Frugal Boy is eating more and more ‘solids’ and to keep pace we have been making our own baby food. A recent acquisition of a $5 blender makes short work of pureeing solids down to something a six tooth digestive track can handle.
We saved some of the store containers to reuse.
The economics of making our own baby food varies wildly with what we use. We try to buy what is in season as that is the cheapest. However you can always pick up family sized bags of frozen veggies and steam them for a cheap, but nutritious meal.
Ultimately we would like to get him eating what we eat, but he just isn’t ready for veal, spinach, and cheese stuffed manicotti with vodka sauce (a meal we made this past Saturday for $4/serving).
Until then, we’ll stick with simpler foods like pureed veggies and wheat circles.
It is hard to believe that it is almost Thanksgiving. What happened to 2014? I haven’t done any big home improvement projects for some time so there was an itch that needed scratching.
Secret Entrance
That looks like a rather innocuous attic wall. I wonder if there is something behind it? It would be a dull blog post if there wasn’t!
Our 2nd floor bathroom is part of a dormer/turret and this is the unfinished attic portion. Some sort of rodent had made a nest up here but I didn’t find any signs of recent activity.
I had several goals for this space.
Clean out all of the nests and old soiled insulation
Uncover all electrical wiring so I could assess its condition and possibly replace
Insulate the space to be air tight
#1 wasn’t very difficult. Wearing a respirator, long sleeves, and gloves I carted out seven trash bags full of crud. Whenever you are working in an unfinished attic, you will want to pay special attention not to step through the ceiling. To that end, I laid down a scrap piece of plywood so I could crawl around without falling through into the bathroom.
With the space ‘cleaned’ up I was able to inspect the exposed electrical.
109 year old wiring
Given its age, it looked to be in good shape. There are some spots that I may want to address in the future (receptacle wired in with a light switch). Eventually we will hire out an electrician to redo the whole house, but until then the plan is to leave well enough alone.
#3 goal of re-insulating the space took some consideration. Fiberglass rolls and blown in cellulose would not make the space air tight (both of these types of insulation are air permeable). I knew that I wanted to insulate against the rafters, not along the floor joists because the existing electrical was in the floor joists and because the finished attic space connected with this unfinished space.
The only insulating products that I know of that are air impermeable are foam based. You can either go with a spray foam or a rigid foam board product. Spray foam is not for DIYers. There are kits that are sold for DIYers but they start at around $600. Foam board is best applied in continuous sheets on the underside of rafters or even better yet on the roof deck itself (outside of house). Seeing as we just had a new roof put on, and a curved turret makes it almost impossible to hang straight boards, I chose to use a hybrid approach.
Cut & Cobble is an insulating technique where you cut pieces of rigid foam board to fit in-between joists or rafters. Then you use canned spray foam to seal the edges. Here is an example of where I have insulated using cut and cobble.
The foam board should have about a half an inch gap to allow the spray foam nozzle to fit. While you could fit the boards snugly against the wood you would have a hard time sealing the edges because you would either have to caulk or tape them.
Ideally, an air gap would be left between the insulation and roof deck to allow air to circulate from the soffits to the ridge vent. This helps keep the roof cool in the winter and prevents ice dams from forming.
Yet another reason why I wanted to redo the insulation in the attic is because last year when our roof was redone, the roofers correctly installed a ridge vent. The pre-existing fiberglass bats did very little to keep air from moving from the ridge vent/soffit system to the conditioned space. In fact, in some spaces you can see the ridge vent while standing in the attic!
nada insulation 🙁
Cut & Cobble is meant as derogatory name because it has many critics. For starters, it isn’t exactly pretty to look at.
About 60% done with dormer
The process of measuring, cutting, fitting, and installing tens or even hundreds of panels is very time consuming. C&C allows thermal bridging. Thermal bridging is where heat moves through a less insulating material, such as a 2×4. After a frost or light snowfall, thermal bridging may be visible from the outside.
guess where the rafters are
Not many studies have been done on C&C, but there are many anecdotal stories of premature failure where the edge sealing fails either immediately or after some time has passed. Finally, the cost of C&C is questionable compared to hiring out a professional spray foam contractor.
I have thought about these negatives and believe that C&C is still the right option in our circumstance.
I am not interested in how it looks. The areas that I am insulating are not living spaces.
I am doing the work myself so it is not like I am paying an hourly wage to someone to install a tedious product.
Fiberglass also allows thermal bridging and that is what we have installed right now
premature failure *might* be an issue. Then again, it might not. This is a gamble.
I got an awesome deal on factory seconds insulation meaning that the material cost for this project is well below what the alternatives would be.
For $80 + $20 delivery I bought approximately 25 panels of 4’x4′ x assorted thickness (between 1 1/2″ to 4″) of polyisocyanurate (polyiso) rigid foam board off a guy on craigslist.
If I had to guess, I would say the retail value of this insulation would be around $500. Polyiso has one of the highest R values per inch of any insulation at 6.5.
I only need a small fraction of that bundle to finish the dormer. In the meantime, I moved the extra from the garage to the attic so it can ‘work’ while it is being stored.
When I get this project wrapped up I’ll post a followup with pictures and any final thoughts that I had on doing the project. So far, I can attest to the length of time required to C&C. It will be interesting if there are any noticeable differences in temperatures when it is all done.
Depending on who you ask, the number of haircuts that a person gets in any given year can vary from none to once every two weeks (24/year). We average about 4 haircuts a year and when we pay for a haircut the total bill averages out to around $12. Growing up, my mom would cut my brothers and my hair. In college, I would wait until I went home to have my hair cut to save a few bucks. My folks probably saved around $200 a year by cutting hair themselves.
