House Week 21: Recycled Denim for the Walls

Progress with the domicile has continued over the last few weeks so i thought i would catch everyone up over a few posts to break up all of the excitement.  Which it *is* super exciting, as usually silence means the person is too busy doing to be telling, which is totally true in my case.  So sit back and enjoy the catch-up slam this week :)

One thing my home would not have had in the 20’s is insulation.  Now this is a good and bad thing.  One nice thing about not having had insulation before would have made the demolition of my house back at week one much faster and less messy.  Well unfortunately I had insulation, and had even paid to have it “blown-in” prior to being allowed to buy the house.  So sadly that all went straight into the trash as it was completely unusable, lame government laws at work again.  Well moving on there really are not any other pro’s to not having insulation in your home.  Some of the main benefits:

1. A “Temperate” Living Space – By insulating your exterior walls (floors and ceilings too), you drastically improve your home’s ability to retain a stable moderate temperature and help to reduce the loss of heating and cooling that used to escape through the walls.  Thus also reducing your heating/cooling bills.
2. Not hearing your neighbors – Most insulation will also act a basic noise reducing agent, with the heavier insulations truly providing noise elimination between rooms and protecting your home from the outside world.  This may not be as critical between rooms for a gal that plans to live alone for awhile, but it an awesome must for someone that wants to study the cello and has neighbors that go to bed at 7pm.

While there are many kinds of insulation i wanted to try to stay as green as possible while (re)building my home which has been a super challenge with my Father who loves hazardous materials and disposable items.  So months ago i set off to find the right insulation for me.  I had heard about recycled cotton insulation made from Denim scraps but had not seen it.  I found a manufacturer, Bonded Logic, that produced all of the different “R” ratings (thickness of the insulation) that were required for my walls and ceilings and placed an order excited that i had avoided the super scratchy glass insulation typically used.

Below is the first delivery (1 of 3) of the Wall insulation from Ashby Lumber along with some insulation “relaxing”.  My little 1200 sq ft home required tons of insulation as we decided to insulate the interior walls as well for additional sound and climate control.

  

Part of the instructions is to “gently shake” the insulation as you remove it from the bags to help it regain it’s shape.  I found it was tons easier to leave it out on the floor over night before using it to really get it to pop back to it’s shape so it was pressure fit between the wall studs.  One of the best things was being able to “rip” the insulation as needed to shorten a piece, cut out for an electrical box, and to pull off pieces to fit in between all of my tiny studs all over the place.

    

The total project of getting all of the wall insulation up took about 30 hours.  Not bad for one gal and i camping light!  Below are some additionally finished walls along with one of the fun to insulate walls from the original framing of the home where they used diagonal blocking.  It’s beautiful, but completely annoying to insulate so i can see why it’s changed to horizontal blocking since the 20’s.