Update December 30

Well, well. We still have snow on the ground. Back porch and front yard measured an average of 8.5" total. What a beautiful day it was!!!

Went sledding with the neighbors and laughed as we figured out how old we were. Bumps that wouldn't have bothered us even 10 years ago make us ache now. I hate getting older! Rich and I took a walk around the block and ended up being ballast for someone from Michigan who had gotten stuck. He asked if I would drive since I was the lightest of the bunch. Dude, I grew up in NC. I know better. I got Dad's 21-foot Buick LeSabre stuck in the snow in an empty parking lot a trillion years ago. I don't drive in snow. The look on my face looked like he'd just asked me to kill his cat. I don't want to wreck anyone's truck, so no thanks!

We got the insulation guys out here and the attic looks beautiful! It's full of insulation, piled high above the joists. It looks like it snowed in there! We're already noticing our furnace doesn't have to come on quite as often, so I'm really hoping it helped. Between the tax credit and the home energy rebate from the power company, it looks like it was cheaper to have someone else do it than to do it ourselves. And no one had to fall through the ceiling! How awesome is that?

And for the non-construction people, R value means insulation value. Maybe the R stands for Retention? Not sure about that, but we'll go with that. R value here isn't as stringent as up north, for obvious reasons. The new code here is R 38 for the attic. We might be close to that, now. R5 for the walls just means that it's not paper thin, but might as well be. But talking with the insulation guy . . . with all the work they'd need to do to insulate the walls here, we'd never see the return on our money. They'd have to open a hole in the sheetrock between each and every stud in the exterior walls, blow insulation in, and leave it for us to repair the hole, patch, prime, paint, etc. And remember, I don't do sheetrock. Ugh.

The next place we insulate will be the crawlspace, but we want to make sure it's nice and dry under there before we do that. We had water issues underneath when we bought it, so we're still dealing with that. No sense in putting insulation in and trapping moisture between it and the floor. I do think the crawlspace is drying out a bit, though. The floorboards throughout the house are popping and cracking. When we bought it, the owner had just had the floors stripped, repaired, and refinished. Some boards shrank more than others, so they used putty between boards that had separated. The putty is so strong that now, when the boards shrink, they actually crack in the board, not between them! How crazy is that? We've got a nice one in the main hallway that can pinch your toes just right if you're not paying attention. We're calling it "character". Hey, did you pinch your toes when you were walking down the hall? Character's a bitch, isn't it?

I can tell we haven't worked on the house in a while. My fingernails are so long that I keep hitting the wrong keys and I have to keep deleting and re-typing. I can't remember the last time my nails were this long. Normally, they've ripped, torn, or been cut by something by now. Guess it's really time to get back to work! Rich has to work this weekend, though, so it may be another week before we really get going again. We need a couple days in a row to install kitchen floor. Haven't had those since early December, so it may still be a while.

Off to see what trouble I can get into. . . .