Sunday with the temps barely in double digits and the wind blowing I decided to work on the inside of the house. With our older home there is always plenty to do but particularly there has been air leak around a light switch in the kitchen. It's located on an outside wall and in an area I haven't worked on yet. After looking at it I found that the wall located behind a the switch an a couple cabinets were not insulated. To compound the problem when the cabinets were installed they used a wing type anchor in the sheetrock to hold up the end cabinet. The 1" holes were drilled into the uninsulated area, giving an easy path for the cold air to enter the kitchen. We are planning on renovating the whole kitchen down to the studs in a few years. That combined with the look my wife gave me as she realized what a mess I had made already on a Sunday morning, I decided to fix the easy to get to areas and wait for proper renovation to fix the rest. The light switch box wasn't holding onto the sheetrock as the hole for it was too big so I cut out and replaced the sheetrock insulated with fiberglass insulation and sealed the box. This area is shown as "B" in the picture. The area above it, I used the existing holes and a couple new ones to spray in some insulation, rather than removing the sheetrock. That area is shown as "A" in the picture. The location of the stud is shown as a red line, with the area that remained untouched and uninsulated shown as "C" to the right. When I got done just for giggles I used my infrared thermometer and shot the three areas. There was a 3 degree drop from A to B and a 6 degree drop from B to C. A was 66, B was 63 and C was 57. Just shows how much better expanding insulation insulates and seals as compared to fiberglass. It made an immediate difference in the feel of our little kitchen. I'm glad that this is the only wall I know of that doesn't have wall insulation!
Nice job. I always liked looking for air leaks this time of year. Obsessed about it you might say. All those little leaks add up.
Spooky, I tend to load up certain cabinets with canned goods that combine for a heavy load. Glad they didn't come down on anyone.
Fiberglass allows a lot of air migration and loses r value as the temps drop, foam and dense packed cellulose ( for wall cavities) do not.
With the cold weather moving back in I got to work on the kitchen again. I decided to update the lights in the little room off of the kitchen we call the "nook". The old lights were a bit dated and were located about 6' above the floor, which meant we had to locate cabinets and furniture around them. After removing the old light and cutting in the box for the new light I found that there was a large air leak into the wall cavity. Whoever built the walls left a gap of about 1" between the top plate and the top of the sheathing. This let exterior air from the soffit to come into the top of the wall. You can see here that I put in some wood blocking to fill block this void. Later I used spray foam to fill in the gaps along this blocking and the studs and top plate, before reinstalling the fiberglass insulation. Here is the new light and repair panels. I used scrap greenboard.
It doesn't take much schlot . I did some work in our kitchen today too and I stopped before I got carried away, gonna save the mess for tomorrow. I am converting an old basement stairway into a laundry room.
I'll have some tomorrow. Today I cleaned two rooms out and made preperations for the sawzall and the horsehair to come down. I have to "tent" off the kitchen and a bathroom to do the demo in order to contain most of the mess.
Well with our new standard size dishwasher (our old one was an apartment sized one) on its way, we moved the refrigerator and will be putting the new dishwasher where it was. Unfortunately it's on the same exterior wall of the pictures above, so I knew there was no insulation in the walls. Originally I was just going to insulate behind where the dishwasher was going to be installed and leave the wall above it for a later day. so I pulled off the old drywall below where the countertop would be. The exterior sheathing is old tongue and groove boards. Since the boards were gapping with age, and knowing my FIL didn't put in good house wrap on, I decided to seal the joints with caulk. I ran electrical up to put in another receptacle above where the new countertop would be. You can also tell we didn't move the refrigerator last time we painted.
After work tonight I decided "What the heck, let's do it right" so I started taking out the rest of the wall. This will allow us to get the whole wall left of the sink redone. I ran out of caulk and time to do much more tonight, but by removing this area it will now allow me to get the wall both weather tight and insulated (R13).
Ha, rookies built your house - mine had a full 8-9" gap around the entire perimeter of the house. My kitchen and one closet still has that gap (I presume since the entire rest of the house was like that). One day I will get to those. Only saving grace was at least there is some insulation - about 1.5" of 1960's rockwool.
You're right some is better than nothing! It's taking a while but every time I elimimate something like this I feel a lot better about things. When you talk about rookies you're spot on. Here is how they hung the wall cabinets. Those are holes into the uninsulated wall for wing nuts they used to hold up the wall cabinets. I know they must have been letting a lot of air into the house, but this was above the fridge so I never noticed. Another sign of a lot of air movement. Cobwebs galore around some big gaps in the sheathing boards. Yikes!
I have to put a 2x4 nailer against the wall stud, so I decided to put a thermal break in. I sliced down some 1/2" iso and put it between the 2x4s.
Thanks for sharing the pictures. I really enjoy construction projects. We we did our home over, (built in 1975) we did a total gut job right to the studs on the outside walls. Even the heating and electric was removed. No nightmares run into like you all have been posting. But it was a time consuming job and ate up thousands of dollars. Good luck with the do overs.
