Insulation & Friends & Small-Town Living

[cimorene]

We wanted to start painting last week, but it's been raining every day and the humidity has been too high. The living and dining rooms didn't have anything else that needs to be done before the radiators could be put back in, so we started papering the attic bedroom (which we originally were going to leave until the downstairs was finished, but everything else downstairs can't be done until the contractors are done with their bit in the bathrooms and kitchen).

The attic bedroom contains one feature added by the contractors: a new door into the unfinished attic area under the eaves of the house, which is currently storage for some random stuff (eventually we are going to stick a closet behind this door with another door into the unfinished attic from inside it). The door is in a door frame, the same way it was removed from its old home at the other end of the storage area, but it hasn't been trimmed out because we had to strip and paper the wall around it. Therefore, there is a deep gap about 1 cm wide all the way around the door frame where it meets the rough planks which make up the structure of the wall and then the stretched cardboard of the wall surface. This will be behind the trim after we put trim on, obviously.



But in the meantime it's in the attic, right up at the eaves, of a 70-year-old wooden house in Finland, and is going to be in our bedroom, so it needs some insulation. At first I thought of the foamy stuff you can pipe into that type of gap which I've seen at home stores and on This Old House, but then waxjism pointed out that we've found loose combed flax insulation elsewhere in the house and it's a natural and breathable alternative. We are all about the natural alternatives here at Knypplinge, because breathable is important for preventing your delicate wooden house from contracting mold. But then I remembered seeing on one of those Australian weird home building shows that somebody had insulated their house with sheep's wool, just basically in the freshly-sheared state, when it more or less sticks together in a layer of fluff much like a bat of insulation. Sheep's wool is an obviously superior choice to flax for insulation! - Because, I mean, we all know that wool does a better job than linen in cold weather (that is, it traps more warm air with the fibers while still letting moisture through, and has antibacterial properties).

So when Wax's mom stopped by later in the day on her way to a meeting, Wax relayed this idea and she immediately said that she DID know somebody local who has sheep (Wax used to babysit for her as a teen and we went there in lambing season once some years ago and cuddled a lamb), so she called her immediately (Right There, In Our Attic: It's More Likely Than You Think!). "How much wool?" the lady wanted to know, but it turned out she had about 2 kg of it, which is to say, the leftover belly wool from shearing her two sheep, which she keeps as pets now that she's old, instead of the flock-y quantity of sheep she used to have. Sometime in mid-October, she said, when we happily accepted. So we're going to have some spare insulation besides the stuff to go around the doorway, but we still have an unfinished attic and a closet to build, so I'm sure we'll put it to some use.

Comments

[spark]

Is moth not a problem where you are? Because if it is, untreated sheep's wool is unfortunately asking for trouble =(

[cimorene]

It seems to be a pretty popular material among natural construction materials and materials for log cabins here and (for some reason on a Finnish site and made by a Finnish company) in Switzerland. And it's pretty expensive, too.

[spark]

https://www.heritage-house.org/stuff-about-old-buildings/insulation/sheepwool-insulation-and-moth-infestation.html might be a useful read. Perhaps the expensive Finnish company is using the treatment they describe?

[cimorene]

Oh, good point! I went back and found multiple stores were selling that brand but labeled differently, so I had to comb through the technical information tab to find the manufacturer.

However, it's a very small amount of insulation in question here, so we think it'll probably still be fine.

[anatsuno]

Just to pipe in with my own story: I have no personal experience using wool as insulation, because although I *wanted to*, I read up on it and apparently even using the treated anti-moth wool isn't recommended... There are stories in forums (in French) of people around here using the treated wool and discovering that after a few uears the treatment wears out and the infestation begins. But as you say, you're only using a little bit in a little space, whereas these people were, like I was considering, using it to insulate the whole roof or under the floorboards everywhere, so.

Crossing my fingers it works out! I think it's lovely, insulating with wool. <3

[cimorene]

Oh dear!

Well, it wouldn't be that hard for us to obtain some loose flax or sawdust, but they'd be harder to apply and none of the other alternatives have the fire-resistance of wool. Apparently flax insulation is typically made with the addition of calcium bicarbonate, but buying it in a bat when you need a volume that's like less than a single ball of wool seems a bit extra.