An update on our insulating adventures...

Still in the Prince's room...

Well we are getting hit with some ridiculously cold temps & wind chills here. (It is 8 with -10 degrees F as I am typing) The wind is coming from the southwest so it hits his room full force. We are trying to keep it around 68, the rest of the house is 72+.

I believe we have pin-pointed the major source of our air flow problem. It is the floor. Half of the room was constructed over a crawl space. Every inch of the addition (the second turret if you have visited Renovating the Money Pit) was constructed with out thought to insulation. At one point before the vinyl siding went up insulation was blown in, however there were no stops in the walls so all of the insulation has mushed. So anyways, the floor seems to be the source of the major heat loss (or cold drafts coming in). It has carpet & padding but it is still hard to walk on it today with socks on. I am considering removing the carpet & padding & putting down a layer of plastic sheeting then putting the carpet & padding over that. It seems to have worked in front of the door in his room.

Again I used duct tape !!! Can we survive with out it???

I am not sure we can do much about this as all short of ripping off the siding & stone work to put up a vapor barrier & then re-side. Maybe in the spring dh can go back down into the crawl space & put up some kind of barrier, we have already filled in with insulation between the floor joists.

The above picture is my "duct" tape winterizing on the windows. You can also barely make out the insulating we did last year on the outer storm windows (we filled in all visible holes with great stuff!). The issue we really have is how do we replace these windows with more efficient newer ones? We don't have a lot of money for repairs at the moment, but it wouldn't matter because 90% of the windows we need to replace are special either in shape or size. We have 2 extremely large curved windows in the north turret plus 10 smaller curved windows between both turrets. Short of having new windows made to order (does anyone still do that???) I think we have to do a complete replacement where we will have to change the size of the window opening & repair the walls in & out, sigh...

I hope that the frigid temps will end soon, I really don't like the constant reminding that I live in an old drafty house :D! $$$ flying out the cracks!