Heating Season is Upon Us

I have a nice long rant about our experience with ordering that air return duct from Home Depot, to come when it finally works out, if it finally works out, but I'm going to save it until I know everything, and more notably until I have that duct in my leetle paws. Assuming that happens.

In the meantime, since we're heating the house and there's a big hole in the upstairs ceiling, we decided to get started on cutting those losses by installing more drywall upstairs. We still need to have the framing inspected, so we can't install everything, but we can cover one side of the wall.

We had some drywall in our stash of building materials, but halfway through the project we made a trip to Lowe's for some insulation (they sell the encapsulated fiberglass insulation I prefer for our leaky walls), and we picked up more drywall so we'd have a nice big piece to cut the last pieces from. In the coming weeks we will definitely be using all this drywall up, believe me.

Anyway, that's why there's a sudden transition from daylight to shoplight in the GIF.

We also stapled up some plastic over the transom window opening. Between the large gaps around the door and the fact that plastic has zero insulating value, this doesn't perform any miracles, but it does stop the chimney effect of sending all the household heat into the attic. I can't wait to see what it looks like in the daylight, too; it will be a real test of how effective that transom window is. (Though most of the time the door will be open, as well, once it's a finished room.)

In the next week we'd like to get at least part of the framing inspection done, as well as closing a couple permits (the pull-down ladder and the front door transom). This means making sure there is a functioning smoke detector in every bedroom and so on, which is kind of iffy here.

The thing is, our neighbors burn wood a lot and it sets off our smoke detectors, which means we spend a lot of time angrily pulling batteries out of them. Yes, this is not super safe and not in keeping with my mild paranoia about house fires. If anybody has any suggestions for different brands of detectors that aren't set off by wood smoke from outside, but are set off by wood smoke from inside, I am all ears. I'm not sure I want a less sensitive smoke alarm, but maybe that is what I want, since a little is better than none.

posted by ayse on 10/26/13