Live and Learn part XLVII
Forty-seven is one of my favorite numbers (right after 27, my membership number for the new Durham Central Market Coop).
We've been wallpapering, of all things. Beautiful, recycled, wallpaper. Wallpapering forces you to get up close and personal with your walls and windows in a way that painting via roller brush on an extendable pole does not.
So it follows that Stephen mentioned noticing that the top casing of our windows was not tight to the wall. I kind of shrugged my shoulders, like, well, whatever, the house is 75 years old, what else is new, just caulk it and be done...
So he said, "really, the top casing is about an inch off the wall, it would suck caulk in like a black hole, and cold air is blowing through like a reverse hairdryer." Ok, I embellished that last part, but seriously. The lower arrow in the photo below points to the top of the window where the drafthole was. The other arrow points to the new duct in the ceiling coming from our solar air heater, where lovely warm air blows in.
I really thought we had done everything we could in the past two years to weatherproof. We insulated the walls and ceiling, looked around for air drafts and caulked the base boards, got heavy curtains, added storm windows and caulked those too. I couldn't think of any way to improve the weatherproofing in the living room. But obviously we weren't thorough enough, as there was basically a huge gaping draft hole over every one of our downstairs windows. If we had done a blower door test (replacing a door with a strong blower fan to blow air out of the house lets you see where leaks are as they pull replacement air in), we would have discovered the leaks, surely. But I tend to actively resist projects that I can't do myself, so no blower door test. Character weakness or strength? Both, yeah, but I place my bets on a future where we will have to depend mainly on ourselves and our neighbors, so sometimes I make mistakes calculating cost/benefits.
Here's the finished wallpaper - pretty cool hunh?
