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Sunday, January 6, 2013

Adventures in the Attic: Yep, Attic, Not Basement

The start of 2013 has been the definition of unpredictable and unexpected in our house. With the temperature dropping we have gotten to put the new radiant heat system to the test. (I am planning on doing a post just about the radiant heat sometime soon to explain a little more about it, but I did put some info on it HERE). Our goal with the radiant heat is to improve the energy efficiency of our house - something that can be hard to do with older houses. We knew that another step we would need to take in order to improve the efficiency of the house was to add more insulation in the attic. For our house we should have had about 15 inches of insulation in our attic, and we only had about 5 inches.

Long story short:
- not enough insulation
- no more forced air furnace to dry out air
- extra moisture from the new concrete slab in the basement as it cures
- heat getting up into attic
- extra moisture in attic
- mold growing in attic (yikes!)

SO

We have spent our year thus far taking everything out of the attic, add insulation, get rid of all the cardboard boxes (which were soggy from the moisture) and put everything into plastic totes (which are on sale right now at pretty much every store - yay!)

I'm not going to show you any pictures - because it is a complete and total mess! But we are slowly getting everything cleaned up, and things should be getting back to normal soon.

Hope the start of your new year has been less messy than ours has been!

2 comments:

  1. Oh no! That sounds like a disaster. Hope nobody got sick from it!

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  2. My daughter's home has mold it it to. The owner is going to fix it. Now she knows why she couldn't breath when she went to bed. The mold was by the head board and wall. Hope you can fix it soon.

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