Attic Insulation

Our house is old, which means our insulation is old and THIN. Not quite the R-39 attic insulation depth recommended for our region. With Home Depot's free insulation blower with 20 bag green insulation purchase, we decided it was the perfect time to purchase some more before winter hits. We needed 40 bags, or $215 worth of Green Fiber insulation (the recycled, none glass kind). It took all of 3 trips to the hardware store (one for the insulation and a second/third trip to pick up/drop off the machine) and about 6 hours worth of time to get the job done. You need one person to be outside feeding the blocks of insulation into the machine...

And a second person up in the attic, with a mask and eye protection, spraying the insulation to the desired depth...

To top it off, we qualify for a small energy tax credit since we didn't quite max out the tax credit from our windows!

Hopefully we will see a difference in our electricity bills this winter.

Camp Ground Cemetary

Not far from our house is a small civil war cemetery. It's so close we can walk to it. It is one of my favorite places to walk Cove too, especially in the fall when the leaves are changing...

It is so old most of the headstones are too weathered to read and falling over...

There is also a huge fallen tree that no one has cared to get rid of...

For some reason that cemetery feels really peaceful.

On the way home we made Cove take a picture by a fire hydrant that matched her scarf...

I guess not all dogs like fire hydrants, because she sure doesn't look happy ; )

Little Porch Action

As I blogged here, our porch wasn't the prettiest...

So we put in a little elbow grease and stripped all the old layers of paint off...

Then we used a little Quikrete semi-transparent concrete stain...

To get a much smoother, rocky gray look (New England Slate)...

(Little tip if you are thinking about using concrete stain...purchase a small paint sprayer that attaches to an air compressor...our first coat we rolled, and you could see every roller stroke when it dried.)

Our front part of our porch was looking a little rough too. We had actually waterproofed the porch when we first moved in, but two years later it was looking like this...

So I got down on my knees and rolled on a fresh coat of ceder colored waterproofer...

As you can see, it was a BIG difference!

Ahhhh....finally, a porch ready for fall!