Days 38-48: Moving right along! Thick insulation done! More windows/doors in!

Day 38 we resumed getting the first (thicker) layer of roof insulation in, which was starting to wear on us--it's a lot slower than the downstairs ceiling was, due to extra non-full-depth studs being in the way just about everywhere.

Day 38: Getting more chunks in toward the apex.

Day 38: We found chunks of thick wire like this one embedded in the insulation when we went to cut through sometimes.  Thankfully only two or three, but we still raised our eyebrows.  

Day 39 was very exciting.  It was a nice day out, the construction crew showed up early, and they had picked up the last of the roof tiles on their way (so apparently those were ready finally, who knew?).  They set to work and soon had them all in.  So meanwhile we did little things downstairs and then started on the last third of the roof insulation, which now we were allowed to do since that section was rapidly getting covered in tiles as we worked.

Day 39: Got the last custom row of these brackets in (going around the staircase opening.)

Day 39: Sadly, whole pads of insulation continued to fall out of the roof--even ones we hadn't deemed needing taping.  (Also it turns out we should use string when needed.  That tape is highly specialized and expensive.  It also doesn't work well for this application.)

Day 39: Since our previous strategy of notching the pads of insulation to make space for protruding half-studs didn't seem to be working out (it's hard to put them in properly and then they don't stay), we decided that for parts like this, we would cut everything piece-wise.  Here though this is the same as on the other side so far--we've stuffed insulation through so some hangs out outside.

Day 39: Now with the tiles up, it's dark on this side!  But we'd bought a 2100-lumen LED work light anticipating this, so that's what we worked by.

Day 39: We made some progress here.  Still lots to go, though.

Day 40 was nice out again so we thought we'd take the tarps off the insulation that had been delivered in the rain, and see what the damage was.

Day 40: The thin second layer of insulation for the walls and roof.  As you can see, on some packs, water got in everywhere.  Here's our attempt to let it dry out, but it's a slow process in the cold, even if it's sunny.

Day 40: However, there was enough warmth for some bugs to wake up again.  We hope they don't get too comfortable there...

Day 40: Still not dry at the end of the day, so we had to pull it back into the house to avoid it getting dew (or even rain) on it overnight.

Day 41: We got all the remaining insulation loaded into the house and organized.  More importantly, two more doors are installed!  (The one on the right is the one we previously had just cut a hole in the black paper for.)

Day 42: Roof insulation is getting done, in large part.  There will be a lot of final little details to do though thanks to our new cutting strategy, but at least these are holding up a bit better.

Day 42: The new door from yesterday, from the outside.

Day 42: The other new door.  Watch that first step!

Day 42: Today we were very proud to install the two simpler (squarish) windows upstairs ourselves, without our general contractor present.  

Day 43 was a milestone for us.  Many things depend on each other, so we had a side-quest and built ourselves a staircase, which we thought turned out rather well given that neither of us had built one before.  The reason we did this was to make it a lot easier on us and safer to load all that new insulation upstairs, which then meant we could reorganize the downstairs and tidy it up to get ready to put in the biggest two window-doors.

Day 43: Staircase!

Day 44 saw yet more falling insulation.

Day 44: Two fell out in the corner, and a third one tore itself in half falling out, in the next column over.

Day 44: Here's how you string them into place.  Seems to hold well despite the cruddy, overly fluffy texture of these pads.

Day 45: Just about done!  We decided that rather then let the remaining fluffy insulation go to waste, we'd put it in over top of the big apex beam, so the beam could hold it in place.  It worked rather well!  In the end we had some full packs of insulation left over.  (You can see a few details that will still need filling in though overall.)

Day 46: Drum roll please...it's all in!  Every little gap!  We can (literally) breathe a bit easier now.  (We were wearing masks, but still, the fibers get everywhere.)

Day 47 we didn't take any pictures, because it was a lot of little detail stuff.  We'd expected our contractor would come to help with the bigger and more complicated windows, but he couldn't in the end; meanwhile we had prepped the windows by getting all the packing pieces unscrewed and away, and cleaning up the space around the windows.  We also did some more silicon application around the installed windows, and where we had already done that and let it dry, we put the final layer of special tape between the black paper and the silicon.

