How to Install Insulation | DIY Kitchen Renovation Pt. 1

so insulating nowadays has changed a little bit in the last few years because back in the old days we used to just basically fill a wall cavity full of insulation and it was understood that the wall was officially insulated but when we come to understand is is that insulating now is not just about the material it's about the whole combination of systems of the home so now we have the exterior of the house we've got our type r out there we have the water diversion system on the outside of the house we can insulate now our house just past electrical inspection which means we're able to start closing up the walls which is insulation you always have to get your electrical inspected before you put your insulation in which is a key element now what i'm doing here is i'm just i thinned out the insulation thickness to go behind my electrical box here alright and i wanted to get all this nice contact down there with the other there we go traditionally when people are framing they frame these stud base so that the installation already fits you can buy this stuff in a sixteen inch or 24 inch widths the actual inch is actually different but that's the on center measurement so when you come over here with your tape measure you can check it's going to say fifteen fourteen three quarters something like that you're close fifteen and a quarter that means you're buying 16 inch insulation if it's almost 2 feet by the 2 foot insulation okay no installation itself the reason this stuff works is it creates a barrier for the cold and the heat to interact so you're gonna have cold from one side let me just see this will have cold from one side and heat on the other side and somewhere in the middle is gonna be the freezing point somewhere in the middle that's the key now the more insulation you put in your wall the less the heat can travel you drive that freezing point further and further outside the wall now yeah what you're gonna want to do when you're installing your insulation is cut around every obstacle that's in the way don't tuck it okay if you have a piece of wood that's in the way cut around it okay because that is a really good seal if I just tuck it I'm gonna have a gap and that always is a problem because insulation only works if you don't have air movement now the other half of the insulation system is going to be the plastic your vapor barrier now if you live in the north like we do the barrier goes on the inside of the house it generally goes on the warm side of the house if you live in the south the people will actually make an air barrier that's a vapor barrier on the outside of the house because it's always hot and all they're doing is air conditioning all the time so where you live has a lot to do with how you actually take care of the situation but for the purpose of this video we're going to assume that we're installing the climate where we have a furnace and we're gonna heat in the winter now you will see you got wire issues box issues different framing going on everything wants to be tucked together we're gonna go like this this is actually the area where my hood fan is gonna go in my kitchen all right now I'm gonna have all kinds of silly gaps to fill in here or I can go sideways make my life a little bit simpler whenever you cut insulation I always cut it a little bit wider than what you need so that you can force it in and compression okay nothing wrong with having wiring inside if you want it tucked away you peel the installation open and then just close it around the wire nice and simple now this one is going to measure there cut there and now I've got to get around this so I've got a cut Wow here we go yeah that's done we gotta get around this box and here now the idea here is you just want an eyeball every one of these elements okay a little bit more it's nice as a way of doing things if you're going around electoral box leave the back have that gloom behind it that is a really nice way to take care of that issue Wow boom boom boom now on the market there are basically two different materials one of them is mineral wool which we have in the bottom and fiberglass they both do the same thing they create a barrier for the hot and cold meet and create condensation now when hot meets cold inside a wall it creates condensation from the moisture that's traveling with the heat which is why we always put a vapor barrier so that heat travels without the moisture it's forced to leave it on this side so nothing gets wet this all stays nice and dry if you're having any concerns with moisture getting through the wall go into mineral wool is a brilliant idea because that stuff will actually dry out and continue to insulate where fiberglass once it gets wet it stays wet and it doesn't insulate anymore there we go that's tub days done that was it that's a pretty tricky area to insulate but you can see how relatively easy it is all right some of the other things you're gonna have to do when you're insulating is cutting it to fit the long width here okay so we're gonna line this up I'll show you my little secret cut both ends okay here we go now you can use a straight edge to make these cuts I like a 2x4 because you can compress the the insulation now if you cut it the right size it fits in with just a little bit of compression if you have to push too much and you end up with that that kind of a compression you've done it wrong right simply peel it out lay it in nice and gentle like you want it nice and fluffy fluffy insulates really well yeah we're gonna get this down here one of the ways you can measure and cut is you just roll it up put a little slice right where the joint is take it out and then cut it all the way through you'll see it's just a little bit long bounce it in there a little bit of compression boom everything is nicely tight together now the key to successful installation it's very similar to the concept like soundproofing actually in soundproofing if you have any air moving at all then if you have an entire wall soundproof you have a hole then you hear the sound clear as they it's the same with insulation if you have one weakness that's going to be where the cold draft comes from and