the attic

Up until a few months ago I'd never had the guts or inclination to venture up into my attic. It's not exactly easy to get into. The access hatch is in the guest bedroom closet and takes some contortion to lift from the ladder and into an angle with which you can pull yourself up & over. I wasn't really sure what to expect -- hidden treasure, a corpse? The possibilities were endless.

The air was thick with a very fine dust so I'm glad I strapped on the dust mask before my ascent. The reason why I went up there in the first place is we had a few big rainstorms in the fall and I noticed water dripping in from the ceiling in the guest bedroom. Didn't want to, but I knew I had to go check it out. A few things surprised me. One, there's insulation up there. I question it's R value, but I figure it's probably better than nothing. Looks like blown in cellulose. There had once been vines crawling up the exterior walls and I found evidence of them up there too. There must be quite a few breaches in the exterior armor that allowed this stuff to get in there. The old duct work from the evaporative AC unit was still intact save for quite a bit of rust on the piece connecting to the outside.

Check out all that water damage. When the HVAC guys installed the new system and removed the old one from the roof they didn't do a good patch job. The claims adjuster also found extensive hail damage from early this year. Luckily my insurance is going to cover the cost for a new roof. I'm super excited. That's one major project we'll be able to scratch off the list several years earlier than we were hoping for. This rocks. More updates in a few weeks...