Grey Matter

We're not talking IQ here, we're talking R-value. Apparently our house is very scientific, in addition to being well insulated. Our garage is directly under our living/dining room and it is required to have a certain R-value worth of insulation in the ceiling since it is considered to be an outdoor space, in spite of the fact that it lies within the walls of the foundation.



Since we are into overkill in the insulation department, we hired an insulation company to come in and spray a solid foam called Icynene into all of the joist bays in the ceiling of the garage.

They came early in the morning and put plastic over everything and suited up to protect themselves in case any of the foam accidentally dripped.

When they were finished our ceiling had four inches of Icynene packed in to all of the open spaces. Icynene has an R-value of 3.6 per inch. Another advantage of using it is that it seals all of the cracks in a much more thorough way than is possible just using fiberglass.

They did the walls between the garage and the bathroom too. The other wall is made out of foam core panels so it doesn't need any additional help.

Our house is very foamy between the foam core panels, the icynene, and one of our favorite colors upstairs, Faded Seafoam, which we've used in several different places including the ceiling of the back porch.

Here's a shot of the intersection between the bathroom wall and the ceiling.

The next step was to fill in the rest of the ceiling with R19 fiberglass. So at this point our R-value is well above the required R30.

Since the garage was all nice and cleaned out, I realized that this would probably be the only time I'd ever be able to park my car there (It's Doug's garage, not mine, and I know it will be packed to the gills again once we finish working on it). So I drove on in. It felt kind of fun to park inside for a change. I'm glad I had the chance to try it out.