In preparation for filling and covering the walls we went around and planed off any of the plywood spacers between inner and outer wall posts which were sticking out from the wall, this will allow the horizontal rails to be nailed on without damaging the vapour barrier.
Sticking-out-plywood-web
Web-planed-off-smooth
It then only took a few days to insert the horrible irritating glass wool insulation into our outer walls, to fill in the airspace void between the rigid existing foam boards already in the walls and the room’s wall boards. We didn’t want to have lots of hollow sounding walls so we went around filling in this void with various thickness of glass wool. We started first with the lower section and we put in a mixture of 100mm thick wool but sometimes we needed 150mm thick. We used our spray gun foam glue to help stick these vertical strips of the wool material but we also fired 2inch long staples to mechanically hold the wool into place too.
Final-insulation-at-base-of-walls
The next job was to do the upper sections of the walls, this time using mostly 200mm thick and occasionally 150mm thick glass wool in places we had originally inserted thicker rigid foam pieces. Again, we used the PU spray glue to stick the wool in but this time we deliberately had much longer pieces and all the excess length were pushed up and through the gap at the first floor floorboard level and piled on top of the rigid foam. We did this to provide a fire break in the vertical direction just in case the PU foam causes a path for the flames to travel up and into the roof space but for the glass wool acting as a barrier. It will also protect the roof from a fire on the outside of the house getting into the roof through junction of wall and roof.
Final-insulation-in-the-walls-1
Final-insulation-in-the-walls-2
Insulation-rising-above-the-first-floor
There are sections of the walls that we cannot do right at this moment in time, mainly in the right hand end of the Great Room because of the huge pile of CLS timber, again in Bedroom 1 because we haven’t installed the conduits through the wall to the outside world and finally, in the Utility room because it is full of our tools and supplies. These sections will get done later on when we have used up much of the CLS timber and removed the obstacles outside Bedroom 1’s wall. All the left-over rolls of the glass wool are now located upstairs at the back of the house.
The next job is to cover all this yukky stuff with a vapour barrier .. !