Insulating Leaves Me Cold

Can we all just agree that retro-fitting an old farm house with insulation under the floor is one of the crappiest crap jobs in the history of crap jobs?

Jaysus. Being all hunched over like a monkey screwing a football (so I can manoeuvre around in a dimly lit crawl space with less than six feet clearance while ducking past jutting nails, suspended ducting, pipes, wiring, and half-assed, ill-conceived home renovations courtesy of countless "Gee, maybe I can save twenty bucks if I do it myself" owners over the past 150 years). Working over my head with 15 decades of dust and detritus (not to mention Fibreglas Pink) showering down into my eyes, nose, mouth and any other uncovered orifice.

And all for the sake of warmer, cosier floors. What ever happened to wearing frigging shoes?

Sometimes I hate being handy.

On the plus side, since nobody else wants any part of the job, nobody says much when you emerge from the basement and declare "That's it for today ... unless somebody else wants to try it for awhile." Silence is golden.

So now, I get to sit here and look for friends and surf around and read some blogs and generally just waste what little is left of my Sunday afternoon. So that's what I'm gonna do.

Unless one of you wants to come over and do some insulating ...

... ah, thought not.

Comments

[Cyn]

For me, Nils, 'twas a day of moving crap around downsatirs to get ready for round 4 of floor-laying, a little mountain biking, a relaxing jacuzzi and a lovely dinner of salmon and rice. Wayne watched the President's Cup. He'll be moving some crap around downstairs later tonight.
I don't envy you and your monkey acrobatics, and I concur...sometimes it sucks to be the handy one. But as much as I don't really need the cut fingers and scraped arms that go along with fixing stuff, I do love the satisfaction of a finished project.

[Craig]

Your antics with insulation and praise of wood stoves sure brings back memories. Fresh faced kid from upstate NY arrives in Savage Harbour and buys a 6 bedroom farm house on the shore. As December 1976 rolls around with the temperature hanging around -20 the furnace is on and I realize it is not going off. That sucker would run non-stop for 24 hours and hold the downstairs temps at 15. No heat upstairs. Not a bit of insulation in the whole house.

I learned quickly about seaweed banking, wood stoves and down comforters. Frost on the inside walls upstairs what not what I had expected.

15 years in that house - multiple trips to the basement each day to bring up wood. Every trip I hit my head on the same beam - herself would just stand upstairs waiting for the thump and curse.

Best years of my life - and I would not change one thing.

[James]

Are you certain, Nils, that you're not just starting the same "Gee, maybe I can save twenty bucks if I do it myself" trend for the next 150 years of owners, instead of laying claim to being 'handy'?

[Nils Ling]

Excellent point, James. I count insulation installing as being on the lower end of the "handy" scale, in the sense that it requires no specific training or expertise - it's just cutting and stuffing. Hard to screw up, and easy to fix if you do. Just hateful work, is all.

I like to think I'm smart enough to know when to pay a professional (and I have done, on some of the renovations) and when to reach for my growing set of tools and have at 'er. My main consideration is not "Will I save a buck by doing it myself?" - it's more "Can someone do this better than I?" or "Is this a project that I'll have fun doing and can take the time to do right?"

I've run across more than my share of half-assed projects where it was clear that expertise took a back seat to saving money. They're easy to recognize. A carpenter I once hired looked at a wall some previous owneer had put in and said "This fella built this wall to last as long as he was in this house. I build so that it'll last as long as I'm on this planet."

When I take on a reno job, that's the standard I go by. "Good enough" ... just isn't.