so having a weakness in your system means you're gonna have a huge energy cost trying to heat you're gonna have drafts in the room but most importantly with those drafts you're gonna have the hot air mixing and your because we have wood frame construction you're gonna get stuff like this this kind of rot its mold it comes from the wood the paper got wet it stayed wet it didn't get a chance to dry and that's gonna be a problem so the way that we deal with it is we have to have an entire thermal brake system now we move beyond just insulating just having the presence of insulation to having a thermal brake system what that means is we don't just insulate a cavity anymore now we have to also make sure that we are able to bring the vapor barrier right from the roof tied all the way through the wall around the windows and the doors through the foundation right into the basement continuous really that's the key any home that was built before basically 95 year 2000 doesn't have a continuous system there's all kinds of breaks in the system the older the house the more brakes the less likelihood you even have a vapor barrier because that kind of technology is relatively new on the market the understanding is new even there's one little spot here where my framing is adjusted I want to tuck it around there we go now you'll see all I do is I put a little mark on the back of the insulation split it open get the insulation up and around and let it envelop the wire okay you can cut it run every wire in the house it's nice and quick don't be afraid to use the little bits off cuts this is like I said as long as you're cutting it a little longer than you need it well let's get rid of this junk here okay then you can put piece after piece after piece because it'll fit absolutely perfectly now I've got another wire here and just peel open something behind some in front there we go that is a nice continuous piece once you have all of your installation installed you can put on the plastic and then you seal it down we're going to show you all that in just a minute okay so one of the tricks we got here is this is a balloon frame construction which means it is really old and there's no top plate so these studs don't have a top on them there's no lid in between floors so we have here's this cavity just continues on and on and on right up to the roof and that just keeps sticking pieces of wood together until they get there because we're going to be doing some work here in the future upstairs I want to actually shove this insulation up that cavity as far as I can go until I get resistance and then just give it a little bit of a gentle tug and let it go snug in there okay because I want to make sure that I've got really good quality thermal break here we go I'm going to trim back the thickness of the insulation off the front ready for this I'm going to tuck this in behind the header that I put in here get all the way down in the back okay now balloon construction because of the way it's done our vapor barrier actually is gonna have a bit of a challenge continuing up so when we cut it we're gonna put it all the way up we also want to tie it in all the way down it's very important when you have an old house like this that you peel back some of your sub flooring and you find a way to get your vapor barrier to be continuous and I'm going to show you the way it is built and the way that we fixed it you just come with me over here so now you can imagine 140 years ago when they built this house you know they have all the studs okay they've got all the outside boards here there's two layers of it so this is the exterior siding and by doubling it up they help to create a water diversion system by getting rid of the gaps helps to close up the air blowing through but before they put the wood on they actually installed this paper now this is really thick this is the original concept front air barrier it's a really rigid cardboard and they would put all that across and on the inside they even put some of the laughs and nailed it over to close up the gaps try to reduce the amount of air blown through but because the technology and the understanding was just so poor back then they'd have the guy that put the flooring in come inside the stud base right now that totally interrupts the thermal break there's no such thing as an interior vapor barrier and so any air that's pushed through this wall either now or in the future because of rot and mice infestation or whatever reason it's just coming right into the room especially around the floors and let's face it when the air and the draft is bad around the floors the house just feels cold all the time so what we're gonna do is solve this problem is we're gonna take our saw and we're going to cut this back because underneath here there's just a two-by-four attached to the studs these are nailed onto by removing that 2x4 we can have access to this stud Bay right to the foundation we're gonna insulate we're going to put that vapor barrier all the way down to this foundation and wrap it around so that we can have a continuous system right from the whatever we do in the basement all the way up to the attic in the future so we're gonna show you the other side of the wall here what we've actually done okay so let me just show you what's going on here here is that 8 by 8 it's a beam that was placed on the exterior stone wall and then there's a gap and then there's an interior stack stone wall and it has a great big 2 by 6 sitting on it and they put these concrete blocks and the trees on top of that that combination of construction really makes it difficult to get a good installation and vapor barrier so what we did is we insulated the stud base got our plastic we brought it nice and long so we're coming down across this this plastic we can actually trim and use acoustic seal around the stone front blocks on top of our new mineral wall that we're gonna lay across the top and then we're gonna tie it together with this insulation blanket that's in the basement and we're gonna overlap this plastic and get a good tape seal and hopefully that will help the create probably about a 98% hair barrier it's not going to be perfect but the way the house is built