I woke at three a.m. to howling winds, heavy snow, and a bitter minus twenty-four degrees with windchill. Stray bits of untrimmed Typar flapped violently against the polyiso outside our bedroom window. After two months or so I’d hoped I’d stop noticing that sound on the windiest of nights, but no such luck. However, unexpected gifts sometimes come in unusual packages. Madame Nature’s bluster would save me from the time and hassle of borrowing blower door test equipment to do what she does so naturally well. I threw on what work clothes I could scrounge off the floor in the dark and crept to the kitchen for my caffe latte and daily RSS feeds.
At six a.m. the clock announced to the quiet household the end of polite silence and the official beginning to the day. On slipped the Blunnies and down I disappeared to the basement and crawlspace to run my hand over every visible wall space and junction. I used strips of Tuck Tape and sheets of neon yellow paper to identify the offending ingress and made side notes to my mason, Dan. The crawlspace work was near perfect and the remaining leakage seemed to be coming from the seven gaping cavities in the masonry-filled header and a few key areas on the rubble foundation that require repointing and parging.
I came upstairs in the light to find a small, peaky pile of snow INSIDE my front door and a trailing wet streak on the floor about a foot long. I stood there and felt snowflakes land on my face. I laughed out loud at the absurdity and utter cheek of it all, catching Husband’s attention. For a quarter of a second I considered hiding it from the man as I knew I would be subjected to his standing Get A New Unwarped Door speech. I parried his jab, launching into my Yeah But counterattack – yeah but wait for the storm door to be reinstalled, yeah but wait for the porch to be framed, etc. It was a bit of the pot calling the kettle black to suggest he bolster his reserve of patience until I could get through the progressive list of work yet to come.
I performed the same crawl-around on the main floor then headed upstairs. No rude surprises here, just the usual offenders: (another) beautiful old warped door on the landing and the crummiest “French” doors from the balcony in our bedroom furiously belching frigid weather. With Tuck Tape and various types of weatherstripping we triaged both, knowing that the replacement French doors await installation and, well, I haven’t decided the final fate of the landing door yet. I think there’s another matching door stored up in the carriage house so perhaps a double door will, more or less, solve the problem in the spring.
I’m awaiting another (cha-ching) delivery from Rona on Monday then I start the insulation of the main basement. Just twenty-two days until the final energy audit for the EcoEnergy Retrofit program and the end to this phase of the work. If Mother Nature in her benevolence chooses to cooperate once again, I may even sneak in the teeniest, tiniest building-related road trip before I up and start work all over again.