When Persistence Meets Stoopidity

When we bought the house, there were 3 upstairs storage areas...sort of like an attic...they are called knee-wall crawl-storage and are common to what is called storey and a half houses. One crawl space runs the 24' of the house, the other is split by the stairs...so an 8' space and a 12' space.

One of the smaller spaces was finished in the big bedroom...and was one of the reasons I wanted to buy the house. Buddy had stripped the insulation from the interior roof and moved it to the knee-wall, then vented the space. He also sealed the entry door. I really liked what he had already done. On my to-do list was todo the same to the rest of the spaces.

In the pic, you see the smaller 8' space after I have installed a floor. Prior to that, it was just an un-ventilated spaced with cellulose, the knee-wall insulation and nothing else.

This is messy work in a tight space. Safety goggles, ventilator, long-sleeve shirt. Lots of cellulose and old fibre-glass insulation floating around. The space is 4' x 4' x maybe 7' on the long angle. Everything is done on hands&knees and a lot of it above your head. Not nice to a young back and really abusive to my compromised back.

So nice to clear the space and make it easier to use.

I vented each space. No need to insulate...as the knee-walls are insulated. The big problem is air-flow. I vented each space to outside the house and then ensured that the spaces splt by the stairs were ventilated to each other.

You can see the knee-wall insulation and the tuck tape to keep things closed off. You can also see the outside ventilation access.

OK. I placed all the storage junk back in the space. All this legwork is a small thing...but cheap to do...the T&G is cottage-grade and really the manual labor is the hard part.

Now, I am working on the 24' section and it is ugly. There is old, beat-off fibre-glass insulation, bits of old wiring, roof-sheahing, rafter insulation, staples, nails...UGLY!!!

Hard to believe this will ever look nice.

After i clean off all the old insulation, staples and nails...I build a secondary knee-wall to hold the T&G. Because the flooring joist did not match up with the rafters...I bolted a vertical 2x4 all along the flooring to give me something to bolt onto.

As I am filling in the space, you can see the 2x4 bottom, and the vent installed to allow air to flow behind the T&G.

I stripped all the old fibreglass off the pipes and did them in the same style as the basement...carpet underlay first...then surrounded by that Reflex silver, bubble-wrap stuff and sealed with Tuck Tape.

The vent to my room ran partially into the flooring, so I boxed it all in, allowing me to store stuff on top on the structure.

Can't tell you how hard it is to work at floor level on your hands&knees, getting the support infrastructure in place. The only harder thing is working on hands&knees above your head. You'd be surprised how much you have to move laterally to get anything done.

We had an old kid toy that had a bad wheel that could not be fixed...so I sealed it behind the little 2' knee-wall. Who knows...may give someone a shock in the future.

24' is a long space. All the lumber had to be cut out in the shed, which means crawling out of the space, walking downstairs and out to the shed in the backyard to get at the chop-saw. Impossible to work with 8' lumber in such a confined space.

TaDa!! Vents at the end, vents along the smaller knee-wall. Vented at the top. Nice, solid floor and nice, clean T&G walls. Hard to justify this in terms of effort. Basically cost about $12 a foot to make and took about a hour per foot to build.

That being said, really glad to have it done and the person who buys this house may be just as glad.