Doors and Insulation

The front door (from Neuffer in Germany) is now installed, very happy with how it looks.

The builder also installed the doors to the patio and backyard (matching the windows by Alpen in Colorado). They are large and heavy – check out those hinges. Each hinge can be adjusted in all three dimensions. Some more adjustments are still needed to make sure they close as tightly as required (more on that in the next blog post).

Tape is providing an airtight seal around the outside of the door.

Roof Insulation

Floor and walls are already insulated; time to insulate the roof. We’ve chosen blown-in cellulose, a natural material that works well for the roof: even after it settles a bit, it will still insulate evenly and well. (In a wall cavity, settling would leave an air gap at the top, creating a cold spot.)

To blow in the cellulose, they had to open a number of holes in the Intello vapor barrier, then close them back up to keep it airtight. Same procedure in the garage, but just using regular netting.

Sewer pipe insulation

We have two pipes connecting from the sewer up through the roof. The air in those can get cold, so we want to insulate around those pipes to avoid heat loss. Here’s one of them before insulation (marked in orange on the left):

And here it is after fiberglass insulation batts have been packed around it.

Garage insulation

The garage walls are insulated using regular fiberglass batts.

Sound insulation

The mechanical room will be somewhat noisy: ventilation, mini-split, and heat pump water heater are all going to make some noise. We’ve added fiberglass batts for sound insulation all around that room – hope that’s going to be sufficient.

We also added some insulation for sound between the bedrooms. There’s a lot more that could be done, hard to know exactly how much is enough.

Fixing insulation

And finally, the groves created by the electricians were stuffed with fiberglass batts, which seemed to work well.