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pine needle insulation Friday, October 23 2009
I've been putting fiberglass insulation into the walls of the brownhouse, but I was running low on the stuff and needed extra-thick material to put above the ceiling. The problem with a building this size is that almost anything bought for it comes in units several times more than what is actually needed. I couldn't buy linoleum tile for the bench because it would have cost $50 (and I would have only used $10 worth of it). But today I hit upon a perfect solution for the problem of attic insulation: pine needles from White Pines. They shed their needles in nearly-pure windrows on either side of Dug Hill Road. All I had to do was sweep them up and put them in the kind of polyethylene bags that grocery stores give you when you forget to bring your own. We usually remember, but we have over a dozen of the polyethylene bags on hand at all times. So I started bagging up pine needles and stuffing them between the brownhouse rafters, using drywall screws in places where the bags refused to stay. Pine needles aren't a good form of insulation in a building where fire could threaten lives, but that just isn't the case in the brownhouse.
I needed a wall material for the inside of the brownhouse, ao I went to the Home Depot looking for something cheap. In the end I went with particleboard because it is incredibly cheap. Drywall might have actually been a better (and cheaper) solution, but rain was threatening and I had to bring it back on the Subaru roof rack.
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