My husband (I will call him H, to protect his delicate constitution) and I decided that it was time to upgrade the old abode. We'd moved into our dream home 9 or so years before, and it was time to do something about walls that had an r value slightly less than the windows (which had no r value whatsoever), lots of unusable space (note r value situation for the reason why), and interior walls that were crumbling due to high humidity and cold. (Go back to r value explanation, one more time.)
We had already added a high efficiency furnace (a laugh riot all on its own, due in no small part to Alberta's boom, a change in the federal government, my husband's pickiness, and an inspector who nearly invited himself over for Christmas dinner. But I digress.) but decided that in order to REALLY make our carbon footprint smaller, we needed to deal with the insulation issue.
In a regular house this is no small feat. However, we do not live in a regular house. We live in a geodesic dome. Yes, you read that right. We live in a dome. All very cool, until you actually try to do anything reconstructive to it. Especially when you (and this is aimed directly at my dear sweet husband H) you aren't quite sure how the place stays up.
He's smart, my husband is, but he prefers 90 degree angles and squares and things. We don't have many of those in our house. Not many at all. Plus, the insulation that we were trying to replace is embedded in the triangles which compose the inside and outside walls of our house. A bit of a situation, all the way around.
However, he scratched his head, and set to work building computer models etc etc, until he felt he was finally on the right track. This is what he decided was the right track: He decided that in order to really do a good job, we needed to remove the shingles (on year 9 of a 25 year guarantee) and replace them with metal shingles. However, these metal shingles needed to be bonded to insulation, in order to actually make a difference, R wise. Also, these "shingles" had to be cut to fit lots and lots and lots of triangles. So, the usual "hiring of an expert to do the job" wasn't going to happen. (I've found that the "experts" like 90 degree angles and squares as much as my husband does.)
Finding and ordering and getting those chunks of metal from somewhere Alberta to our driveway is a story unto itself, but suffice to say we finally found them, we finally got them, and with them safely stored in our garagemahal, we felt we were ready to begin work.
Oh, did I mention that it had been decided that at the same time that we were tearing off the outside skin of our house, we would tear out the inside skin, because the drywall was cracked and separating -- and because we had done such a crappy job of "fixing" it when we moved in? (Oh, and did I mention that we bought a "fixer upper" and had been at renovations since the day we stepped into the house? No. I didn't think I'd mentioned that. Worth remembering, though.)
We hired our nephew, who was attending Grande Prairie College (majoring in Volleyball and minoring in interpretive dance, I think. I could be wrong.) to help, (because we had had enough contractors look at us as though we were slightly insane whenever we requested a quote for something we wanted changed, and so had decided to do the reno ourselves.) and set the beginning of May 2008 as our start date.
Look at the picture, and add a thousand words. Most of them swear words.
The first official day of reconstruction. Our work slave is trapped in Grand Pairie, due to the same snow storm. We are having fun now!Here's a funny thing. I was reading this over, and realized that I had hidden the fact that we had decided to do this massive renovation ourselves in the middle of the second last paragraph. I'm still in denial that this was all our own fault.
But it was.
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