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.