Category: House stuff

Finally getting into some consistently warm and more typical weather for this time of year. It’s not getting really hot  yet, but it’s hot enough to tell that the insulation I put in over the garage seems to be helping quite a bit to moderate the garage temperature.

Up in the attic space, I was measuring temperatures in the mid 30s (°C) while in the garage it was in the low 20s. Much more comfortable.

If the temperature difference stays around 10°C during the height of the summer heat, insulating the garage will have been totally worth the investment.

This year I decided to insulate the attic space above the garage. During the summer, the garage stays pretty hot and muggy, and nothing saps the will to work on projects in the garage more than stepping into a 40°C workspace.

The attic gets pretty toasty in the summer, and the drywall doesn’t do much to keep the heat out of the garage. I’m hoping the insulation will keep at least some of the hot humid attic air out of the garage and help maintain the garage at a tolerable temperature.

The insulation is pretty easy to put down, but having to crawl over and around the rafters made for tiring work, so I ended up splitting up the job over two days. Unfortunately I had a bit of a brain fart when ordering the insulation from Lowe’s and got the 16″ wide batts instead of the 24″ wide batts even though I had just measured the rafter spacing. Doh. Fortunately, each bat is 48″ long, so I just had to cut each one in half before laying it down. That added a bit to the installation process, but was easy enough to do.

With 4 of the 8 packs of insulation down, all the far away parts of the garage were insulated.

At the far end of the garage, there’s not a lot of head room and lots of shingle nails poking through the roof sheathing. After laying a few pieces of insulation down, I decided my head needed some protection. I don’t have a hard hat but I do have a bike helmet, which proved to be adequate for the job.

The second day went a lot faster and I was able to get the rest of it done in about an hour. A little less crouching and crawling around because most of the hard to get areas were already done.

The opening to the attic area is the only space left uninsulated now, so I’ll have to think of something to do about  that. Maybe glue some insulation to a board that would sit on the opening and could be moved out of the way when needed.

Ended up only using about 6.5 bundles out of the 8 that I bought. Not sure what I’ll do with the leftovers. Maybe I’ll just spread them out over the attic.

Very happy to see that the rose bushes survived Snowpocalypse 2018.

I had covered them up with some plastic sheeting to try to protect them a bit from the freezing weather we had, and then the snow came. All the snow accumulation on top of the sheet kind of flattened the bushes and they were pretty sad looking for a long while after that.

A few weeks ago leaves started sprouting on the bushes like crazy, so I guess the bushes are doing ok despite the snow and smushing and recent frosty mornings.

No signs of anything resembling rose buds yet, but maybe in a few more weeks.

Most of the big house projects are done, and now it’s time for the smaller ones. The closet in my office called out for shelves for some vertical storage.

Some wall brackets and 12″ wide 6′ long shelves fit into the closet perfectly.

I put in three shelves to start with, and have plenty of room to add full length or shorter shelves later if needed.

Plenty of room now for project parts and spare bits.

The workbench has a top now!

After browsing around Home Depot for a bit, I ended up going with 8 foot long 2×8″ boards for the top. A little rougher than the 1×8″ boards I was initially thinking about, but the 2×8″ boards were significantly less expensive. The end result is essentially the same though. The edges aren’t exactly the most square so there are some tiny gaps between each board, but nothing big enough that stuff will fall through them.

Next task will be to take the sander to it and smooth it out some. After that, it will be ready to use (unless I decide to do some coats of polyurethane or something).