Saturday, September 21, 2013

Retro remodel to new building standard

The final touch will be shutters but that's not to be taken lightly. In other words, we cannot make up our minds. Should we go for the modern cheats, the decoration-only shutters common to many remodels, or will we pick fully functioning shutters?

We'll see.

In the 1950s, the house looked like this, unchanged from its early days, except for the antenna, mercifully cut off at the very top.


Then it fell victim to the quick, easy, and ugly functional maintenance and became this cousin of the Amityville horror house:
A crane, sledgehammers, crowbars, many hours of work by the roofers, and months of our work spread out over years, got us to this:
The house is now almost completely up to the latest energy saving code required if you build a new house today. Since the roof structure was re-done, insulation of the attic was required by the permit. All the other insulation work was voluntary. Financially, insulating the "building envelope", i.e. all the outside walls, of a house as old as this one makes sense only if you can do most of the work yourself. The roofers were very happy when we asked them to take all the time they wanted for the project in return for our use of their scaffolding.

Some small, hard to fix areas were done with expensive but much thinner outside insulation. 
One the right side of the lower photo, you can see the wall at the top jut out a couple of inches where we doubled up the insulation while the lower portion of the wall barely encroaches on the stair space. The doubled up top is much more efficient than the 2009 New Building standard, the lower part is a little less efficient but still beats the more lenient 2007 standard.

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