we're not gonna get perfect the goal here is to go from I would say when I bought the house 30% efficiency up to about 95 to get all that insulation and vapor barrier sealed up so we don't have air moving back and forth from the outside and then we're gonna have a nice comfy winter so before everybody has said your questions in and comments going oh my god how is he playing with that insulation he doesn't have any gloves on he's not wearing a mask the truth is the fiberglass pink it's eco touch technology relatively new on the market where it allows you to work with this stuff without dying right traditionally installation was absolutely horrible the old yellow stuff had actual chunks of glass not just fibres this is actually pretty comfortable to work with for the most part now it's difficult for me to talk on camera wearing and one of these diapers so I'm gonna put it on now finish this on a time lapse but just so you know if you're working at home wear a mask don't be crazy but this stuff is actually pretty comfortable work with and I don't ever have the need to wear gloves so just keep that in mind now if you are working with insulation it's driving you crazy when you're done wash your arms under cold water you'll be fine - all right so let's get to the time lapse when we're done this will talk about vapor barrier and all the tips and tricks for installing it because it's incredibly important to do it right ow Oh so before we start the time lapse one more thing oh that's better people are gonna ask you know what kind of installation should I use what our value of that sort of thing our value all relates to the thickness of the insulation so it comes with a label 12 14 20 and whatever whatever that all depends on the installation situation if you have a 2x4 wall you're gonna be going hard 12 if it's an old house like this you can bump it up to our 14 if they carry it in your store most new home construction is our 20 and the new standard because it's made with two by six the new standard is whatever your house is framed upstairs you need to frame your house downstairs so if you're finishing a basement and you have two by six walls in your house and you can check just by measuring the thickness of your window if you have to buy six walls upstairs you've got to frame with two by six walls downstairs or at least leave that five and a half inch space from the wall to the finished framing so you can use an hour 20 insulation there otherwise when the inspector comes he's not gonna be happy he's gonna make you fix it all that huh one more thing I've worked for three kinds of insulation the pink the white and the mineral wool and I'm just curious to have a conversation in the comments section down below what is your favorite and why keep in mind that we're talking about insulin for a thermal break on the exterior of a house so I don't want to have too many people talking about how mirror walls fireproof if you have a fire and you have exterior insulation made of mineral wall it isn't gonna make a difference at the end of the day what the result is the rest of the house is going to burn down before your exterior walls do is still getting bulldozed and starting over so let's talk about your favorites and why keeping in mind that fiberglass pink is usually less than a third of the cost of mineral time for the time lapse [Music] well we're here talking about this step I'll just show the products we're gonna use one of it is a staple hammer this is nice because staples driven right t-50 staples I like using three eighths on my vapor barrier it seems to be the perfect blend of long enough but not too long that you don't have to hit it too hard you're gonna want a marker you use a black marker on the plastic and then you're good to go of course you're gonna need some duct tape this is to seal plastic to plastic in areas where there is no wood you want to use acoustic sealant there's a lot of varieties I think I have some mono here as well it's all the same stuff this basically never dries it's a real real nasty black goop and you put this between two layers of plastic and press it together or you can put it on the wood like we're gonna use around all of the floor joists we're gonna fill all those cavities with this stuff and then press the plastic into it to create an air seal every one of those little roof cavities now that detail is gonna be time-consuming but it's gonna be worth it because that'll kill all the drafts in the house and you're gonna want to have some fresh blades because when you're cutting plastic you want a nice sharp blade you get cut when you're working with a dull blade every time your blade has got a nick in it or something and the snag is a plastic you have an extra tug that's when you're gonna hurt yourself so make sure you're working with sharp lace this is gonna be kind of like a tutorial I'm going to show you some tips and tricks for if you're doing this on your own because his selling vapor barrier generally speaking can be a real frustrating for a lot of people if you haven't done a lot of it so I've got a few tricks up my sleeve I'm going to share with you you get a few thousand square feet for just pennies a glass right it's not that expensive so when you're measuring out your vapor barrier be generous it's easier to trim it off if you have too much then to try to fuss around with something if it's almost not quite there just maddening right so what we're going to do is measure the wall cut our plastic a little longer than we need it then I'm going to show you how to stick so this is really simple 4 feet 8 feet 12 feet 16 and 3 is 19 I'm gonna throw an extra foot on each side so I'm gonna cut it at 21 now there's a lot of ways to do that that board is almost 7 feet long all right 7 feet 14 feet 21 yeah and a little bit never hurts to have a little of extra ok before we get started we're just gonna check to make sure that their tools are properly loaded we got lots of staples in here and we are good to go just snaps into place pull it down and release that's how that works so the secret in doing your vapor barrier generally speaking is you're gonna be working in a dirty area you want to unravel this so you stay on the clean side