The Great Fluffening, Part 7

Today we're going through the looking glass, which is to say doing basically the same thing as yesterday but in a mirror image.

The car hole door brackets got a shortening on this side and some blocking installed, the little triangle in the corner got some blocking and a cheese wedge of insulation, and after all of that I managed to have just enough time to fill two measly rafter bays with foam.

Two rotten, measly rafter bays. And let me tell you, you would have to search long and hard to find a bigger concentration of mease than these two rafter bays. The one on the left loses a good half inch in width from the bottom to the top, and if you think that's bad, the one on the right goes from about 16 inches at the bottom to barely 13 inches at the top.

Luckily these two rafter bays are the worst in the whole roof (well, except for maybe the one right next to them), so getting them out of the way should be a lot of work off my plate.

I think it's pretty clear at this point that I'm not going to get the whole insulation project done before my vacation is up, particularly since I'm trying to actually enjoy some R&R in between sessions of wrestling with framing and insulating. The good news is that the project is in a state now where I can just chip away at it whenever I find time, and there shouldn't be anything major to trip me up from here on out.

The Great Fluffening Part 6

I was hoping that today would just be tossing insulation up into the rafters non-stop, but one minor issue did end up stopping me for a little detour: the mounts for my car hole door tracks.

I don't really want to entomb these forever behind the insulation, strapping and drywall (just entombing them behind the drywall would be acceptable, though), so I'm going to put in a piece of blocking and lower them down below the level of the rafters.

Like this, basically.

Cutting through the slotted angle wasn't too bad to do with my snips, and I made sure to bevel the ends so as not to leave a pointy-sharp right angle.

Anyway, with that done I was ready to get rolling with stuffing the insulation, and now that I had yesterday's experience under my belt, I surely wouldn't be spending an hour on fitting the insulation panel into each stud bay.

Or at least that's what I told myself before spending an hour on fitting the insulation panels into each stud bay.

I did a little reset though and had a think about the pain points I was running into, and decided to switch things up a little bit by cutting the panels cross-ways into 4 foot panels rather than lengthwise into 8 foot ones. Wrestling the full 8 foot lengths up here was turning out to be quite a chore, and cutting them was equally awkward given that the straightedge I was using is only 4 feet long.

These 4 foot panels did indeed turn out to be much easier to deal with, and despite needing to do twice the layout and cutting, the process went much quicker than with the 8 foot ones, so I'll be continuing like this from here on I think.

Of course, there's only 6 more full-length rafter bays until I get into the weeds of the valley rafter bays, so I was going to run out of places to stick 8 foot panels soon anyway.

The Great Fluffening Part 5

When last we left off, there was just a little bit of framing yet to do, starting with finishing off these collar tie-ish pieces.

Which went in pretty smoothly.

Then we just needed a bit of blocking along the top of this wall, which we'll use later to nail some strapping to.

Which was a good way to use up the world's shittiest piece of universal wood.

Honestly it was more knot than wood, so sticking it in a completely nonstructural location like this made a lot of sense.

But with that done, it's time to get to the main event: actually, finally installing insulation.

It's a good thing I have just barely enough clear space in my car hole to fit a 4x8 sheet of this 2-inch polyiso board.

Anyway, it gets cut out and up it goes.

The cut on this one isn't super smooth. I tried a score-and-snap technique but it wasn't great for a 2 inch thick piece of foam. On the next piece I tried cutting it with a hand saw and it resulted in a much cleaner cut, but was pretty slow.

I think using a utility knife to cut from both sides might be the answer, I'll try that on the next sheet. But first, I want to get the tape up on these two panels while the ladders are in a good spot.

Is it strictly necessary? Eh, can't hurt.

And it's not especially difficult to install.

Just to sate my curiosity, I grabbed my IR camera and took a snapshot of the roof here.

I really didn't expect to see much of a difference, but somehow even in the dead of winter, at about 10°c outside, the insulation is impressively effective. The underside of the sheathing was upwards of 19°c and the insulation was more around 13-14°c. Of course I don't mind the solar gain in the winter, but come summer this reduction will be very welcome, and I can always stick a heater out here on the chilly days to warm things up now that the heat won't be just directly escaping out through the roof.

Well, now I just need to do the entire rest of the roof. Better get to that.