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Just because something is in an old house doesn't mean it's quality or worth keeping. Just like these days, there was a lot of shoddy work done on houses from the late 1800s in the early 1900s. It's sometimes hard to differentiate original work from close to original work. The idea that you shouldn't replace old stuff because it is better is also not true in many cases. If your windows are singled paned panels in rotten wooden frames then replacement with anything is better. If you have a shoddy contractor do it then it's going to be a crap job regardless of all other factors. Yes, if you have a decent contractor install vinyl window frames then it wont look authentic but it's better than rotten windows. If you can afford to have a decent contractor put in windows that match the house then that's great but not everyone can afford nor value the cost premium. While it would be nice to keep the historic character of a home, that's not realistic if it's a $120,000 house. Unless it's going to be your forever home, it's not worth losing money hand over fist on custom jobs from master tradesmen. cowofwar fucked around with this message at 21:34 on Nov 7, 2012 |
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Nov 7, 2012 21:29
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Koivunen posted:Oh thank god. For a minute I thought you were one of those Have you ever lived in a house with such fantastic looking old windows? As someone who has I'm firmly in favor of getting modern efficient ones. Of course this is true if it gets cold and/or windy if it doesn't I guess it doesn't matter.
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Nov 7, 2012 21:34
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types that would rip out old windows and put in white vinyl instead.
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cowofwar posted:Just because something is in an old house doesn't mean it's quality or worth keeping. Just like these days, there was a lot of shoddy work done on houses from the late 1800s in the early 1900s. It's sometimes hard to differentiate original work from close to original work. If windows are rotting or broken beyond repair that's one thing, but to be replacing perfectly functional or easily repaired old windows is a tragedy. New windows are expensive, and if you're already going to be blowing a bunch of money on replacing them, why not go all the way and give your house decent, good looking windows instead of going for the cheaper, uglier option which ruins the entire house? I guess it all comes down to how much it means to you to conserve a home's appearance. Our house was $45,000, and it's definitely not going to be our forever home. We expect to move out in five or six years. However, the entire reason we are going the extra mile to save the original features of this house is simply because there aren't many truly original early 1900s homes left. Learning to do things like demolition, woodworking, electrical work, painting, etc etc etc, on your own is important so that you can save thousands and thousands of dollars by doing it yourself instead of hiring people to do it for you. Duck and Cover posted:Have you ever lived in a house with such fantastic looking old windows? As someone who has I'm firmly in favor of getting modern efficient ones. Of course this is true if it gets cold and/or windy if it doesn't I guess it doesn't matter. I honestly have no idea what you're trying to say. You have lived in a house with fantastic old windows, but you replaced them anyway? Here it drops to below zero for several months of the year, we get snow, and it is usually very windy as we're right next to a Great Lake, but there are options for insulating your windows and home to save heating costs in the winter.
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Nov 8, 2012 02:08
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Switch "Original Windows" with "Milsurp Stock" and "Replace" with "Sporterize" and this could be a TFR thread.
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Nov 8, 2012 03:21
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Yeah things are getting pretty soap boxy. Koivunen and I are just aesthetic purists I guess. Some real estate developers were going to demolish a Frank Lloyd Wright home in Arizona a month ago and I almost had a heart attack and I worried about it for days on end. I get pretty militant about this stuff. I feel as though, when you buy an old home that was built before cranes and machine tools, you are literally inheriting the hard work and sweat of the people who built it. In the older neighborhoods of America, these were tradesmen and professionals who lived before the era of constant entertainment and television. Their lives were their craft, literally, they had their craft, and their family. Sure you paid your own good money for it, but you aren't really an owner, you are a custodian of the land and the structures built on it. In our town, so many opportunists buy up old properties and rent them out, and do absolutely nothing to enhance the value, or improve the home. They just subdivide them to make them convenient for rental and place an ad in the paper. After 40 years of people not giving a poo poo and just treating homes as temporary places to live and then passing them onto the next person, our neighborhoods might as well just be bulldozed and turned into trailer-parks and high rises. For people who actually put work into the places they buy, good on you, and whether you slap in some vinyl windows to save on heating costs, or you spend countless hours researching and finding great contractors and suppliers, at least you are taking some amount of pride in the place you call home and doing the best with what you can afford.