Shae and I cut each others hair on occasion. With Frugal Boy underfoot, it can be difficult to leave the house for an hour, especially when most of our free time is at night. The other night Shae asked me to cut her hair because it was getting long and resembled string to this playful kitten.
You’ll need some equipment to properly cut hair. A pair of sharp scissors designed for hair cutting. Don’t use them for anything else, you want them nice and sharp for cutting hair! A comb and clips are helpful for longer hair. Good lighting and a smooth floor make an ideal place to set up shop. I set down a chair in our kitchen so Shae could watch the aquarium while I worked (yes she trusts me with scissors).
A towel wrapped around your victim, err client, will make cleanup easier. If you are intimidated by the thought of it, do what I do and watch some youtube videos. The biggest challenge is just having the confidence to do it and know that hair grows back and it isn’t the end of the world if you make a mistake. It takes me a bit longer than a professional, but we save a little bit of money, have some time together, and can do it all from the comfort of our own home (within earshot of a sleeping baby).
Being a home owner is awesome. That awesomeness has a price stapled to it and when we became home owners for the first time last year, it became abundantly clear that we would need to acquire some more stuff. One of those things was a lawn mower and because we moved in at the beginning of the summer it wasn’t something that I could procrastinate on.
Who am I kidding, I bummed and borrowed neighbors mowers for the first month while I avoided spending any more money on house stuff (buying five new appliances, a water heater, mattress, and tons of other stuff will cure you of shopping).
Thankfully, my in-laws gifted us with their used corded electric mower. It had a tiny 18″ mowing deck, but our yard is tiny and most importantly the price was right, free! I bought a new blade for it and a really long extension cord and quit bothering our neighbors (probably to their relief). Over the course of the summer I learned the best way to cut the grass while being mindful of the energy supplying umbilical cord. It got the job done, even if I spent more time untangling cord than cutting grass.
This spring shopping fever was starting to take hold again. All of the home improvement stores had such nice displays of mowers. The memory of fighting extension cords was still fresh and motivating me to find something better. Gas mowers have been around a long time, don’t have cords to worry about, and are economical. I used to mow my parents lawn and some lawns around my hometown using a trusty gas mower, but given the fact that we have such a dainty yard and no other gas powered tools, it seemed inefficient to add a gas tool to our otherwise all electric collection. A corded electric mower was out of the running from the get go but maybe a battery powered one might be the answer. Battery powered mowers have come a long way in recent years thanks to the mass production of lithium ion batteries. These energy dense rechargeable batteries have taken the consumer electronics market by storm, but like any rechargeable battery, it will wear out over time. The prospect of spending $100 every three years is not very appealing to me. The only other way of mowing a yard is by human power. Reel mowers are a centerpiece fixture of my imagining of the 1950s. One of our neighbors has a reel mower and it is wonderfully quiet, especially when his neighbor brings out a gas monster. My wife, Shae, is all in favor of reel mowers, but she’s also mowed the yard once (ever in her whole life). So like any on-the-fence individual, I did nothing and slugged out another season with the long tailed red devil.
This past week while mowing the yard, the mower became very difficult to steer. Looking down I saw that one side of the handle had disconnected from the mower body. “AHA, the mower is broken, now I can justify a new one”, I thought, until the ridiculousness of that statement hit me a minute later.
Knowing what I had to do, I went to the hardware store and spent $1.31 for a new bolt and wing nut.
Two minutes later, the mower was fixed.
While this mower is a bit of a pain to use, it does do the job it is meant to do and until it properly dies, I’ll keep on using it. How often do we throw something out or buy something new just because we don’t have the best or shiniest. I bet I can get another year out of this mower, and at the end of next year, I will probably say the same thing.
Thanks in-laws for the functioning mower. It gets the job done and we’ve been able to put money towards things that really matter, like Frugal Boy’s education fund.
This weekend we did not do any extensive traveling. Instead, we stayed home and finished up some projects. A walk to the library revealed other people working on home improvement projects on a much larger scale!
How would you like to paint the top of that turret?
It was a cold day, so we broke out some of the Fall clothing. Thanks Auntie Rachel for the blanket!
It was cool enough that Frugal Boy just stayed in his pajamas all day. They are really soft pajamas.
We decided to spruce up our kitchen with a giant whiteboard. That way we could plan out what is for dinner and easily shuffle recipes around depending on how many leftovers we have and what we are in the mood for. Large white boards are pricey, and with it being back to school season, small whiteboards are sold out in many local stores. Being DIYers, we decided to make our own “whiteboard” from scratch. Here is the result.
DIY “Whiteboard”
If you want to make your own, all you need is a sheet of acrylic (commonly referred to as plexiglass) and washable markers. Glass is a superior writing surface, but it also weighs more and is easier to break and cause a safety hazard (especially with little kids). We made a frame from 1″x2″ pine and stained it. The acrylic fit into rabbeted grooves in the back of the frame and then we used glazier points (used for holding glass panes in wooden windows) to hold the acrylic in place. A yard of fabric was glued onto the back of the frame to provide a white-ish background. A couple of screws and 20 gauge copper wire hold the whole thing up on the wall. The advantage of using wire to hang things is that it is very easy to adjust and level. You should use washable markers instead of dry erase markers on acrylic because they clean off better. Finally, our calendar grid is drawn on the back side of the acrylic so we can easily reuse it each month.
So with all of that said, here is what’s for dinner for the month of September!
