attic

We were working in the attic yesterday. It really makes no sense that we were working in the attic. It is August/September in Arizona . . . the hottest days of the year. Yet that is when we chose to insulate.

We've got a great walk-in attic room - space for lots of junk, which unfortunately we have a lot of. The bad part of working up there is that the roof slopes down dramatically, so even though there is a sense of having room to walk around, I find myself cracking my skull on the overhead beams if I walk a little too far to the right.

Yesterday, we took up all the floorboards so we could spray in some insullation between the first and second floor. The process entailed prying up nails and planks of wood, scooping out handfuls of 60 year old nasty, deteriorated insullation, sweeping, vacuuming, cleaning etc.

As the floorboards were being removed, we were walking around on the trusses. This process requires some balance and attention, because if you step between the studs, you could go right through the sheetrock to the living room below. Dave and I didn't worry about actually going through to the living room, because we certainly wouldn't fit between the studs. Melanie, however, would have crashed right through onto the couch below.We really didn't want to do any sheetrock repair in our living room so I prayed that we would be sure footed through this process. We were carrying around planks, buckets of tools, the shop vac, big hefty bags of the old insullation. We were prying wood, ducking around each others movements, all while balancing on the trusses. Eventually as the evening went on and we became more and more exhausted and nearing death because of the heat, and after many near misses with shoes and tools and buckets I realized it was inevitable. We had many close calls through the evening. I had to change my prayers to "Please don't let it be me that that puts my shoe through the sheetrock." I was looking down focusing on where I was putting my feet and smacking my head on the overhead slope more often than normal.

We had a company come and spray in some insulation this morning and Dave is like a little boy at Christmas, so excited and proud of the new and improved attic.

Sadly, this is only phase one of many phases of this project. We have to put down a new floor, insulate the ceiling of the attic, sheetrock, insulate a very wierd and hardly accessible space over one of the back bedrooms, insulate and seal around the walls of the loft upstairs, then tape and paint all the sheetrock. Oh, and Dave decided that since we have everything out of the attic and we're in the construction mode already, we might as well add those dormers on the roof that we've always wanted. So yeah, that too. I'm predicting by December, we should be finished and be able to put all our storage stuff away. (Just in time to pull a lot of it back out again to trim our Christmas tree!)