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Nov 8, 2012 09:56
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I own a home built in 1880, and the windows are a bitch. More than a few of them leak so much air right now. I want to get them replaced but keep the old style. Neighbor said theirs was quoted somewhere around 800-900 USD per window, I'm a new home owner so I don't know if that's actually good but it sounds loving horrible. Also the wood on a few of them is all lovely and chipping away, I have no idea how to do anything with wood but I imagine the price on that is going to suck too. Also we live in a Historic district and there's some council somewhere that has to approve anything you do to the front of the house, back and sides are fair game I think. I need to find that info because we need to change the paint color soon. Luckily everyone on our block is into keeping things nice, and there's a pretty strong sense of community and everyone helps each other out. Our street is like an oasis of old architecture (From 1880's to 1910ish), three blocks over you'll see some lovely inner city type buildings with lovely vinyl siding and... eh, just trashy stuff. Another good thing is that the city is putting money into cleaning everything up, so hopefully all this debt is worth something in the future. e; Related: I admire your work OP, I have so many projects I want to do, and no time... I wish I could just man up and power through some projects after work but I just feel so drained that when I get home I don't want to do poo poo. RizieN fucked around with this message at 21:17 on Nov 8, 2012 |
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Nov 8, 2012 21:15
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RizieN posted:I own a home built in 1880, and the windows are a bitch. More than a few of them leak so much air right now. I want to get them replaced but keep the old style. Neighbor said theirs was quoted somewhere around 800-900 USD per window, I'm a new home owner so I don't know if that's actually good but it sounds loving horrible. Also the wood on a few of them is all lovely and chipping away, I have no idea how to do anything with wood but I imagine the price on that is going to suck too. If you're in a historic district, you're pretty screwed on prices. For reference, I replaced 11 windows in my late 1800s house for $110-$160 each (depending on size, of course). I chose the mid-grade (8800 series) vinyl windows from Home Depot and they look just fine. My house may look like the rest on the street, but I don't really care. I wanted the old, drafty, leaky, and in most cases, painted or nailed shut windows to go away and lower my ridiculous heating bills! If you got the money for aesthetics, great, go for it. If you're needing lower winter bills, ain't nothing wrong with Energy Star-certified Home Depot windows.
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Nov 8, 2012 22:09
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You can find vinyl windows that will look exactly like the ones you replaced from the street. If you want, you can even paint them so they blend in better. Also, you americans better not be bitching about prices. In Canada custom vinyl windows run $400 for the cheap ones.
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Nov 8, 2012 23:14
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Yeah, historic districts are tricky. If you can't handle the price of the renovations to the standard of the council you really shouldn't buy a home in a historic district. I don't want to sound like a dick after the fact, but what attracted you to the historic neighborhood in the first place? If it was the historic charm, that charm is maintained by the council, and compliance is a pretty big responsibility.
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Nov 9, 2012 07:47
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Koivunen posted:
It's not my call to make the windows are still there. I just think the idea of "fantastic old windows" is ridiculous and a little too sentimental for my tastes. Old windows may look nicer (or not I don't really like how the glass is sort of wavy) but they do not retain heat nearly as well as a modern window will.
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Nov 10, 2012 05:15
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Duck and Cover posted:It's not my call to make the windows are still there. I just think the idea of "fantastic old windows" is ridiculous and a little too sentimental for my tastes. Old windows may look nicer (or not I don't really like how the glass is sort of wavy) but they do not retain heat nearly as well as a modern window will. Plus, nothing says aesthetically pleasing like plastic covered windows for 4 months a year. 
