attic

I put in about 5 hours today and was able to get all of the upstairs heating connections finished. All that’s left to do is to connect it to the furnace (luckily, it’s only about 5 feet away from the old chimney chase) and finish insulating everything. Oh, and we have no return duct yet, but I’m not convinced that we’ll even need one. The stairwell should act as a giant return vent, allowing the air to work its way down to the front hall. If things don’t work well, then I’ll add the separate return in later. It took so long, because I foil-taped both the inside and the outside of almost the entire assembly. It may have been overkill, but I hate the idea of air leaking out into the cold attic space!

I really should have run all the ducting before I closed up the chase back in 2005. However, I was too paranoid about tipping off the kitchen inspector to future projects that may or not end up getting permitted. The problem it’s causing me now is that the chase is somewhat snug, and it was a bear feeding ductwork up it. Ironically, while the chase was snug enough that it made my duct insulation bunch up halfway up the shaft, I had the pleasure of watching the entire 10′ of insulation slide off the pipe while I was securing it at top. I was frustrated enough at that point to just say screw it, and I’ll try to come up with some clever way to push it up from the bottom later. Or I’ll just say screw it and let it warm the chase up a bit. If you’re wondering what you’re looking at, the section with the metal strap is a tee that branches 0ff to the right (and then wye’s into flex duct that heads for Chloe and Ginger’s rooms) and continues straight towards the playroom register. The little flex pipe that branches off to the left is for the bathroom.

See if you can follow the math…

Colder weather
+ Large holes in the closet walls (attic access areas)
+ No heat ducts
= Cold upstairs

While the new insulation has made a tremendous difference, not having the furnace connected (yet) to the upstairs was not working out now that we’re into November. It was getting too cold for Chloe to be sleeping up there, so I finally took the first small step back into the remodeling world since Project Ginger. I put in foam insulation and 1/4″ plywood panels to cover all of the attic access holes. I probably went overkill by creating 7 of them, but I do not like inaccessible, or even difficult to access, areas. Some parts of the attic had been sealed up since the house was built in 1911, although maybe ignorance is bliss, since who wants to even know about raccoon poop? So, here’s what they look like now and what lies behind the plywood.  Check back in another five years to see if we’ve even painted them by then!

This has very little to do with the house, but it is a project that I’ve been working on for awhile. A month or so ago we got an LCD TV with a built-in HDTV tuner. To condense a very long story down, I’ve become enlightened as to how great over-the-air (OTA) HD is. If you are capable of getting a decent enough signal (which is actually less stringent than regular analog TV), you can get a perfect quality TV signal for free. Luckily, we live less than 5 miles from the TV transmitters up in Portland’s west hills, so signal is no problem. I could almost get it working with a set-top antenna, but there would always be one channel that wouldn’t come in. And once I fiddled with it enough to get it in, another one would drop off.

I then tried moving the little antenna up into an attic cavity and snaking a coax cable down into the basement to connect to my “structured media center,” which is basically a fancy name for an overpriced, metal box. That worked surprisingly well, but it wasn’t perfect. Today I picked up this little beauty from Radio Shack for about $25. It looks like some sort of death ray, but it’s actually just a UHF antenna. Fortunately, in the Portland area, all the HDTV channels are in the UHF band, so I didn’t have to mess with a bulky VHF antenna. Right now it’s just resting on the insulation, and I’ll get back to it later to get it more properly mounted. Well, the big question, is how does it work? Simply put, it rocks! The reception is bulletproof. I am calling Comcast tomorrow to drop the cable…