Our Paisley Home: All in a weekend's work

I can spend hours daydreaming and imagining what we will do in our new home (many of these hours involve pinterest.com!) I think about what colour we will paint the walls, how we will arrange the rooms, how good our basement would look if we could afford all the storage solutions in the world and so on and so forth. However, at this point, we have to scale back the dreaming and ground ourselves in reality. We have a lot of work to do before March 31st, and none of it justifies any time spent on pinterest.

When we moved in, we found out that there was zero insulation in this 101 year old baby. This was not revealed to us in the home inspection since there was no attic hatch. We found out upon tearing down a wall and cutting an attic hatch. We can understand that a house built a century ago would lack insulation, after all, wood was plentiful and heat was cheap. What we can't wrap our heads around is how none of the previous owners went about insulating the place. Heating bills must have been through the roof! (Pun intended).

The uninsulated attic

Our fancy new attic hatch

So away we went to insulate the attic (after setting up wiring to put in overhead lights in the bedrooms) and the one corner of first floor attic space. Afterwards, we found out that the government is offering grants for home upgrades that increase efficiency, only available until March 31st. Although we missed out on the attic grant, there are still grants for insulating the basement, exterior walls, replacing doors etc. We booked an audit and, as predicted, it revealed there were many ways we could upgrade the efficiency of our home. Apparently, the air in our house changes completely 15 times per hour, with an ideal number being closer to 7. At least we're breathing fresh air? Also, the auditor said that if we added up all the tiny hole and leaks in our home, we would have a gaping hole equivalent to 1.6 square meters. Do you get what I mean when I say we aren't even thinking about paint at this point?

Hose man

The cotton candy insulation blower machine

Part way through insulating

These upgrades have been keeping us busy, and the time crunch has been leaving us with a (healthy?) level of stress to get it all done. Andrew's Dad, Craig, spent a weekend with us in December getting all the work done that is seen in the previous photos, as well as tearing down a wall in our bedroom! For some reason, and probably against his better judgment, he decided to come back again this weekend to help insulate some of the remaining first floor attic spaces. I guess we didn't wear him out enough the first weekend! We couldn't feel more grateful for all the hard work he has done, and the knowledge he has brought to our home renovation adventure.