Day #163
September 21, 2020 – With the completion of the kitchen and living room windows along the railroad side, I can drop back and install the wall insulation. This will only take me an hour or so. After that I will start taking the inside of the closet bump out apart. We suspect there will be more carpenter ant damage just waiting in the walls.
The wall insulation along the railroad side of the kitchen and living room is almost complete.
The closet bump out that I wrote about before straddles two different rooms, the living room and the first bedroom. In the image below the inside of the closet is visible on the right side of the photo.
I reframed the roof of this bump out because of carpenter ant damage to the roof joists. The ants don’t really eat the wood but they chew through it leaving sawdust behind.
To expose any damage I removed the paneling on the inside of the closet.
Carpenter Ant Sawdust
As we suspected there were piles of carpenter ant sawdust inside each of the joist spaces.
I spent the rest of my time today removing all the paneling inside the closet and cleaning up the sawdust. With the interior framing exposed I will be able to insulate the closet interior. Unfortunately, the studs in these walls are sideways so the joist spaces are only a 1-1/2 deep. I will have to use a rigid foam insulation in these spaces.
Now I’m off to Lowe’s for rigid insulation and some lauan paneling. See you soon.