Sealing the house

[Daox]

This past weekend was unofficially 'seal the house' weekend. I went outside and caulked almost all the upstairs windows. This week I'll probably finish up upstairs and start downstairs. Anyway, here is an example of what I found.

Before. That is about a 1/4" all together.



After. Still need practice caulking and making it pretty.



I also caulked between the wood and siding trim. There were some pretty huge gaps there too.



In addition to the windows, I was up working in the attic again sealing everything off and getting it ready for insulation. This is the kind of stuff I was running into and filling with expanding foam (Great Stuff).





When you peel up the insulation, you can literally see the dust that has been filtered out from the air moving through the gaps.





Next on the list was in the Kitchen. I have a roughly 6" hole in the chimney which leads right up to the attic where it is cut off (doesn't go through the roof). This needed plugging if I want to keep heat in there. When I was up there I could even feel a draft.





So, I took some foam insulation I had laying around, cut two circles, and used liquid nails to glue them into the hole.







I spray painted the second piece. That didn't work so well. Did you know spray paint eats away at foam? Well, I do now. However, it did kind of give it a nice textured look.





But, then I was bad and didn't wait for the glue to dry on the first piece. I pushed the new piece in and they both went in too far. This made a mess, and I'm not happy about it.





Thankfully, there is a plate that'll be going over all this and it'll hide my mess. I only painted the foam so there wasn't any blue behind the plate. Now, I just have to figure out how I'm going to hang it.