Day 48: With the upstairs insulation done, we started putting these long brackets in (which, unlike the downstairs ceiling, will hold a layer of those thin pads of insulation in addition to wiring and drywall.)  Got almost half of it done.  Most of the time was spent setting up the corners and end rows, which had to be done once for each of the four sections of the overall space.  The rest should go pretty fast, within a day.

So that's it for now...next time you read this, we hope our windows are all finally in, the vapor barrier and brackets are done, and we're putting up drywall.  :-)

Weeks 5-6.5, the Double-ish Mega Update

We really outdid ourselves this time.  First we were blitzing the house, then real life happened, and we had visitors (i.e. helpers! hooray!) and the struggle, I mean adventure, continued.  So here are around 13 working days' worth of photos, depending on how you count exactly.  At this point things are really starting to heat up!  (And hopefully we'll mean that literally soon, because a wet winter has started to set in here.)

Let's see...where were we?  Oh yes, the roof.

Day 25: Porch has lathing on it now.

Day 25: Eaves-troughs, too!

Day 25: The other porch also has lathing.  Birds are gathering...

Day 25: Another chunk of the ceiling insulation done.

Day 25: Partial lathing on the main roof too.

Day 25: Feeling pretty cosy with all this insulation.

Day 25: Wind blew down our shower again.  It's getting too cold for outdoor showering for us, so we just left it down this time.

Day 25: Getting the tiles ready to go up...!

Then there was a day gap here for some reason.  Probably rain, or possibly the workers had to be somewhere else.

Day 26: The tiles are going up!

Day 26: On the other porch too!  Also you can see some piles prepared on the main roof.

Day 27: Side view as they prep the main roof, which is now fully lathed and eaves-trough'd.

Day 27: Starting the attic insulation--walls first.

Day 27: Also the side walls, although it's hard to see, because all the not-yet-used packs are in the way.  In hind sight we could've laid that out better, perhaps.

Day 27: One side wall progressing fast!  The side walls are short, so that helps.

Day 28: After another gap day, got a bunch done here--back wall is pretty much complete, including finicky angle pieces! 

Day 28: Now these fun parts remain, including making parallelograms, some of which must be one-third the thickness of the normal wall insulation because of these big sideways beams.

Day 29: It rained, and the rain came in here by the side wall :(

Day 29: It also came in by the front wall, where it went up to the edge, and got soaked up by the insulation.  Not cool.  However, the workers later told us it's not a huge deal, since some people actually purposefully soak their insulation in water to help it expand so it's sure to completely fill the space.  We can't picture how one would ever properly dry the stuff out after that, but OK.  (And the worker also said he himself does not do this.)

Day 29: Gettin' dem parallelograms done.

Day 29: Just the awkward apex left, and the part that hangs outside.  Not sure if we're supposed to do that yet.

Day 29: The front wall's done!

Day 29: Ceiling time!  Fortunately some of these fit perfectly without cutting, so that's nice and easy.

Day 30: Another insulation shipment.

Day 30: Yep, lots.  And not all of it was packaged or stored with equal standards, it seemed.

Day 30: Fortunately we were used to this and were able to make short work of getting a lot of it inside.  We left some outside though because according to our estimation, it seemed like we might have a chunk too much.  So we put some extra tarps on it.

Day 30: Things were just cleared up, now it's a tight space again.  I have a feeling we'll see this pattern a few times...

Insert big real-life gap here.  But also we lost a bit of motivation because the roofers discovered there were not enough tiles, so we can't actually put all the insulation in yet anyway.

Day 31: Carrying on, we got a number of rows started.

Day 31: You can see the missing two-thirds of the one half in terms of roofing tiles.  Also the apex was left undone (despite having the tiles) because it's done last to keep it all together properly, it seems.

Day 32: We kept going, and even did up to the apex on the last row, just so it would be complete.  (Not as much water as you'd expect comes in the apex gap when it rains anyway--it was like this even without any tiles.)

