Anyways... the Friday of Memorial Day weekend, Bill had a half day. Seriously, the day before a holiday or the weekend of a holiday, it's like the higher ups at Bill's company are like 'eh, let's just have a half day' EVERY TIME. So not fair. Anyways, I had to work in Wisconsin, so that put me back at home at about 6pm. I walked in the door and everything was ripped out. YES! And most of it was cleaned up. Well, at least the big stuff was.
I have no advice for this part of the process because I wasn't there. I'm pretty sure Bill just took a sledge hammer and went at it. My one probably very good piece of advice would be: protect the things you're not destroy very well... like your bathtub and floor. Our bathtub looks horrible already and part of finishing up our bathroom is to get that refinished/painted/whatever it's called, so it was sort of protected at the beginning and then not really at all later on. Tape over the drain, lay down cardboard, maybe tape that in place and then probably cover it all in plastic so small stuff doesn't get down into things and scratch stuff up. Somebody did put some scratches on a couple things.... one on a floor tile that I think if I put sealer in it, it won't be noticeable. The other was many scratches on our hard wood floors from him dragging the bags through the house :/ .... I lied, there is a third place. Our deck from dragging the bags there too. Don't DRAG the bags. Our floors need to be refinished, so I'm not super upset or anything, just slightly annoyed.
Bill, I believe, was in a slight panic because he had found mold on the insulation under the window. I am allergic to mold, like I can't breath and I get sick allergic. So, he was panicy because mold existed and he knew that it would affect me. Unfortunate side note, I'm pretty sure his demolition knocked some spores about the house and I had some issues the next couple days, but I'm fine now. Anyways, he didn't clearly spell out where this mold was and he made it sound like it was on the wall studs, etc.
So, I called my mother, my personal mold expert. She has worked in insurance for I think my whole life and has taken a lot of 'classes' about mold and how to handle it. I asked her what she would recommend I clean it up with. Turns out, I didn't even need to ask, because after further questioning Bill, he told me that it was just on the insulation facing the tile. I sprayed stuff down with bleach anyways, just to make sure.
I of course got the fantastic job of the fine clean up. I whipped out our fancy Home Depot 'shop vac'. It's really just this contraption that you snap on to the top of their fancy orange buckets. The thing has worked great for other stuff, but I've basically destroyed my regular vacuum from sucking up drywall dust, so I got this bad boy out. It worked great, at first.... until all the dust clogged up it's not fancy filter bag thing so much that it now neglects to suck. Fun stuff. So, I would be sucking away and then it was just sort of stop sucking. Then it would start just letting stuff fall back out. I'm not sure how this was really occurring, but I'm guessing it just didn't make it all the way through the tube into the bucket in the first place.
I finally got it all cleaned up, mostly. I figured we would be making more of a mess anyways, so that I didn't need to be perfect. Then we went out to the fantastic Home Depot, the first of MANY trips that weekend to go get some new insulation. That was fun... So, obviously, you want to get the best insulation. Well, every sort of package they sold was WAY MORE than we needed, which I can deal with.
We had R-19 in the wall that we pulled out.... R-19 only comes in (I think) 6 1/4 in thick. Our walls are only 3 1/2. Someone smashed extra thick insulation into the wall.... I'm not 100% on how some of this stuff works and I could totally look it up, but don't the create different thicknesses for a reason? As in, sometimes when you try to stuff too much into too small of a space it does the reverse of what you are intending to do? In this case, one would think more insulation would make it warmer, but maybe in fact it's causing it to not work as well as an insulation with a lower R value that fits properly? I'm no expert.
Well, we ended up buy the three times as much as we needed package with an R-15 value that was 15 inches thick. We had 12 inches between our studs. Fun stuff. So, we got to cut a bunch of insulation.
We got all the insulation put in, which was fairly fast and easy. Then it was on to the cement board...
No comments:
Post a Comment