Finding Out My House is Swiss Cheese

Yet again I've discovered another hole in the house! This one was big. The entire ceiling over the bay window opened up to the roof over the porch. There was no insulation, no covering at all separating the inside of the roof and our old living room. Standing inside the space under this ceiling you could feel massive amounts of cold air rush into our house.

I attacked this problem two ways. I needed to insulate the upper part of the wall because this wall is the lower part of the walls inside my boys' rooms. Large triangular spots on their walls were never insulated, even with that blown in junk that I filled the walls with a few summers ago.

To insulate the walls in that spot I first installed 2x4s vertically, toenailing them into the porch supports already there. Next I stapled insulation between those new studs. This got really challenging as the angle of the roof behind me pitched. I got poked by the nails of the roof above me. This is my own fault. I had access to this portion of the wall when I put the roof on the porch. At the time, I was so focused on doing the roof that I didn't inspect this area very well. Truthfully, I couldn't see the whole into my living room because of the plaster ceiling. This would have been so easy to do with the roof open!

The next order of business was closing up the opening. To do this I installed 2x6s across the entire span. I created pockets to hold the 2x6 insulation used in attics and on ceilings. This would give a R-19 to that portion rather than the R-13 for a 2x4 wall. The second I covered that with insulation, the draft was gone. Lastly, I covered the entire area with 6 mil plastic. Even though the paper on the insulation is a vapor barrier, there were spots where I filled in the insulation without the paper. Also, I want this buttoned up. I don't ever want to feel the cold sitting in my living room again.

Check out the pictures of the before and after. As crazy as this sounds, the Weekend Woodworker wasn't able to finish this project until Monday night. After working all day, I came home to work on this for the next four hours.

Basement Stairs and Another Wall Insulated

Saturday I worked hard to get another wall in my basement insulated. The trick with this wall, the basement stairs were right against the wall. I thought about this for about two weeks and then made my plan. Everything went just as planned--for once! This project had a massive potential for making big problems at my house. Without the stairs, we can't do laundry. If my wife misses one day without putting in laundry, the basement gets filled up!

To begin, I removed the steps. I used a circular saw to cut each stair down the middle. I then took my hammer and hit each part out of the dado created for each step. There were about five huge nails in each side of the stringers holding each step. Total over kill. I then took off one stringer and slide it out of my way. I cleaned and then painted the wall with a basement waterproofing paint. The wall was in good shape which meant I only had to fill in a few cracks with mortar.

Under our stairs there was a makeshift shelving system. I've always hated it and planned to redo it someday. Someday was Saturday. Discovered the entire stair system was being held up by two 2x4s! We dodged another bullet there. I beefed up the supports under the stairs with 4x4s and a studded wall. The stud wall really gives the entire platform good support now.

The wall was again treated with insulated foam board. This was also put behind the shelves.

The last step was to measure and cut new steps. The new steps were 29 1/2" wide. After a little trouble, I got them all in. I added 2x4 supports under each step to give them more strength. The steps will be carpeted so I used regular 2x10s for the stairs. If we wanted, we could have installed oak stairs but that would have raised the cost, big time. Carpeted stairs are fine for our basement remodel.

Really amazing how much warmer our basement is with these improvements. There are no heat runs in the basement but it is just as warm as the rest of the house.

In one of the pictures below you see all the crap back on the shelving unit. I made the base for two shelves but reused the plywood from the old shelves. I needed to stop the project and needed a place to put all that crap. I will be finishing that shelving area with plywood shelves, a wood panel against the insulation and stud wall at the back and to make the shelves look thicker, false fronts for each shelf.