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Nov 10, 2012 10:54
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EgillSkallagrimsson posted:Plus, nothing says aesthetically pleasing like plastic covered windows for 4 months a year. I loving hate having to do this! Every fall I get out the silicone draft stop caulking tube and seal them up, then I put that insulation plastic over them. Otherwise I might as well just set up my ductwork so one of the vents just blows hot air outside. Also waking up in the morning to see my dog sleeping in a snow drift, inside the house! Maybe we should start a thread about this, so the OP can get back to telling us how fun it is scraping old cigarette smoke of the walls.
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Nov 10, 2012 21:35
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Rodnik posted:Yeah, historic districts are tricky. If you can't handle the price of the renovations to the standard of the council you really shouldn't buy a home in a historic district. I don't want to sound like a dick after the fact, but what attracted you to the historic neighborhood in the first place? If it was the historic charm, that charm is maintained by the council, and compliance is a pretty big responsibility. Don't worry about sounding like a dick, I have no regrets and I can afford to keep this house up to standards, I just thought that 800 per window is a little excessive (which that neighbor could've just gone balls out with her replacements). I haven't actually even looked at prices yet because winter is almost non existent this year, but I will want to get some of the woodwork fixed up and I might as well replace them then. I don't know why the historic attraction, I just like it. It's cool to have an old home in the city and we got a big house for a really good price (sellers were breaking up and just wanted the house sold immediately) when the market tanked. I wasn't even necessarily looking for an old home, but the homes in any of the neighborhoods I wanted to live in weren't going to be very new. Everything just kind of happened in a way that worked for us with the timing, and it actually met the prerequisites that we wanted in a home in the city, it just happened to be a historic home.
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Nov 11, 2012 00:37
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Are Aluminium windows (single, double and triple glazed) not a big thing in the northern hemisphere? Or is vinyl used instead of aluminium.
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Nov 27, 2012 00:02
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Anphear posted:Are Aluminium windows (single, double and triple glazed) not a big thing in the northern hemisphere? Or is vinyl used instead of aluminium. Never heard of aluminum windows. My new ones are vinyl with argon gas sandwiched between the two for insulation (Low-E).
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Nov 27, 2012 02:12
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Duck and Cover posted:It's not my call to make the windows are still there. I just think the idea of "fantastic old windows" is ridiculous and a little too sentimental for my tastes. Old windows may look nicer (or not I don't really like how the glass is sort of wavy) but they do not retain heat nearly as well as a modern window will. Honestly, as someone who lives in a 1910-era house, the windows aren't even a big deal. We had ours replaced three years ago with some of the original-looking modern versions, only to discover that we were actually losing most of our heat through the walls. The old newspaper insulation has all gone to dust and pooled at the bottom of the walls, so up on the second floor you can feel a severe temperature difference at about chair-rail height.
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Nov 27, 2012 02:51
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Yeah, we plastic our windows and still get DRAFTS through some of our outer walls. It's disturbing and my feet are always cold because there's air coming in where the wall joins the floor, apparently. It doesn't help that our first floor has no subflooring - the oak floorboards were laid directly down on top of the joists, which has led to all kinds of fun sagging and splitting of the lovely wood and means that the basement keeps the first floor nice and cool no matter how much heat we pump into it. Old houses are the poo poo, yo. I love the idea of keeping original windows, but I want to replace ours because 2/3 of them were replaced once already with a mix of craptastic 70's-80's-ish aluminum and vinyl single-panes. They don't quite fit the original window openings (in the front, the larger picture windows were literally jammed in until the frames twisted and then badly caulked), they're ugly as sin, and they don't match either the existing old windows or each other. The original casement windows we have left are in awful condition, although I'd at least like to get original-looking replacements so we don't lose what little character the house has left. I almost wish the original windows still existed all over the house. Even if they were in bad condition, they'd be better than the poo poo the previous owners shoehorned in. Anphear, as far as I know aluminum is not a widely used window frame material any more, but I have seen a lot of it in older, cheaply-done housing up here so I guess at some point it was pretty popular probably because it is lightweight and cheap. Faerunner fucked around with this message at 03:50 on Nov 27, 2012 |
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Nov 27, 2012 03:40
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We spent a lot of time finding air gaps and caulking them, but drafts are still somewhat of an issue. The windows helped, as did gutting and properly re-insulating the attic, but we really need to go farther for real efficiency.
