Month: November 2009

The wind has been blowing hard the last few days. The airport registered a 54 mile per hour gusts and the next day there were gusts in the thirties. After it quiets down, I’ll go out in the woods to see what has blown down. There is always windfall.

When I was a kid, Dad would not let me go out in the woods during or after a windstorm until he had surveyed it for widow-makers.

One of Dad’s remote cousins was killed in a windstorm. His family had a farm in the community called Lawrence, close to Deming. The cousin followed Deming tradition and became a logger. His mother was partially disabled. She could walk, but just barely. A series of accidental falls and bumps to the head had paralyzed one side, her left I believe, shortly after she arrived from Germany, probably in the twenties. She never learned to speak English well, preferring to speak German, which she spoke rapidly and clearly, but with a slight stutter. Her bad arm was completely immobile and twisted up close to her body. Her husband died from a heart attack when the son was barely out of high school. The mother was self-reliant and energetic and able to keep house despite her disability.

The son was killed during a fall wind storm like the one this week. Heavy winds forced the logging crew to knock off work for the day and they were gathered around a warm up fire, getting ready to return home off the mountain when a gust of wind brought down a widow-maker, a heavy tree limb hanging in the branches of another tree. That widow-maker did not make a widow, but it killed my Dad’s unmarried cousin.

His neck appeared broken and his chest was crushed. The crew loaded him on the truck and rushed him to the hospital in Bellingham, but it was a punishing three hour trip, bouncing over miles of washboard and pothole logging road in a truck sprung for hauling loads. One of the loggers riding on the truck rushing to meet the ambulance told Dad that the ride was nearly as bad as the widow-maker.

After the death of her son, the widow sold the farm in Lawrence and moved to a small apartment in Bellingham. My parents visited her almost every week, partially out of pity because she was isolated and had an exceptionally hard life, but more because in spite of her broken English and lack of mobility, she was intensely interested in everything around her. She never talked about her absent son or husband, but she had lots to say about John F. Kennedy, whom she liked because he said “Ich bin ein Berliner” in German. After he was assassinated, she got books from the library and even spent some of her small pension on William Manchester’s book about him.

Eventually she died too and Dad was her executor. The cold war was still raging, but she willed most of her estate, which was much larger than Dad expected, to relatives in East Germany. Delivering the inheritance to those relatives was difficult because they could not accept foreign currency, so it all had to be converted into loads of coal, appliances, and cases of canned goods through brokers.

I will be checking for widow-makers soon. You never know what kind of trouble they will cause.

The pressure test is done. No surprise: the old house leaks. Our house exchanges inside air with outside air roughly three times faster than a new energy efficient building. To get the same amount of ventilation in a modern well-sealed dwelling you would have to open wide a picture window. That open window accounts for all the drafts in the old place. The challenge is how to close that window.

It would be easier if there were a few big and simple steps, but instead, there are a thousand small complicated little leaks to stop up.

A tight fitting storm door for the old front door will help, but it will only close the window a fraction. The upstairs and attic needs weatherstripping in fifty places and there are knee walls that need to be better insulated and closed up. Conversely, the attic space itself could use better ventilation. The rim joists in the basement, the band of wood where the house meets the foundation, leaks badly and must be caulked tediously and carefully. There are basement windows that leak air and we have to improve the seal between the basement and the crawlspace under the extension we added in the remodel. There is leakage around every light fixture and wall outlet. The list of little jobs is nearly endless, but at least now we have a list.

A bright spot in the test was a glimpse of the personality of my great grandfather whose personality hovered over the test. My mother used to fume at my great grandfather for building the windows for the house by hand with his Stanley molding plane. The windows are all odd sizes that he built to fit the space, not the dimensions in a standard catalog. To my mother’s dismay, standard curtains and drapes would not fit this handwork, but the same stubborn patient personality that stopped traffic to light a cigar properly built windows that are still tight close to a hundred years later. The engineer running the test was surprised, and I shook my head at that headstrong old craftsman who, likely as not, would have just put his feet up on the open oven door to warm and returned to reading his German paper, the windows performing as expected.

Next week, I am betting close to a thousand dollars that our house is full of holes I don’t know about. A crew will pressurize the house with fans and then track down where the pressurized air leaks out. Evenings and weekends for the next few months, I will crawl, climb, and wriggle my way into dark corners and dusty attics, stopping up the holes. I might even hire someone to fix the tough ones. If it all goes as I anticipate, we will get back the investment in a few years of reduced heating bills, and the cold drafts that come from nowhere all over this old house will disappear, making it much more comfortable for everyone but Napoleon, our Shetland Sheep Dog. Napoleon’s coat is designed for sleeping outdoors in the snow, so he, and he alone, is always searching for a icy draft for a nap.

When Henry Thoreau built his house on Walden Pond, he did not look for insulation to keep warm. Instead, he plastered the interior of his little house. The plaster made his cabin almost airtight. Henry was no dummy and Walden Pond is a lot colder than Whatcom County. With airtight plastered walls, even an inefficient fireplace would warm his cabin. The first requirement for warmth is walls that do not allow cold air to flow in from outside. Heat does radiate out through thin walls, but radiation is very slow compared to a rush of cold air. A well insulated space will not be warm if frigid air is flowing in from the outside.

About five miles southwest of the farm, there was a shingle mill on the Northwest Diagonal road, about a half mile south of John Schaefer’s place and just north of my great-great-uncle John’s farm. When I think of Henry Thoreau plastering his cabin, the shacks of the shingle weavers along Northwest Diagonal come to mind. Dad said once he and Grandpa came home from Bellingham after dark in the winter when the northeaster was blowing. Dad said they could see the red hot tin stoves glowing through the cracks in the walls of the shingle weaver’s shacks. Those poor people must have been cold, but if they had followed Thoreau’s practice and plastered the interior of their shacks, they would have been warm and the stoves would have been invisible.

Thoughts of those shingle weaver’s shacks prompted me to go out to yard and examine the old cedar shack that was my grandparents first house. The walls are thin– inch cedar boards– but a wide batten is carefully nailed over every gap. You could not see a red hot stove through those walls, although it would have benefited from a plastering. Those old cedar shacks are made from the same material as an Indian houses that I have seen those up close at the Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria and the Makah Museum at Neah Bay. They used the same technique of overlapping cedar boards to seal out the weather. The Indians split their boards, the bostons,  whites, had sawmills. The frame of grandparent’s shack was built from split, not sawn, timbers, so in that respect, it is like a native structure.

When my grandparents replaced the cedar shack with the house, they included the features of the day: electric wiring, plumbing, and an enormous wood burning furnace in the basement, but no insulation. They added some rock wool insulation into the north wall at a date unknown– the thirties is a fair guess.

A few years ago, we remodeled and when the crew tore into the north wall, we discovered that parts where the northeaster hits the hardest were built up from wood siding, two layers of shiplap sheathing, two by fours laid flat, wood lathe and plaster, adding up to almost four inches of solid wood. Solid wood does not have a high thermal resistance. Four inches of wood only has roughly half the thermal resistance of a two by four stud wall insulated with fiberglass batts, which is inadequate by today’s standards. But solid wood has another property: it stores heat and radiates it back, something that a fiberglass insulated stud wall does not do well at all. So the old timers knew what they were doing when they put up that crazy north wall which is warm to the touch no matter how hard the north easter blows.

This year, if all goes well, it will be the warmest ever.