Hitting the deadline

Against all odds I managed to get the room completed in time for Christmas with a little help from my friends and family. We all had a great time relaxing in the luxury of our new living room. With the 3 kids bagging a sofa each to stretch out we were still a bit short on furniture at times but who needs furniture when there room to stretch out on the floor in front of the woodburning stove.

The Building Regs. required me to put insulation under the new floor and I took the opportunity to add more elsewhere so we exceeded the requirements. This has paid dividends because, even in the coldest weather when it was minus 9 outside and the snow lay all around we were toasting in our room. The wood burner had always worked well in the old room but with the extra cubic capacity of the new space it looked a little under-powered. We thought about getting a bigger one to cope but increasing the insulation turned out to be the better investment. The central heating is now on tick over as background heat.

Now I know that all this extra insulation costs money and when you start putting huge amounts of insulation into a building, as they always seem to do in Grand Designs, there are diminishing returns. The first 100mm will return the investment in 2 or 3 years but when you get to 300mm that last 100mm will not get you your money back in less than 20 years. Those figures, by the way, are actually just wild guesses because there are so many variables in heat losses that I didn't even make the calculation.

For me he insulation is more about comfort levels than saving on heating bills and that warm floor and extra insulation in the walls has made it very comfortable indeed. The icing on the cake is that I got most of the insulation for nothing.
It was pure fluke. Just when I was about to buy it from the merchants I drove past a building site and noticed this guy putting sheets of 100mm thick Celotex on the skip. He had so much of it that he has to pile it up beside the skip. Some were small off- cuts but most of it was plenty big enough to fill the space in between the floor joist.
It had been so badly cut that I doubted he even used a tape measure when putting the pieces in. It was almost as if he had just cut one strip off an 8 x 4 sheet and then chucked the rest away. There was hardly a straight line on the offcuts which meant that the bits he had put in probably didn't fit that well. If insulation doesn't fit snugly you might as well not bother because the cold air gets around to the warm side and it's game over. The unsuspecting house owner will have no way of knowing unless they hire a thermal imaging camera.

The guy loading the skip was very happy because I had suddenly created a lot of space in the skip and he had a load of wood to go in it. "Stop right there" I told him. I would make another trip or two and take the timber as well. Free insulation and now free firewood.

My wife laughs at the way my head always turns when we drive past a skip. It used to be pretty women that turned my head. Now it is the prospect of recycling building materials. A sure sign that I am getting old and mean.