George Shirley wrote:
....
What exactly are we foaming?

some hard to reach spots above
closets along the outer wall that should
have been sealed up and finished 20yrs
ago when the place was built. in two of
them i'd plugged them up by stuffing old
t-shirts in there to keep air flow down.
surprised by how well those old shirts
held up for that long. i thought they'd
have been chewed up by bugs or mice.
nope. so they got a third use today as
i used them to dust 20yrs of dust up and
finally threw them away.

a few winters ago i could feel drafts
through this room from various leaks in
the walls. since then i've gone around
the outside perimeter and caulked and
foamed shut all the gaps down low and in
the siding which. last winter i didn't
notice the drafts any more so that was
nice. still get plenty of air flow
though with forced air heat/AC.

these three spots were the last of
the sealing up i wanted to do this fall.
i still have some caulking to do and
the garden shed (which is the back wall
of the garage) needs work to seal it up.
the mice get in the walls too easily
there.

in my room here i had to duck tape
three foam can tubes together to get
them to reach to the back wall. it
would have been very hard to crawl up
in there to get to them, but luckily
the extended straw trick worked well
enough.

i figure a three to five year payback
on this project. mostly it was just to
keep bugs from crawling through and any
heat savings is a bonus.


It's fairly nice here at 1442 hours, light
breeze blowing, which is helpful. I started Tilly's fall brushing
yesterday, so far a plastic bag full of dog hair has come off her. Once
it is all off, that which doesn't blow across the garden with the wind,
will be buried around one of the fruit trees. A good source of nitrogen
with a little work. I think I saw fall peaking in on us last night but
I'm not 100% sure yet.

we've had about a dozen hard frosts
so far and some snow, but today was 67F.
not too bad yet. trees are losing
the leaves. been raining a fair bit so
i still have gardens to finish up and
also beets to pick and put up.


songbird