After our first year in our 1960’s house, we have learned that it is a bit on the cold side in here during Alberta’s frigid winters and we want to start doing something about it.

One thing we discovered shortly after moving in was that the overhang on the front of the house had very little insulation in the floor. It looks like the floor was insulated with some asbestos-based insulation when the home was constructed 40+ years ago and it seems to have settled, leaving no insulation for parts of the overhang.

The old asbestos in the floor was doing nothing for retaining heat.

This helped make our living room, the kids’ bedrooms, and basement much cooler. This summer I tackled that with lots of spray insulation. I took down the aluminum soffit that was under the overhang and drilled many holes and insulated the overhang with expanding foam insulation to fill in the area and lock in the old asbestos.

The asbestos is fine as long as it is undisturbed and doesn’t get airborne. It is all now safely encased in foam and the extra insulation seems to be making a difference in the house!

We also took a look in our basement above the ceiling and discovered that the header is not insulated all the way around the house. So the basement and upstairs walls are insulated, but the space between the floors wasn’t.

No insulation here either…

Fixing that problem.

Getting the basement more comfortable is a priority this year as Naomi is spending more time down there homeschooling Ellie. We also have an uninsulated concrete wall in the laundry room we hope to address soon.

Recently Naomi and I had one of Canada’s EcoEnergy audits done on our house and we learned some more ways to keep the house warm. We already knew our attic was lacking insulation – about 10 inches less than there should be. All that was up there was 4 to 8 inches of 40 year old fibreglass batt insulation. We learned we could get a grant for insulating it properly, so we set out to learn about blowing in insulation. I’ve been up in the attic a lot getting it ready for insulating, including hooking up the bathroom exhaust fan so it vents outside and putting in insulation dams for the soffit vents.

Last week we filled up our attic with a sea of cellulose.

This is a two-man job, and Steve was sucker enough kind enough to offer to help out by loading the blower.

I don’t think I can move my legs anymore.

Thanks for the help Steve!

We have a number of other projects ahead of us to do as we can afford them, but the next step in our quest for heat is a wood insert for the living room to replace the drafty old  fireplace. Hopefully we will be able to get it installed in early December! We are thankful for the Lord’s provision for what we have been able to do so far and look forward to what we can improve here in the future.