Seeing Pink

I had Columbus day off as a holiday from work last week, and spent the day finishing most of the insulation downstairs.... And now the basement is all insulated! Matt went through and used cans of simple spray foam to fill in any larger cracks, and now all that is really left is to tape the seams.

This was a surprisingly easy project! I mean, it still took time (maybe 2 full weekend days and a few week nights finishing up and doing the spray foam), but it was a pretty simple and low stress step that I'm glad we did ourselves.

Here were the basics. We are by no means experts, but these are the steps we took from the research we did reading up on the product and from asking folks at Home Depot.

1. Cleaned the cement walls of dust and debris (used our broom and swept them really well to get rid of cobwebs, dirt, concrete dust, etc).
2. Measured each section of wall from floor to the top of the wall (it varied by a few inches around the house since our house is so old and its settled and some additions had been made to the house)
3. Marked these measurements on the the large pieces of hard insulation, cut them with a simple razor blade, snapped them apart.
4. Applied ample adhesive to the backs on the insulation pieces (I think we went through about 20-25 tubes of it... there should be a picture of the type we used in a previous post)
5. Put the pieces up and pushed them tight to the wall to make sure they were secure.
6. Used spray foam to fill larger cracks around the crawl space and on the top of the walls (where there are spaces by our wood beams).
7. Tape the remaining seams between each piece of hard insulation to prevent moisture coming through from the cement walls.

Woo hoo. On to the subfloor next....