Hi all!I’m getting ready to do an outsulation project on a modest house in Montpelier, VT – climate zone 6a. The house was built in the 1970’s or 80’s. It’s 2×4 @ 16″ o.c. stick frame construction and is filled with fiberglass insulation. There seems to be a mix of foil faced and regular brown kraft paper fiberglass in the stud bays. The street level floor has 1/2″ polyiso on the interior side under the drywall. The exposed roadside wall faces south/southwest. The intention is to do all the work from the outside and avoid interior work as much as…

Thought I’d share my recent experience dense packing cellulose in 2×6 stud bays. As insulation contractors that do dense pack cellulose are few and far between in my area, I was pleased doing it myself with a rental machine was relatively simple and straight-forward. I used a Krendl 425 blower, rented from my local independent building supply store for $45/day. Much of the information I used to figure out how to do it came from GBA articles, including comments on Martin Holliday’s blog post here:https://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/article/borrowing-a-cellulose-blower-from-a-big-box-store First, I stapled and glued Insulweb across the stud bays. The glue was Elmer’s, thinned…

We’re undertaking a full renovation of a c.1920 house in the SF Bay Area.  The house has an existing crawl space (varies in height between 6’6″ and down to perhaps 12″ in places), but has a large enough space centrally that we can potentially use as a mechanical room which is an attractive idea. We’re specifying and investing in having the house above pretty air tight, and mechanically ventilating and so naturally exploring where the edge of our building envelope is, and whether the crawl space is inside, outside or it’s own discretely treated space. The space is currently vented…

This house is 100+ yrs old. The back wall was buried in dirt and built up gravel. Moisture rotted the sill, band joist, bottom plate and some of the vertical members. Also some of the foundation wall needed repair. We have repaired (see photos of current state) and now we will put siding back on, but how to flash since the rest of the wall is just siding on studs with bat insulation between? This is in the mixed humid climate of central NC. Thank you! https://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/question/flashing-at-base-of-repaired-wall