Since my vacation days are coming to a close I decided to clean up some more fiddly tasks today, starting with getting the soffit vent covers prepped for installation.
And the first step of preparing them is to remove the bar code sticker, which was expertly placed to block 90% of the vent area.
I wonder how many of these have been installed with this bar code sticker still in place, over the years? I'm guessing somewhere between "all of them" and "all of them".
The Prop 65 warning will, of course, be staying. We can't have anyone being unknowingly exposed to aluminum, after all.
While we're here, I also checked to make sure that the 2 inch hole saw I have would make the right sized hole for these to fit snugly into.
And that is, indeed, a delightfully snug fit into this piece of wood that will now double as an installation tool. It also reminded me that my 2 inch hole saw is just slightly not deep enough to cut all the way through a piece of universal wood from one side, which is awkward. But more on that later, we've got stickers to remove.
And remove and remove and remove.
Now we need to prime these, and it just so happens that I have some aluminum primer left over from the awning refreshening I did a while back.
And so on it goes.
And on and on and on.
Now my house isn't primer-coloured (well, it's a slightly different shade of primer, I guess) so now would be a good time to use up a bit more of that jar of sample paint I got a short while back.
Or maybe it was a long while back. Well, a little peeling and stirring later and it's looking good as... usable.
You know what? It spreads on fine, so let's paint.
And paint and paint and paint.
Well that was a bit of work, let's take a short bicycle break.
We don't have winter here, we have smog. People do love their wood burning fireplaces this time of year.
Anyway, back at it and it's mail time.
Using a knife that wasn't long enough to make it half way through the foam wasn't really cutting it, pun entirely intended, so I picked up an 18mm utility knife. I also ordered some non-snap blades so that the blade wouldn't snap while I had it extended like this, but they're arriving a bit late so I'll just try to be careful with the one (1) snap blade that was included with the knife.
I know that size isn't supposed to matter, but it's gotta be long enough to do the job!
Also in that delivery was a 1 inch hole saw to add to my hole saw kit. I don't need it for this project, but I do need it for "don't assume I have a 1 inch hole saw in this kit when there actually isn't one".
But more importantly, I got this hole poker.
This is a 2 inch self-feeding auger bit, which looks like it should rightly be a wrist-breaker-9000-deluxe.
Which just barely fits into the chuck on my drill.
But despite appearances to the contrary, it actually goes through this universal wood surprisingly smoothly; even moreso I dare say than the hole saw which has a tendency to bind and grab. This just chews up the wood and spits it out the back effortlessly. I like it.
And yes, it does drill the holes sufficiently on-size.
Now I was going to go around poking holes in my soffits today, but it occurred to me that some of the insulation panels I've installed are being held up mostly just by the seam tape and the wishes of small children. Like, most of them are in there pretty snug, but there's a few that are just lightly set in place. Given that, it seemed likely that a strong wind blowing in through the soffit vents might be enough to pop them out and send them crashing back down to the car hole floor, and so I decided that I should hold off on the soffit vents until I get the strapping nailed up.
So let's carry on with the insulation installation instead.
I'm happy to announce that I made it through the first roll of seam tape.
So that means I damn well better be at least 1/4 of the way done, because I only bought 4 rolls of it.
Speaking of doneness, I managed to fill these two rafter bays before running out of working hours.
There's just the one more teensy wedge-shaped bay on this side to go (which you can see in the upper left), which is nice, because it means I can move the insulation panels inside if there's any rain in the forecast, and they won't be too terribly in the way if I stack them under here. I don't think they'd get damaged by being rained on, but all the same I don't want to deal with wet insulation panels.
Oh, and I also furred out and insulated this little cheese wedge.
There's three more rafter bays on the other side that would have been nice to get done, as then I could move my band saw back into its home, so I'll probably tackle those next as I putter along to finish up this job. I also have the 4 full size rafter bays on that side to do, but I'm holding off on those for a bit as I'll need to move some car hole crap out of the way to access them properly.
On the subject of puttering along, I'm expecting progress to slow considerably from here on out, so this will be the last of the daily-ish updates. I'll make another post here and there as I run across things worth sharing or just to summarize the work that's been done, but other than that it's back to the usual schedule of occasionally shouting into the void for me.
For now, I'm calling this another project successfully part-done.
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