The Great Fluffening Part 11

Well it's been a wild ride but it's finally come to a close.

It's time to nail up the last piece of strapping.

Feels good to be done this phase, but there's still one more thing I need to deal with before this project is fully complete, and that's installing the soffit vents.

They'll be going in these soffits here.

Most of the soffits will be getting two vents, but there's some uneven spacing so one of the soffits is only getting one. Let's see how the 2 inch auger bit does in drilling through these old chunks of Universal Wood.

Well it just eats right through them.

Though it's a bit of a sloppy eater.

Well holes are holes and, as we can see, these holes lead right into the space above the polyiso insulation panels.

Though this view won't last long, as they're getting plugged up with these round vents.

Which I pre-painted to match.

From the ground they basically disappear.

But they're up there, doing their thing.

And speaking of things down on the ground, I have a bit of sweeping to do.

Correction: I have a lot of sweeping to do.

And with that, the fluffening is complete.

The Great Fluffening Part 10

When we last left off, I had just upgraded my tool arsenal with some foam cutting jigsaw blades. I'm happy to report that these have been working remarkably well. So well, in fact, that I've managed to finally get all of the insulation panels installed.

This was also helped a great deal by the T-square that I finally got around to purchasing.

I really should have got this from the start, but live and learn I guess.

Speaking of learning things, I learned that my head gets really sweaty when I'm at the top of a ladder. I think it must be because I'm afraid of heights, since there's simply no other logical explanation for it.

But I managed to persevere, and, as I mentioned above, the insulation panels are all in place. Let's take a moment to bask in their insulating glory.

The moment of basking is over, work will resume immediately.

Specifically, the work of putting up the strapping. At some point in the far distant future I expect this strapping will be holding up some drywall, but in the more immediate present it's going to keep the insulation panels from falling out, since a few of them aren't an especially snug fit and the tape won't hold them forever.

First up, the diagonals along the valley.

Followed by filling in across the joists.

The pneumatic nail gun is really pulling its weight here.

Continuing across the top, it's more of the same, though on a 19.2 center instead of the 16 inch centers, because this section of ceiling happened to be about 40 inches across so it divided more evenly that way.

If you recognize this strapping from a few years ago, you've got a good eye. It's actually the strapping that used to be (barely) holding up the vinyl siding that used to be on the front of my house. Naturally I wouldn't throw away some perfectly good crappy wood, and that decision paid off handsomely today.

Of course there isn't nearly enough of it to do the whole ceiling so I'll need to get about 30 more boards to wrap things up, give or take, but I at least had enough to get things started.

The Great Fluffening Part 9

Progress has naturally slowed a bit now that I'm back to twerk at my day job, but it hasn't come to a halt. I did a bit of insulating this week but held off on doing too much while I was waiting for another new tool to come in.

You see, cutting the foam with the larger utility knife was definitely a step up from the small one, but I had my eye on going one better.

Wherever there is a job, there is a power tool to make it faster (and more dangerous).

These blades are designed for soft materials like foam and cardboard, and have a wavy knife edge designed to slice through the material rather than serrated teeth that rip out chunks of annoying fluff.

They're also much longer than regular jigsaw blades.

Now that's a knoif.

I had actually tried cutting the foam with a regular blade, but the short length left it just barely unable to pierce the paper on the back side of the cut, and the foam crumbs it ejected everywhere were irritating to say the least. Let's see what kind of cuts this new blade can make.

And the verdict is...

Beautifully clean and basically dust-free. It's also very easy to control and follow a line, so this should be a big upgrade.

As for the insulation progress, I've filled two more highly irregular bays.

And I used some highly irregular scraps to make it work. Waste not, want not.

The Great Fluffening Part 8

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.

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.