In which the fluff gets less fluffy.
Today was mostly a supply run day, but we'll start things off by tidying up a few remaining bits of mystery wood that I didn't get to yesterday, namely this rafter reject and the little diagonal piece of universal wood that was holding up the car hole door opener.
I didn't feel like crawling around in the attic to remove the one (1) nail holding that end to the top of the living room wall just on the other side of the drywall here, so instead I just cut it off flush.
I'll deal with the remainder some other time, probably when I redo the drywall (which has seen better days).
This rafter reject is actually in surprisingly good shape, so I should be able to chop it up and reuse at least some of it.
This one doesn't have any signs of a birds mouth so I think that bit is still up in the attic.
Anyway, I also removed some little scraps of universal wood from some of the rafters that I hadn't cleaned up when I removed the hantavirus shelves a few years ago, and also pulled down a board with some nails in it that was previously being used to hang things up. Things like this rope.
This "rope".
I have no idea what happened to it, but you can literally just pull it apart with your bare hands, without any force at all. I'm pretty sure a twisted up kleenex has more tensile strength in it than what's left of this pile of microplastics.
Anyway, about that supply run. This is, once again, where I'm quite happy that I drive a van.
And this is also where the story of the fluffening takes a twist: this is not rockwool. Obviously. It's 2 inch polyisocyanurate, which delivers the same R-13 as the 3.5" batts of rockwool. It also costs the same amount, give or take a few pennies.
Why the change? Well it's pretty simple: I only have 2x4 rafters holding up the roof in the car hole, and if I installed ventilation baffles, as I planned to do, that'd take up about 1.5 to 2 inches of thickness, leaving only about 1.5 to 2 inches of space for the 3.5 inches of rockwool. This is not an ideal situation.
What's also not ideal is the amount of scotch whisky flowing through the veins of the roof framers 65-odd years ago when they somehow managed to nail up the rafters at all manner of wonky angles, not even managing to line up the ends on opposite sides of the ridge board. What this means is that if I got the bat insulation, I'd end up having to cut it to pieces in order to fit into the randomly trapezoidal rafter bays.
On the other hand, with the polyiso, I'll still need to slice it up to fit into the rafter bays, but I won't have to deal with adding the insulation baffles nor trying to stuff too much insulation into each bay.
Of course I could have gone with polystyrene insulation instead and saved quite a bit of money, but that stuff is highly flammable and I'd rather not turn my car hole into a blazing inferno when some grinder sparks happen to bounce off the ceiling. Polyiso is, in contrast, highly flame resistant.
I've still got a few more supplies to pick up tomorrow morning, but that can wait until tomorrow morning.
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