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Nov 27, 2012 15:53
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Faerunner posted:Anphear, as far as I know aluminum is not a widely used window frame material any more, but I have seen a lot of it in older, cheaply-done housing up here so I guess at some point it was pretty popular probably because it is lightweight and cheap. daggerdragon posted:Never heard of aluminum windows. My new ones are vinyl with argon gas sandwiched between the two for insulation (Low-E). Sweet. Its still all the rage here. Must be something to with out building regs. NZ had a lot of issues in the late 90's and early 2000's with builders cutting corners at the customers bequest which lead to 'leaky houses' that looked fine both internally and externally but once you ripped of both cladding layers, entire walls were rotten and no longer load bearing. I did some searching an it appears that the aluminium windows that we can get are effectively the same shape and design as the vinyl/PVC ones that are available in the States. The link below is the basic design of all aluminum windows which are very similar to results I get when I google vinyl windows. http://www.nulook.co.nz/index.pl?page=galleries&cat=7&m=190
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Nov 28, 2012 03:31
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Faerunner posted:Yeah, we plastic our windows and still get DRAFTS through some of our outer walls. It's disturbing and my feet are always cold because there's air coming in where the wall joins the floor, apparently. It doesn't help that our first floor has no subflooring - the oak floorboards were laid directly down on top of the joists, which has led to all kinds of fun sagging and splitting of the lovely wood and means that the basement keeps the first floor nice and cool no matter how much heat we pump into it. Old houses are the poo poo, yo.
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Nov 29, 2012 07:01
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Anphear posted:Are Aluminium windows (single, double and triple glazed) not a big thing in the northern hemisphere? Or is vinyl used instead of aluminium. Aluminum windows were a cheap fad after the war. The aluminum industry needed to keep the demand high, and since they were no longer manufacturing thousands of warplanes a month, they tried to get these abominations to take off. (along with lots of other ideas like aluminum pans, siding, ladders, etc.) They finally died off (for the most part) in the 70's (I think) and now you really only see them on older buildings that haven't been renovated yet. Most of these windows were really cheap sliders that froze in the winter, caused frost to build up inside them, and if you were not careful, would rip the skin off your fingers. They typically had horrible insulation qualities and unless doubled up with an additional one on the inside would cause everything within three feet of them to be colder. They were basically heatsinks that bled your energy bill out into the cold. They are not ideal for northern climates, and have all but been replaced by vinyl.
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Dec 1, 2012 02:26
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Blistex posted:Aluminum windows were a cheap fad after the war. The aluminum industry needed to keep the demand high, and since they were no longer manufacturing thousands of warplanes a month, they tried to get these abominations to take off. (along with lots of other ideas like aluminum pans, siding, ladders, etc.) But hey, they never rot! (sigh, my house has several of these pieces of poo poo, they are abysmal) There are also modern very nice windows that have an aluminum clad exterior that won't rot and don't need to be painted
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Dec 1, 2012 04:05
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If you live in a historic residence, you can usually get grants and tax breaks to restore the house to historic conditions. Here in Illinois, these are the resources, but I'm sure there are similar programs in Minnesota and other states. Some of the programs listed here are also available nationwide: http://www.landmarks.org/incentives.htm
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Dec 17, 2012 19:51
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Unfortunately where I am the grant (that I know about anyway) stays with the house, not the owner. And apparently someone sometime used it on our home  But I've been working on the home more lately, it feels good finishing projects!
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Dec 17, 2012 20:27
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dwoloz posted:But hey, they never rot! (sigh, my house has several of these pieces of poo poo, they are abysmal) Oh, that could be interesting. I'm thinking that I might do some research and see if the Crank windows my local Home Hardware are pushing are quality units that won't break after their first year. Triple pane is hard to pass up, but the two crank windows in the two bedrooms are both 1/2 out of order as one side on each won't crank open any more.. A mod needs to change the thread title to, "Those windows belong in a museum!"
