Blowing Away the Cold

We were at an impasse. We couldn’t stand the ridiculously high gas bills and we were tired of the constant cold that has forced even our cats to burrow under blankets.

Turning up the heat cost us money. Keeping the heat low was costing us our sanity.

Leah came up with a possible solution, which she has taken to calling “a team building exercise.” That means a major home improvement project involving at least six trips to Home Depot, one roll of duct tape and eventually several 5-gallon buckets of spackle. Somehow every project involves spackle.

We spent the past weekend blowing an insane amount of insulation into our attic and one wall. And I promise you, this project was as fun as it sounds.



Leah was stationed on the front porch where she would feed bags of chemically treated chunks of recycled newspaper into a blower. I would brave the attic, but first I had to get into my gear. I had my goggles, face mask and head lamp. I had my jeans taped to my socks and my shirt taped to my gloves in an attempt to stop the existing fiberglass from making me itch. To be totally honest, I looked like a badass.



The attic is only 2 ½ feet tall, which forced me to crawl around on pieces of thin plywood placed over the studs. Leah attached a rope to the back of my jeans as a way to communicate. She tugged it when she was about to start another bag of insulation and I tugged it to tell her to stop. I spent three hours in the attic on the first day and two hours the next. In all, we blew in 30 bags of insulation, more than 650 pounds of the stuff.

I escaped the attic alive, but sore. I had to navigate the hose into the far reaches of that attic, past two-by-fours and over electrical wiring. To do so, I had to lay in awkward poses that eventually caused pressure bruises on my elbows, ribs, hips and knees.





But at least Leah got me a nice, big, greasy Italian hoagie. Hoagies make just about everything better.

Once I loaded up the attic, it was time to take a hammer to our front wall. Using a very mediocre keyhole saw to make an indentation, I hammered 12 holes into the front wall, finding an empty cavity that in some places was 16 inches deep. It took another hour or two and six more bags of insulation to fill in the walls.



We are not yet sure how successful our “team building exercise” has been. The living room feels warmer, but our bedroom really doesn’t. No matter what, we know we did what we could and I now have the green light to turn up the thermostat, high gas bill be dammed. And Leah has 12 major wall holes to spackle before she begins skimcoating the walls. Like I said, every project eventually involves spackle.