Shop preparation - Part 2

One of the reasons I’ve put off insulating the walls for so long is that it is, without a doubt, a two-man job (make that a dirty job), and it requires a truck. So, when my son announced he would be home for Thanksgiving with a rented pickup truck, unbeknownst to him, I seized the opportunity.

Following a tip, I settled on the idea of blowing cellulose insulation into the walls, from cuts I made near the ceiling. Home Depot sells the stuff for about $11 a bale, but requires you to buy a minimum of 20 bales in order to use the hopper/blower for free.

I figured I’d fill up the walls, then shoot the rest above the ceiling as additional insulation. The walls ended up swallowing 9 bales.

If I knew then what I know now, I would have paid somebody to do it, but in this case ignorance was absolutely bliss, and we dove headfirst into the trap.

Alessandro breaking up the cellulose bale before feeding it to the hopper

While the system is designed and works well for blowing insulation 10 to 15 feet away, it really sucks (no pun intended) at blowing it into a 4 inch deep wall space. The cellulose comes out with such force that most of it blows right out of the wall into your face, and onto everything else, including walls, ceiling, furniture, tools, you name it. The mess is total!

Premature gray hair

Needing to improvise, I sacrificed the flat fiberglass piece I built in chapter 3, cut a hole and ran the hose through it.

This worked much better, even though the air coming out of the hose would now pressurize the channels in the wall. This tended to lift the plate off the wall every so often, gracing us with an instantaneous dirt shower. At least I could see right through the semi-transparent fiberglass, and stop blowing when the wall filled up.

Being on the top rung of a shaky ladder, in zero visibility, while fighting a bucking bronco of a fiberglass plate, over and over for 37 times, is just not the kind of fun I had in mind, and it will be just fine by me if I never have to do this job ever again. 

After two full days of cleaning, vacuuming, and blowing, the shop had finally returned to normality, even though I was still digging lint out of places where the “sun don’t shine”. 

Time will tell how well the insulation holds up to the heat, and the cold, but I have the feeling the shop has just become the most comfortable place in the entire house.

UPDATE: It took an entire roll of fiberglass insulation cut in small pieces to fill the gap left near the ceiling.

A little trim and it will be done.