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Well again it has been too long between posts. I can’t believe how hard it is to stay on top of this from week to week. There have been a lot of exciting advancements in the house since the last post. We have since insulated, got all the sheet rock hung, taped and mudded as well the mason’s are vigorously working on getting the brick done.

Insulation
When we started this project, we agreed that we didn’t want to completely blow the budget on stupid things that didn’t matter like extravagant light fixtures or high prices flooring rather if we were going to go over, we wanted it to be on things that would have a payback. These things included any efficiency upgrades in the house appliances and house heating and cooling. Any house that is going to be efficient is going to have a tight wrap and a good insulation r-value. One of the many things that goes into insulating a house is the wall insulation. There are a number of choice to go with here but the most debated right now is whether or not to spend the extra money and get spray foam insulation or the more standard and less expensive fiberglass. The main difference between the two are cost and air dissipation. It is common sense that the way to make an efficient house is to keep the warm air inside in the winter and the cool air out and vice versa in the summer. Air dissipation is the enemy to efficiency. Spray foam tends to eliminate this because it can be sprayed in liquid form to seal all the holes and leaks in walls to the outside. It bonds to the wall and expands in every direction. Fiberglass insulation cannot seal the holes as well as foam can. It just simply doesn’t expand into the crevasses like spray foam will. Now, with that said, you can still achieve the same r-value with fiberglass as with foam, you just have to put more or thicker fiberglass insulation in the walls. There is also a theory that you can make a house too tight and it won’t be able to breath allowing for proper ventilation and circulation. The flip side to this decision is of course cost. You will be spending thousands more to do the entire house in spray foam insulation over traditional fiberglass. With that said, you need to compute your pay back period, or how long it will take you to pay back that extra cost with the saving you will realize in lower utility bills. In the end, the cost was too much for me. Conservative calculations place this payback period somewhere between 15 and 20 years. It would have cost approximately $2500 more to do spray foam insulation than fiberglass in our house. Even with a savings of $20 a month in utilities, which is a pretty high estimate, it would be around 10 years to pay that back. That is a pretty long payback period and ultimately was too  much for me. What we did opt to do was insulate the ceiling of the basement. This wasn’t too much more to do and it essentially separates the two levels and slows the dissipation of heat from the bottom level to the top. What that means is more of the heat stays in the basement when it is heating and the furnace doesn’t have to heat the basement near as much. I believe this was a good investment.

So without further delay, here are some pictures of the insulation.

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