How Not to Insulate Your Attic

Part 1 (Time frame: early February)
I went to Home Depot earlier this week and bought $1000 worth of insulation with the idea that I would do a little to stop wasting energy and cut my summer electric bills by hundreds of dollars, while taking advantage of the energy tax credit that is currently available (free money from the stimulus bill!). The Home Depot man, whom I might add is a very persuasive and successful salesman, said that two reasonably capable folks could install the 75 bags of insulation I’d purchased in just about 2-3 hours. With my keen engineering brain I quickly calculated that I could pay my 20 year old son $15 an hour and my 13 year old son $7 an hour and we could do the job for less than $75 of labor. Heck, the blower they lent us had a picture of a petite young woman in a frilly smock donning a paper mask handling the job with ease. How hard could it be? I assumed (wrongfully so – this in literary terms is referred to as “foreshadowing”) that among the five of us Harris’s there were at least a combined two reasonably capable persons … I was wrong. So, to make a long story short, Saturday afternoon we spent from 2 PM to 6 PM and managed to get roughly 4.2 of the 75 bales dispersed into our attic which now has two, what I would call, size 13 foot “vent holes” protruding into our living space — one in our laundry room ceiling and one in our master closet ceiling. I consider these “vent holes” to be an undesired consequence of the insulation dispersal process and therefore I will choose to repair them rather than leave them for the next homeowner to admire. Luckily no one was seriously injured, although my older son was walking with a slight limp afterward. I again used my keen engineering brain to calculate the cost of repair for the “vent holes” at about $60 each (from a handyman I know) and by extrapolating the labor time and repair costs for the completion of the dispersal of the remaining 70.8 bags of insulation, and the ensuing cosmetic damage and potential medical bills, my total cost for the job would be roughly $12,682 (I used an excel spread sheet to calculate this) and require approximately 288 man-hours of labor (not including medical personnel), seven 4 x 8 sheets of drywall, 232 ft of drywall tape, and three trips to the emergency room. Don’t say anything about the possible expense for the divorce lawyer, alimony, child custody considerations, and child support. So, now I will hire a handyman to repair my vent holes and complete the insulation job probably at a cost far greater than any savings I would have realized within the time span that I plan to stay living here at my current address.

Part 2 (Completing the job)

On Monday we completed the dispersal of the remaining 70+ bails of insulation into our 3000 sq ft attic, which now looks as if it was downwind from a significant volcanic eruption. The good news is that the whole insulation job cost me only $335 for labor-which is only about 4 times my original estimate (I am a Government engineer, what did you expect?) plus 9 hours of my time that otherwise would have been spent celebrating (read as lounging around) President’s Day. After hoisting up 70+ 25 lb bales of insulation and feeding them into a noisy cantankerous hopper style insulation blower (designated as Blower # 1 — more foreshadowing), I was sore for 3 days. I will not go into much detail, but after dispersing approximately 3 bales of insulation, the aforementioned hopper style insulation blower (#1) did suffer what I would call an unfortunate mishap involving twisted/broken rotating metal parts followed by a raucous clanging noise that, had it not been for one key safety shield, may have resulted in careening metal projectiles that would have surely slashed through my garage door opener motor mounted to the underside of my garage ceiling. Let’s just say that the aforementioned hopper style insulation blower was prematurely retired from service.

I believe that the Home Depot service representative that checked in the “defective equipment” was so flabbergasted by the situation; i.e., the prospect of property destruction and/or bodily injury, and the ensuing plethora of paperwork that would have been required, that he gladly issued me a replacement hopper style insulation blower (blower # 2), no questions asked, for the completion of the job.

In the end, it was all worth it though as I seemed to have redeemed myself with my very benevolent spouse, and hopefully, will see a significant energy bill savings this summer. The moral of the story is: buy a house that is already insulated.