Hello All –
I’m sure this question has been asked a million times before, and I’m sure there are many solutions as well.
I am beginning the remodel of our 1921 house in western PA. We decided to start with the main bathroom since a) it was a hideous disgrace to remodeling and b) we need a _very_ functional bathroom with our growing family. I currently have the bathroom gutted down to the stud walls, both outside and in (whew that plaster is a dusty mess). I have been reading and thinking about insulation for quite some time and I still am up in arms as to the proper way to put this room back together. Here is what there is currently:
. outside walls have never been insulated
. some sort of ‘tar-paper’ sheeting directly on the balloon framing
. wood clapboard siding directly on the ‘tar-paper’
I think the ‘tar-paper’ would be considered a sort of drain membrane? Definitely not sure on that though, I was not even expecting it to be there.
Originally I thought I would do this from the inside out:
. green board drywall / cement rock board (for shower,tub areas)
. 4 mill vapor barrier
. kraft faced batts r13
. XPS ~r4 cut to fit in the stud space (trying to get more r)
Now I’m wondering if I should skip the vapor barrier as this might just do more harm than good and doing one of these instead:
a) stack in XPS to fill the cavity (probably around r12-14
b) remove XPS use kraft faced batts only
c) XPS, non kraft faced batts
I’m also looking at the possibility of something like GP DenseShield rather than doing a green board/cement rock board combination.
Oh yea the inside climate is controlled in both seasons, (I finally got my AC project up and running) so in the summer we have AC and winter heat.
Thanks for any help that is out there..
kpfoote
Replies
Greetings ak,
and Welcome to Breaktime.
This post, in response to your question, will bump the thread through the 'recent discussion' listing again.
Perhaps it will catch someone's attention that can help you with advice.
Cheers
"The old Quaker Meeting house is almost 300 years old and as my sawzall made its way into the pegged ancient wood, a smell emerged that told me about dried, cracked things. The ancient Quakers sitting in the well worn pocket of their silence on the darkened pine benches were whispering something to me across the years. Something about why I was here, why we're here. Lord but it was hot. I reached in to clear anything out of what was the sill, nothing but the hardened mud, lime and sand mortar, dust and shadows." -- Jer
Overall, yours is a heaating climate tho, and that room is a more than average wet one, so the VB should be on the interior of the studs.
Do you have room dimensionally to put the FG in the stud spaces and then span across the stud faces with XPS? That will stop thermal bridging on studs. I realize most baths are already small so....
Since a bath is small, it won't break the budget to use totally XPS in the stud spaces to get the best R-value. use cans of spray foam to be sure you eliminate any convection currents there.
Since this is baloon framed, you lose a lot to vertical convection. Put in firestop spacers/blocking at the cieling level if you can. That same stud space that agravates heat loss is a chimney for fire should one ever get started.
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It's amazing that some people will come back and thank me for spending 5 sec giving them a copied bump and others who receive a response of technical merit don't say a thing.
be a lot of different types of people in the world.
A bird does not sing because it has an answer. A bird sings because it has a song.
rezSorry for not sending a thanks back! It was taking quite a while so I just kept on doing what I thought best after reading more on the subject. I did end up using some of the advise that was posted back to my original query though.Again thanks for the bump and I'm enjoying the vast amount of help on this forum. I sent out a request for further pex help a while back and quite a few chimed in so now I'm finishing up that so I can finally close these walls up :-)-- akfoote
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A bird does not sing because it has an answer. A bird sings because it has a song.