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Dec 18, 2012 03:07
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Blistex posted:A mod needs to change the thread title to, "Those windows belong in a museum!" I agree. A quick update since it's been a long-assed time. We have the entry way painted, and it looks awesome. The color we chose nearly matches the original maroon/deep red color, the original is just slightly more purply. We still need to hang the crown moulding, which is a big project, and we won't be getting to it until January (at least, because we have been pretty lazy lately). Our utility supplier couldn't make it to our house this fall to install a gas line, so we are heating the house with fuel oil this winter. It blows. It cost over $900 to fill the tank, and in the month of September, we used half of it. We don't have any gauge on the tank so we have to guess when it's getting low by tapping on the tank and trying to determine when the sound changes, and then we have to arrange for the company to come to our house and fill the tank, then give them the majority of our savings. When I was a kid, my parents always kept the house really cold, and I thought to myself, "When I have a place of my own, I don't care what it costs, I am going to keep it at 72 degrees at all times." Now that I actually do have a place of my own, that thermostat is not going above 64 at the highest. Sweat shirts, slippers, robes, blankets, and warm-up showers all around. After the shock of having a $400+ heating bill, we researched insulation standards for our area of the world, and decided to re-insulate the attic and basement with R-38 insulation. We spent $700-something on insulation and had it delivered to the house. We bought it from Menards, and the delivery company literally dumped it in our back yard. Rodnik and I had worked night shifts that night, but we stayed up to be awake when the delivery truck came. The morning passed with nobody coming, and we started to wonder what had happened. We looked out the back window and saw this...  There are five palates there. They didn't knock, didn't ring the doorbell, nothing. Just threw them in our yard and left. (We have a really quaint yard, don't we?) It snowed the next day. Anyway, that weekend we insulated our attic. There was about six inches of vermiculite and blown wool insulation, and we stacked this stuff on top of it. I was the unfortunate soul who went up in the attic and felt my way around the 2x4s and lay down the insulation, sweating and out of breath in a respirator, goggles, long sleeved shirt, and elbow-length gloves, and Rodnik was the unfortunate one who had to run up and down the stairs retrieving packages of insulation from the back yard, then climbing up a ladder and handing them up to me. DIY insulating is hard work, and unfortunate for either person doing either task. We also experimented with sealing our windows. We bought peel-away caulk and did some windows with that, and we also bought some stick-on caulk strips, which I was not impressed with. The peel-away caulk definitely does a better job, and we tried to peel some away, and it comes off very easily. The stick-on strips come in a large roll that is similar to the Bubble-Yum gum tape, and you peel how much you want and stick it on the window cracks. It's not very sticky and not very pliable, in my opinion it's a waste of money. We also plan on putting a layer of plastic over the downstairs windows even though we used the peel away caulk on them. It's nearly the end of December and we haven't done it yet, but we have every intention of covering the downstairs windows, as we still have at least three more months of below freezing weather. There is a noticeable difference in the temperatures between downstairs and upstairs. We still have yet to insulate the basement. It will require cutting the insulation in half and then boarding it to the exposed beams, and it will be messy and will take a long time. We really need to do it though... soon... Will post pictures of the entry way once the crown moulding is up. It's still a bit of a construction zone with the ladder, sawhorses, drills, dried plaster on the floor, etc. Koivunen fucked around with this message at 14:19 on Dec 20, 2012 |
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Dec 20, 2012 04:54
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We call the Peel-Away Caulk "Draft Stop" here, and it's 100% required for my old rear end windows in the winter. Two years ago the dog's room had a 3" snow drift because there was a gap.
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Dec 21, 2012 15:58
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Even my '89 house is going to get a pretty big dose of insulation next summer (hopefully with less vermiculite involved). Whose blue truck is that in the yard picture? That thing is awesome but I can't make out what it is.
