else. So I'm wing­ing it using my own best judge­ment. Any girl read­ing this may be think­ing that a man using his own best judge­ment about cur­tains is going to screw up badly. This might be true. But I have pretty good aes­thetic instincts and a fair help­ing of com­mon sense. I think it will work out. Now let's dis­cuss how I've used an exacto knife to cut away some of the dry­wall, drilled holes with a nail and screw­driver, and am right now charg­ing up a brand new cord­less drill!

A pre­vi­ous occu­pant patched the wall exactly where the brack­ets go. He used an enor­mous amount of patch­ing com­pound and cre­ated a 1" thick con­vex bulge over the spot. It was a tumor on the wall, painted over. Even­tu­ally I'll shave the mon­strous thing off and make it smooth, but for now I cut a rec­tan­gle down into it until I had a smooth flat area where the wall nor­mally would be.

Then it was a mat­ter of putting the brack­ets up, even using a level to get the cor­rect rel­a­tive posi­tions, because hang­ing posters or any­thing else I invari­ably end up with a down­wards slant to the right when I eye­ball it. The brack­ets are mostly up at this point. The are up on the wall, but anchored only by tem­po­rary screws. I need to make the holes big­ger to get the plas­tic dry­wall anchors in, but I haven't suc­ceeded yet. I've tried expand­ing the holes with ham­mered nails, the fat­test screw­driver I have, and some things I won't men­tion; End result: noth­ing. First I ran out of tools. Then I ran out of objects I could mis­use as tools. I mut­tered about this for some time. The holes didn't get any big­ger, but I felt better.

That was what led to buy­ing a drill. As a man, I have always wanted a drill of my own. As a poor man, I've always resisted the temp­ta­tion to buy one. Being now a finan­cially com­fort­able man, I bought one tonight: a 14.4 volt cord­less Dura­bilt that came with a charger and 2 bat­ter­ies and a dozen bits. I picked up a cheap bit set in case I needed it (so I tell myself).

By the time I got home it was 10 and the drill will be unus­able for an hour until the bat­tery charges, so the drilling will have to wait for tomor­row. I'm not cruel enough of a neigh­bor to start drilling walls at 11 PM. Yes, there have been sev­eral 4 AM smoke alarms, but that was acci­den­tal, not that the neigh­bors care about the difference.

I'm stuck for the night on the cur­tains and still stuck on my other ongo­ing project: get­ting a TV stand. I bought one at Nebraska Fur­ni­ture Mart made specif­i­cally for my TV, but didn't like it after it was assem­bled. So I'm going to return it. In the mean­time I found an awe­some one at Best Buy and bought it last night when my sis­ter was over (free labor!). How­ever the TV weighs more than 80 pounds and I hate to lift the damn thing again — par­tic­u­larly not onto the glass table top, tem­pered safety glass or not. Either the TV, the stand, myself, or some com­bi­na­tion will end up bro­ken. I conned Kellen into stop­ping by after class tomor­row to hang out. And, obvi­ously, to help lift the TV onto the stand. So that project has been stalled and the TV block­ing the entry­way into the apart­ment for two nights now.

I'm glad the TV stand was the last of my big pur­chases for a while. It's going to take sev­eral months to pay off all my recent pur­chases. For­tu­nately it looks like I'll get nearly all of my $1900 in fed­eral taxes back, and another $300 from the state! I made almost the same amount the year before, and only got $500 back. Which means I did some­thing wrong the year before or some­thing wrong and ille­gal this year. I hope my cal­cu­la­tions this year (actu­ally TaxAct's cal­cu­la­tions) are cor­rect, because that money will pay off a huge chunk of my fur­ni­ture or my car.

I need to fig­ure out which makes more sense to pay off. I must owe about $8000 still on the car at a pretty low inter­est rate, though I can't remem­ber what it is at the moment. The fur­ni­ture, on credit at Nebraska Fur­ni­ture Mart, is $3500 at an 18% inter­est rate. I think it's interest-free if paid off in 6 months, so I think that will be the bet­ter option by far. Instead of mak­ing big monthly car pay­ments like I did in Jan­u­ary and Feb­ru­ary, I will get that fur­ni­ture paid off and off my mind. One less monthly bill to worry about.

I need to make up a for­mal budget.

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