This morning was a generous helping of Fun With Cement. One of the rooms in my house that's stripped back to the studs and exposed brickwork has lots of gaps between the concrete blocks. The outer surface is mostly OK, with a few air gaps (that are on the list to fix, when the weather is nicer), but the inner surface has gaps anything up to 3" wide between the blocks. No idea why they did that, but starting the process of filling the gaps in to improve the insulation. It's remarkable how fast it goes through cement, I've used a 10lb bag of it just patching the wall in the last couple of weeks alone. Today I opened my last bag of it, so probably going to be buying more next time I'm in town. Some of the gaps are large enough I'm planning to cut up a concrete block and cement strips of concrete into place. That seems much less involved than trying to patch a 3x8" hole with cement alone. The ones I can't get at (there are some large gaps behind studs) are most likely going to get filled with a combination of fiberglass and builder's foam. Hopefully this will provide an air barrier that will improve insulation immediately, and also offer more protection when my insulation boards arrive at the end of the week. Good news so far - based on the last oil delivery our oil usage is approximately 30% below the oil company's projections based on historical usage.
Let me get my calculator first. Oh, and I'll need a Jewish, Babylonian, Junian, Gregorian, and Mayan calendar...
Mayan calendar is no good, it ran out of days. Don't you remember, it was the reason for the last apocalypse. Or maybe it was the one before that, it's hard to keep up with them all.
I got to patch a few of the larger holes, cementing around a strip of a concrete block to seal the gap up. The first couple aren't particularly pretty but they seem functional, and they'll be covered up anyway so cosmetics aren't important for this job. Tomorrow my insulation panels arrive so hopefully it won't be long before I can get them into place and save even more on my heating bills.
My insulation panels are here. I'd hoped to work with them today but cutting them to size creates dust so I'd rather do that work before I get myself cleaned up. Maybe tomorrow I'll get to play with the panels. I'm also hoping it's a little warmer tomorrow so I can cut some more concrete strips and patch a few of the larger holes in the wall. I need to patch them before putting the insulation panels up.
Speaking of songs you don't hear that often, I heard this playing at a restaurant recently and picked up who the singer was and had a very vague recollection of it. It's long.
Meh... not getting work done on the house because of another tax return. I hate filing taxes... not so much the amount of tax I pay - I can live with that - but the amount of time it takes to collate everything and file endless returns.
Uh, oh! Hypoxemia (low blood oxygen) has set in, perhaps triggered by altitude change (?). Need to carry portable oxygen concentrator in the vehicle and wear a finger monitor, and comprehensive supplement regime. In near-danger zone, so, yeah, i could croak, but...no worries
Found some more ugly holes in the wall of my house. I'd found a draft but hadn't figured out where it was coming from. Well, today I found it. I'd had to pull down some more wall in an upstairs room to get at what I thought was a small hole and turned out to be a big hole, and then found an even bigger hole. This one is easily big enough to put my fist in, and has the added bonus of a (fairly narrow) gap all the way to outside. So when it's 12 degrees outside there's one heck of a breeze blowing in through that gap. So far it's taken some wads of fiberglass to block some holes and two full cans of building foam to try and plug the gap. When it's warmer I need to get out there and fix the outer face of the wall. I'm going through cement mix at a faster rate than I ever have in my life, fixing some of the larger gaps in the walls means I'm going through several pounds of the stuff every day I really get into it.