so it's draped over your head while you're working you're not getting covered in filth and dirt and getting into your eyes barrier generally comes in 8 or 10 foot lengths plus a few extra inches okay so we have an 8 foot wall here but we're also doing a rim joist that's why we added the bottom first so that we can tape that seal so we're using an 8 foot piece of plastic and the goal here is to install it so that we're just going to have an overlap here of a couple of inches yeah let me show you how to do this so you can keep a level here's my clean side all right get underneath it and then Ravel all that extra plastic and you want to have about an extra foot past your corner okay kind of like surfing max you got to get inside the inside the wave okay so what I'm doing here is I'm for the purpose of the camera I'll try to get a little more awkward I'm gonna be having it about a foot out of the corner okay and just a little bit higher than I need it I'm gonna put one staple right there just to hold that spot now we get tricky now if you hold on to your old boxes cardboard boxes staple boxes stuff like that then you're gonna love this next trick there's a crease in the plastic and what you want to do is you want to have that looking like it's somewhat level right and when it's somewhat level you want to go like this on that crease right where that what picked cardboard is once you got your staple on that crease throw a few in there what this does is it gives you the ability to go to the other end of the room and stretch the plastic out and make sure it's all perfect what up good I know we're gonna have extra right now I cut an extra-long on purpose just to overemphasize the point there we go yeah [Applause] I'll let you just get an idea you can see those creases now right you can see that it's starting to look pretty perfect pretty parallel now I'm gonna grab the plastic right on that crease where I've got my staples on the other side and I'm gonna pull it as tight as I can you're gonna grab another piece of cardboard now this is the perfect time to step back and take a look at your work you can actually see because I stapled on the crease in the plastic that looks pretty darn good right this is where the easy part comes in now we're staying on the clean side we are going to just scratch this up towards the ceiling [Applause] and this is kind of like ironing your clothes right every step you're just pulling towards the outside okay pulling down looking for nails or screws you flip this around to the hammer side okay there's anything left in that wood you want to take care of it right now now here's the plastic from the bottom okay that overlap there is it going to be pretty darn healthy so we're gonna do is we're gonna staple above that joint for now all right now I've seen a lot of guys over the years and they put a staple every two inches they'll go through a whole box of staples on a wall and that's just not necessary remember you want to have a good seal for anything that's penetrating the vapor barrier but the plastic itself doesn't have to be tight to the wood because when you install the drywall everything will be compressed so this is just to get everything in place that's all we're doing here so that we can make things easy to work with all right we don't have to go crazy with staples it's one of those things where if you use too many you'll end up running out and then you're gonna have a trip to the store and then that one little four dollar box of staples ends up costing you fifty dollars and wasted time and gas and everything so be smart there we go working up pulling up a note okay so here what you need to do is think about your strategy now because it's bloom construction my studs are not in line with my choice they're offset what we're going to use is really use this surface of the stud for pressing plastic into the insulation acoustic sealant we're gonna have a sealant coming across the floor and then down and around the joist again so when I cut my plastic I want to have it kind of fitting right into the best corner okay so what I'm gonna do I just slide my knife in here okay remember I talked about having a sharp knife we cut straight towards myself that's not terrible little crappy at the end but alright for now and over here we're gonna do the same thing on this cut right off that joist we're talking about that sharp knife business right okay so now I've got a piece of plastic I'll go up here onto that wood onto that ceiling and there's still like an inch and a half or whatever to wrap around this wood now you'll see here there's gonna be an issue right so what we do is we stretch this out take your knife and give it a bit of a nick okay so that the plastic will wrap around that joist we can even throw a staple in it add a little red tape when we're done if we need to now this stuff is crazy messy I mean it does a great job but it is incredibly messy so put a nice angle on it and put it on in such a way that you're gonna be able to leave it on the wall without wearing it okay because this has gotta be one of the messiest substance known to mankind alright and this isn't a situation here where I'm close is good enough okay oh I'm dripping everywhere oh oh close is not good enough with this stuff you want this to be everywhere it won't seal there's not enough there to press into yeah okay and here we go both sides at the same time stay on the clean side right presses into the corner across the top take your life a little leisure throw in a couple of staples in those key intersections okay loving it yeah we're gonna get this pressed in there beautiful and we got a whole lot of extra plastic here right I'm gonna suggest whenever you have extra material get rid of it it's easier to see what's going on and do a little quality inspection if all of this junk is out of the way mine folder blade there we go now that actually is quite good Oh some of the goop do or the staple went through once again and now I have a seal I've got drywall going here it's gonna be under compression I got my black all the way up and around the wood right around the joist cavity over here now this black stuff doesn't come off very well gasoline works wd-40 