Spray Foam Murder Scene

Before we started on the spray foam, we noticed that our windows had taken on a little bit of water. It had rained pretty hard in Granbury during the week, and it gave us an opportunity to test the windows. Nothing came into the house, but there was some water in the bottom of the slider channels of a few windows that appeared to have experienced some wind driven rain. After a little bit of research it seemed like with slider windows it is normal to have a little water in the slider channel after a hard rain. There are drainage holes in the window that are designed to get that water out, and the next day all of the water was gone. The drainage holes worked!

Now as you may have guessed with the title of this post, we went a little crazy on the expanding foam insulation (Great Stuff). And by we, we mean Drew. While the rough openings for the windows and door were very close to a perfect fit, due to many precise measurements along the way, there were some gaps that needed to be filled.

Please raise your hands if you love a drafty house?! See, no one. For this reasons, Drew spent Saturday going a little overboard with the Great Stuff around every window, the door and even in the headers. Foaming the headers were mainly just to add a little insulation in them to raise their R-value slightly by getting rid of the air gap.

Be warned, you will have to clean up this mess once it dries. Abbie spent Sunday with a knife carefully cutting off all of the extra goop. Carefully, because you want to avoid cutting the window, house wrap, and flashing tape underneath. Below is what a window looks like when it is cleaned up a little bit. The trim we are going to put up around the window will cover the rest of the spray foam once it is installed.

After finishing up with the window and door gaps. We also needed to tape the house wrap to the top of the top plate. This finishes off the top of the house wrap and gets us ready for installing the fascia vents and the rafter baffles which together will vent the roof (you'll hear about this in more detail in a later post).

In the first picture below you can see the house wrap between the subfascia (2x4 in the top of the picture) and the top plate (2x4 in the bottom of the picture). It's not really attached to anything at this point and it just flaps in the wind. So we had to cut the house wrap at each rafter, fold it over of the top plate, and tape it down with Tyvek tape.

The picture below shows the finished product.

Next up will be installing the line set (refrigerant lines) for the mini split and setting the electrical boxes!