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Dec 21, 2012 18:20
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Seat Safety Switch posted:Even my '89 house is going to get a pretty big dose of insulation next summer (hopefully with less vermiculite involved). Whose blue truck is that in the yard picture? That thing is awesome but I can't make out what it is. slightly bigger version but still not great I too want to know what that is. I thought it was a Toyota or Suzuki at first, but the wipers and signals are throwing me for a loop. Doesn't help that it looks like a bumper for a plow (extra lights/signals on top). I just threw the photo into the AI misc thread, hopefully  Motronic can identify it.
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Dec 22, 2012 09:46
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Isn't it a IH scout of some sort? mid 60's probably.
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Dec 22, 2012 10:20
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Man, I wanted to add more insulation to the attic when it was on sale this fall but that doesn't sound like fun at all. I'm gonna keep putting it off and go work on our little bedroom instead. That draft stop caulk is the best stuff in an old house! In our last place we used it around every window and cut our heating bill in half. This year we've used some caulk on the worst windows and we also did plastic really early (Octoberish) so we had a toasty house until this weekend when the temp. finally dropped below 40. Our heating bill in the winter runs toward $200 even with plastic on the windows, and that's with a brand-new energy-efficient gas furnace which still runs constantly due to heat loss out the drat uninsulated walls. The furnace replacement wasn't an option; our old one broke less than a year into owning the house, in March, when it was still cold enough to be pretty uncomfortable without one. We still have to use a little electric heater in the bathroom because by the time the hot air gets to the 2nd floor vents, it's not as hot any more - we need to patch and insulate the ductwork, augh. But yeah. Caulk the cracks! If you have a chance, check all the outlets. Insulating around the outlet boxes or even getting those little foam pads that go behind the outlet covers can also cut down on drafts and cold air leaks. They cost a few dollars for a box of 10 or so and you can get them for switch plates too.
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Dec 22, 2012 11:13
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yaffle posted:Isn't it a IH scout of some sort? mid 60's probably.
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Dec 22, 2012 18:30
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Blistex posted:the dog's room I like you. In my house the dog's room is sometimes called my room 
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Dec 22, 2012 23:18
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Seat Safety Switch posted:Even my '89 house is going to get a pretty big dose of insulation next summer (hopefully with less vermiculite involved). Whose blue truck is that in the yard picture? That thing is awesome but I can't make out what it is. That would be my 1962 International Scout. The front end has a welded on plow mount and its missing the original grill. One of my poorer decisions of this past year. It needs way more work than I had originally thought. I was driving it around town during the summer but in September the wiring literally caught on fire and none of the lights work. A man can still dream, and I hope to get it functional again sometime in the next year. Working on a car is a bit more expensive than I thought. Koivunen has been saintly in not ridiculing me too much about it. A small but welcome blessing. On the house: Insulating an older house without a vapor barrier is tricky business and after researching like crazy I've pretty much realized without tearing out the walls entirely there isn't much you can do. The house was built to breath, so moisture from the inside escapes through the walls and damp doesn't rot away the wood framing. You can't use loose fill insulation as that will just get damp and dry out poorly, leading to all sorts of nasty side effects. I've heard some people recommend closed cell foam insulation, but you need to use the low expansion stuff so you don't pop out the walls and then that makes rewiring in the future tricky because you can't feed wired through the walls without cutting huge holes all over the place. The closed cell will also trap moisture in the house even though it doesn't absorb moisture. The best we can do at this stage is insulate the attic space as we have, and then insulate the basement and the spaces where the sub floor meets the wall as best we can. One problem with the shape of our roof, is that there is no way to get insulation under the portion of the roof that has the steepest pitch, and even if we did somehow stuff insulation in there, it would block the airflow in the attic and again cause moisture problems. I love this house, but old construction techniques are like PCs and newer technologies are like Macs, they speak different languages and are incompatible. Rodnik fucked around with this message at 13:38 on Dec 24, 2012 |
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Dec 24, 2012 13:16
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I'm not quite sure how your attic is set up, but when I insulated mine I installed rafter baffles so that the insulation wouldn't block the air flow coming up from the soffit vents. I used something like this: http://www.homedepot.com/h_d1/N-5yc1v/R-202563035/h_d2/ProductDisplay?catalogId=10053&langId=-1&keyword=baffles&storeId=10051#.UNhhcaw3Fzc They're very cheap so thats something to look into. Also, why didn't you go with blow in insulation? Something like Cellulose works well especially since it doesnt itch. And its easy to blow into the deep dark corners of the attic.