works give it three or four days works but generally speaking if you're concerned about that wear clothes that you can afford to throw in the garbage or wear some disposable gloves and keep changing the mountain I always have a place where you can put your acoustic caulking in a corner on a scrap piece of wood that way if it leaks all over the place you can throw that in the garbage and you're gonna end up walking through globs of it all over the house and track it through the rest of your house that would be a disaster anyway that's pretty much the whole process and the only other kind of penetrations we have to deal with now is how to tape down everything else so let's go through that so right here I've got a window it's kitchen counter where we are if it's more than four feet of counter you need two plugs but it could be on the same twelve two wire that's nice so I put in two different boxes on the same circuit so I can demonstrate how to seal both of them up box number one this is awesome because this has a plastic flange with a rubber gasket on it and here's how I do box number one I simply cut the plastic right on the inside of the box okay and then I stretch that plastic around that and that's done now I want to put the drywall on it's compressed around this box and this gasket and it is gonna be perfectly sealed box number two does not have the flange tighten all this you're gonna cut the inside of the box you're going to stretch it around the box but now we have to tape it to the hose okay so start with your tape about a quarter inch above the box cut it in an appeal fold over the edge so you can find it again in a second and then what you do with your tape is now you're pressing it into the plastic okay and then just give it a little nick in the corners now you can do this and use this as much as you need the idea is to get the tape to tape around the the exposed quarter inch edge of that bottles I know it sounds a little bit ridiculous but trust me when I say this if you don't seal these up properly you're gonna have air moving around your electrical circuits and you're gonna get a draft and you're gonna get condensation there and you're gonna get mold appearing on your wall board just behind your countertops all right that's not something that you want there we go now that's frustrating takes tape that box cost about $2 a piece more I'll let you decide if it's something you want to fuss around with but they both work now they're both gonna be air sealed that's awesome that's how you handle that down here in the bottom we have an option to seal down here okay we can get the black goop we can peel the plastic back like this put a line lay it over top and press it in or because we've worked nice and clean and that's the factory edge I can just take our tape and press it in like that okay now our barriers continuous down to the basement our barrier up top is continuous and sealed to the subfloor upstairs and when we continue the work upstairs at a later date we'll be able to seal the vapor barrier to the floor from the other side and that'll give us a perfect air seal throughout the entire wall right through the foundation yeah that's about all we're gonna need to know for installing the plastic and the tape except for the windows now this is the last place where you're gonna have to learn how secret or two so let's get into this we want to staple the plastic around the frame okay again the drywall is going to do most of the work here but having that plastic stretched tight gives you makes a lot easier to cut this all up and we're gonna be changing these windows out that'll be in the next video but for now I'll show you how to do the plastic you have at window jamb you have expansion foam that foam is an air barrier from the jamb to the stud okay so there's no air leaking here so when you're cutting your plastic you don't have to do anything fancy here and try to tape it onto the window jamb I know a lot of people do that because when they buy a new house they'll see in the basement they've got vinyl windows and they always use the red tape and tape the plastic right to the window it's the ugliest thing and it shouldn't be allowed but they're just lazy what we need to do here is cut the plastic just to the side of your expansion foam you just clean your stud okay right there that's what you're looking for and I'll show you why in a second cut the extra plastic away from the window now you've got two options when you install your drywall you can trust that it's going to create compression but if you really want to make sure that you don't have air leaking around your windows take your staples off now grab your goop okay and just get a thin bead here didn't have to be a lot just enough to make contact and this stuff is awesome for areas where you've got inconsistencies in the surface height okay well pull it tight now just gently come back and press that on okay there you go now we got a good air seal whoo-hoo right no teeth necessary use the goop press it in when you're done if you want to just for extra measure you can throw a couple staples back on all right problem so that is a perfect way to have a complete thermal and air and vapour barrier system in your home no matter how old your house is Wow so if that information is all helpful to you and you're planning a major renovation project so remember the devil is in the details here if you want to learn more about how to renovate your house they click the link here you can follow along from the beginning on 1880s farmhouse restoration project to see in the comments below

Channel: Home RenoVision DIY

Views: 485,210

Keywords: homerenovision, kitchen remodel, home renovation, home renovation diy, how to install insulation, vapor barrier, vapor barrier installation, kitchen renovation, kitchen renovation DIY, thermal barrier, how to stop drafts in my house, How to Install Insulation | DIY Kitchen Renovation Pt. 1, Jeff thorman, kitchen remodel insulation, install insulation, diy insulation, make house warmer, how to make house warmer, energy efficient insulation, how to insulate house

Id: RAoSs392u8o

Length: 36min 20sec (2180 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 17 2019