Category: Other

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.

I am a “word-a-day” addict. I don’t have a word of the day calendar on my desk, but I subscribe to two word a day email services and I keep links to several others. I gave up on expanding my vocabulary when I hit the half-century mark. That was ten years ago. I decided then that if I did not know enough words yet, I had better find the cashier and leave the casino, perhaps because I live in fear of the day that my language processing stack overwrites my control registers. As a computer scientist I know this could happen and the havoc that could ensue.

I know a lot of words. I’ve have been lucky, or foolish, enough to have studied many different subjects in the sixty years I have had the pleasure of dwelling on this green and glorious earth. I’ve been dumb kid, a farmer, a mathematician, an anthropologist, a sinologist, a carpenter, and a computer engineer, roughly in that order. It has been a string of exposures to different concepts, modes of thought, ways of describing things, and faces put to the world, and each one required new vocabulary words. And I passed PhD level examinations in German, Modern Chinese, Classical Chinese and French. Consequently, somewhere deep in the language centers of my brain, many words are stored. Enough to threaten a whole range of touchy control registers leading to all manner of mayhem.

Given this wealth of words, why the obsession with “word-a-day”? Depth is the answer. I don’t look for new words, but I crave better understanding of the words I already know. Here is a collection of links to word-a-day sites.

http://wordsmith.org/words/today.html

The Word A Day site. This site celebrates the English language with words that are not necessarily rare or challenging, but always interesting. The words are organized into weekly themes, and reflect the wide ranging tastes of the site master, Anu Garg, whom I have never met, but revere as a fellow computer professional and lover of language.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/cgi-bin/mwwod.pl

A daily word from the venerable American dictionary publishing house that took heat in the early sixties for describing American English as it is used rather than prescribing ideal usage. This decision dismayed those who had deified “Webster’s” as an ultimate moral authority.  The “Did You Know?” sections are a treat for word lovers because the M-W dictionary authors occasionally reveal etymological detail unavailable elsewhere.

http://www.oed.com/cgi/display/wotd

The word of the day from the Oxford English Dictionary is the heavy weight from the definitive historical dictionary of the English language. Of the words of the day, this one I either skip or study at length. Nothing in between. Unparalleled history and depth for word lovers.

http://www.wordcentral.com/buzzword/buzzword.php

The Daily Buzzword is Merriam-Webster’s word a day for eleven to fourteen year olds. Surprisingly, I find this is a very practical site. A working writer has to be cautious when using unfamiliar words. You can easily put off readers by using words they are not familiar with. Rare words become the center of attention and you will be called on the slightest error in their use. The Daily Buzzwords are reminders of good solid words that I want to be the mainstay of my working vocabulary. The Daily Buzzword authors’ word choices are surprisingly useful to a writer for adults. The other word of the day sites are entertainment. This one is for serious work.