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Dec 24, 2012 15:08
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Rodnik posted:That would be my 1962 International Scout. The front end has a welded on plow mount and its missing the original grill. One of my poorer decisions of this past year. It needs way more work than I had originally thought. Nice truck, certainly; they're great vehicles and pretty easy to work on at least.It's too bad spray foam insulation is so pricey, and I can only imagine what horrible health issue we'll discover it has in 30 years. It wouldn't fix your ventilation issue either unless you redid the attic venting as well which would probably mean a new roof and.. I see your point about the incompatibility. Seat Safety Switch fucked around with this message at 03:49 on Dec 27, 2012 |
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Dec 27, 2012 03:44
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Rodnik posted:One of my poorer decisions of this past year. Actually, it was his birthday present from me. He found it on Craigslist and was fantasizing about it for the longest time... so he got it for his birthday. It currently has two flat tires and a large snow drift inside it as he didn't close the windows before our first blizzard.  Just a heads-up on the insulation. I was wearing the clothes that I normally wear when we are doing house work, but even after three washes, they still itch when I put them on. I'm not sure what else I can do to make these clothes wearable again, but if anyone plans on trying DIY insulation, be sure you are wearing clothes you don't care about. E: Rodnik made a thread in AI about the truck but it has since disappeared, it wasn't updated since last August (?) so it's not listed any more. Here's a close-up of the Scout.  Another word of advice: If you have a massive DIY project going on, it is not wise to invest in a second massive DIY project until the first is complete. This was an error on both our parts as we figured "Hey, at least the Scout runs, right?" Koivunen fucked around with this message at 07:06 on Dec 29, 2012 |
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Dec 28, 2012 14:24
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Rodnik posted:Insulating an older house without a vapor barrier is tricky business and after researching like crazy I've pretty much realized without tearing out the walls entirely there isn't much you can do. The house was built to breath, so moisture from the inside escapes through the walls and damp doesn't rot away the wood framing. You can't use loose fill insulation as that will just get damp and dry out poorly, leading to all sorts of nasty side effects. You hit the nail on the head there. Well, we still have the basement to insulate/caulk/fix. Two days ago we got enough snow on the front porch that I re-discovered why our porch is cracked (I learned this last winter and promptly forgot the horror of it). Our basement extends UNDER our non-enclosed concrete porch. (There is evidence that there were windows at some point, but the porch has not been enclosed for years now.) The concrete therefore is exposed to the elements on top, and to the nice warm air from our furnace on the bottom. Over the years the entire slab (and it's a drat thick slab) has cracked through, and water has found its way down into the basement. The underside of the porch is spalled and broken and some of the rebar is showing through, and although it's still (probably) structurally sound-ish it looks terrifying. Also the leaking is bad. When there is rain it doesn't drip much because the porch doesn't collect rainwater so much, but it does collect snow drifts and when those melt due to warmer days or the heat radiating up through the concrete from our basement... well, we had a surprise lake in the basement the other day. Needless to say that's going to be a top priority fix as soon as it's warm and dry enough to haul out the hydraulic cement and sealant. Koivunen: I'd just throw the clothes out and buy a set of overalls. Home improvement ruins wardrobes!
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Dec 29, 2012 05:24
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Everyone I know who has owned a Scout simultaneously loves and hates it. They seem to always be breaking down.
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Dec 31, 2012 02:58
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| # ? Apr 24, 2024 13:58 |
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Oh man.... You guys should have looked into getting a blower and putting the cellulose or fiberglass up in the attic. One of you could have stayed outside and fed the machine while the other was up in the attic. Way less physical handling of the material.
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Jan 7, 2013 06:23
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