After somewhat of a hurry up, with bad weather impending, I finished the path down to the garden shed and cleaned up the pad where I want to park my car in the winter months. The really strange this is that, when the rain came, I still found myself wanting to walk on the grass! Not to worry, I got over that strange state of mind and now enjoy getting out of the car and walking all way up to the rear steps without stepping on a single blade of grass.
You can see one of my young mulberry trees alongside the path. I suppose that, in a couple of years or so, I will be cursing the purple stains of mulberries on the path.
The second strange thing was that Daniel, my contractor, slipped and fell from off the roof onto the old deck, fortunately without injury (other than a certain loss of dignity). Over a beer he told me that it looks as if he will be moving to Boston at year's end.
Later this last week, I was painting my front door and also renewing the draft seal at the bottom. What was strange about this was that I realized this was, strictly speaking, a maintenance job. The weather has been cold and I had been awaiting a warmer day so that I could remove the door. On Friday it was warmer outside than inside so off came the door for this work. The main reason was to renew the draft seal, the last thing I can do to seal up the house.
I finally competed the sealing up of the loft above the stairways. This how it looked before I started this work. Quite a lot of air was able to move between this space and the attic above. The problem was that the space was somewhat irregular due to the shape of the stairways up and down.I solved this by walling off the difficult spaces above the stairways making the space cuboid.
Once I had completed the drywall work, I could not resist using up some old paint stock to make it all look pretty. The ceiling is white and the interior walls a kind of daffodil yellow. The wall next to the exterior cladding is blue, same as the exterior walls. Both this wall and the ceiling have the InsulAdd treatment to reflect heat back into the house. I had some old vinyl composite tiles, as you can see, stacked on the floor. Now the entire floor is tiled, so it is just like any other room in the house. Mostly, I will be the only one to see this. It will become a store room. I suppose that is yet another strange thing.
What all this has been about is sealing the house as much as possible, so as to conserve heat and keep heating costs to a minimum. According to the gas company billing, my usage is about one quarter of the average of the houses in my area, so I have been doing fairly well in this quest.The real test if all this is the 'door blower' test. With this work done, I invited Jason (the air conditioning specialist) back to do the 'after' measurements, compared with the original measurements. An airtight plastic shroud including a powerful fan is placed in the front door way. When the fan is actuated it blows air into the house. With all the windows and doors closed, it becomes possible to measure the proportion air escaping to the outside through various cracks and crannies.
This test indicated that I have been able to achieve, by this work and other work done by Jason's company, a further 25% reduction in loss of air to the outside. This will amount to a saving of about $200 per year in heating costs, so I can expect to recover the cost of this work in about five years.
Just in time, it seems...
Night time temperatures are now dipping below freezing and daytime ambient temperatures are falling to within 20 deg. F of freezing on most days. I run the house at 65 deg F, a comfortable level for me as I dislike an overly warm house. Even with only a few hours of sunshine each day, the house warms some five degrees through insolation (heating via sunlight), so the heating only turns on some hours after sunset. Overall, I am quite pleased with all this and consider all the work that needs to be done to be done. In a year or so, I will consider adding underfloor heating to improve efficiency but am nearing the limits of the law of diminishing returns.
What these strange events mean is that I have come to the end of renovations and improvements to make the house into a comfortable pad for an ageing bachelor bloke. What will I do with myself, I wonder, with the ending of over two years of devotion to making the house into what I want it to be?
I will explore that challenge in the original blog (LifeAccording...)