Day 32: Got that first row complete down to the bottom, too.

Day 32: By the end of the day, even more rows were filled in completely.

Day 32: On the side with tiles, we filled in all the rows!  Well, to a point.

The next day was a turning point, though!  Well, a potential one.  It was exciting at least.  Took a while before it turned into more of a finished product.

Day 33: The windows and doors came!  Also a laser leveler to help with the ceiling brackets (we have a drop-down ceiling.)

Day 33: They're everywhere.

Day 33: The delivery guy felt really bad for this.  All the other workers had spent such care tip-toeing around this little fig tree with the tractor and vans and everything, and then one rocky moment and the delivery van bumped it to death.  But we cut it into five branches and replanted...who know?  Maybe we will have five nice fig trees in the end instead of just one as a result.

Day 33: We later had a bit of a stressful moment when we measured the windows and doors, and realized that every single one was at least 1 cm too wide for the hole it was supposed to fit into.  Turns out they are not supposed to fit into the hole, but on the inside of the wall, adjacent to the hole.  It made more sense the following week when we were shown how to actually install one.  Phew!

Day 34: Meanwhile, our visitors helped us continue on the roofing insulation.  Some of it turned out to be highly annoying in that it was overly fluffy, so no matter what dimension you cut it, it would not hold itself in the ceiling.  Here we used tape, but this particular one actually fell out a week later.

Day 34: It's hard to see here, but all along the top of the wall, where before there was a hole to the outside where the roof has an overhang, this now is stuffed with insulation too.  Very finicky work done by our voluntold / unsung hero visitors.  :)

Day 34: This is coming along...the rows are looking nice!  We can't do right up to the apex though because the missing roof tiles still haven't arrived.  We were not happy to hear that the tile distribution company actually knew five weeks ago that they had not sent enough tiles (they didn't have enough on hand at the time) and just left it as a ticking time bomb for us rather than saying or doing anything about it at the time.

Day 35: Got the laser level going and put some drywall brackets in the ceiling.  The level was used in the four corners of the one half of the first story.  Then we drew strings tightly between them to fill out the rows and columns of brackets to make a big, alternating grid of them.

Day 35: Then we ran into this anomaly.  Turns out it's no trouble, because it's only two rows wide, and for these two we can just put the bracket outside the weird spot instead of inside where we can't.  (Or we could do it inside, by bending the brackets, apparently.)

Day 35: Our nice grid on one half, mostly done.

Day 36: The proper cutout for the window, and a rough ledge for ti to sit upon.

Day 36: With some expanding insulation tape added.

Day 36: The first window, more or less installed!  It juts out of the wall currently, but we have more wall to build around it, with another layer of insulation, plus drywall.

The next day was very busy.  We got some things done on our end and the contractor also came by and did two of the door/window sets with us.  Plus, the workers returned, and had picked up the tiles along the way, so they finished tiling the roof!

Day 37: Starting to put up the vapor barrier.

Day 37: Have to keep moving these heavy windows and doors around.  It occurred to us later that we should probably also do the upper half to avoid moving each thing twice.  However, this was partly mitigated by our contractor and ever-helpful worker crew helping haul the upstairs ones upstairs for us.

Day 37: Brackets mostly done on the other half now too.

Day 37: Putting in the first glass door set.  We've cut away a beam that was screwed to the floor, and added a smaller piece of wood offset from where that had been for the frame to sit on.

Day 37: There's that tape again.

Day 37: So much more light inside now!

Day 37: Some silicon seal on the outside.

Day 37: From further away.

Day 37: A hole cut for the third such glass door set on the back of the house.  You can also see the apex tile up there!

Day 37: Two done on the side now!

So now we have more windows and doors to do (before the birds move in--already had to chase a few out of the attic), finish the vapor barrier downstairs, finish the attic insulation and then its vapor barrier...and then add more brackets to hold the thinner insulation everywhere.  At this point we're also supposed to plan where electrical outlets will go, so we can put the tubing in for the cables, so that's exciting.  So much to do now, but it's really coming together!