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It is my understanding that these old 4-squares were designed to be cooled by airflow. Modern insulating often defeats the old style airflow designs, but insulation is still a good thing! I assume with a 4-square you have a hipped roof, possibly with 1 or more gables. If you are able to get...

I know your question is about bats, but here goes. We just had an engineer look at our balloon-framed 2 story house. We don't have the written report yet, but he did tell us that in most of these old houses the lathe and plaster served a structural purpose to keep the studs from moving. [Our...

Unknown1 - go to the Forums page, choose the correct forum and click on it. There should be a blue button at the top that says "new thread"

Whew that's quite a post! Have you tried contacting a design tech at the power company? They will be able to inform you if your service line is undersized and what the requirements and costs are for installing a new meter. My local power company just looked at our service, which hasn't been...

If you are interested just for looks and not heat, electric fireplaces are very nice looking now, and you don't have to worry about combustion. There are some very realistic looking ones on the market these day.

I would not be surprised if you find out there used to be a door centered under that gable.

I have ventless gas fireplaces, and they were great at first - took the chill off of a room quickly and saved us a bunch on our gas bill. Now, the gas company has added some new kind of "stink" to the gas, and whenever we turn on the ventless it stinks up the room. The other issue is to keep an...

You also need to check out your local codes. The towns where I live do not allow sump pumps for groundwater to discharge into the sewer systems due to system overload during storms. You should have a separate discharge line running outside well away from the foundation of your house, just as you...

We put down 3 feet of plastic [the thicker the better] with 3-4 inches of rock on top when we redid our basement wall. Not a weed in sight. It is also sloped away from the house so any water that doesn't hit the gutters runs away from the basement. Another advantage of rock vs mulch is that you...

That is why we always purchase materials ourselves and go through them by hand at the store. You would not believe the percentage of materials being sold that are damaged by the strapping, forklifts etc. I personally would not pay someone to install broken stuff on my house - I could do that...

From a fellow Money Pit owner: Good Luck. You have my sympathies.

Unfortunately, we live in a rural area where permits are not required. So no mandatory inspection to fall back on. Since it is a rural area, most of the tradespeople are firmly entrenched in the "good ole boy" network and it is hard to find anyone that will go against their buddy and say it is...

There is a certain amount of lean involved - it is an old house. However, everything in the interior was gone, so the only adjustments would be made at the exterior walls. [Warning - begin rant] A 2x6 support wall with everything wracked and leaning, plus no headers above the doorways, the two...

Yeah, well I should have titled my post "Ranty rant" because I am mega frustrated. :mad: The "specification" was that the new floor joists for the attic should butt end to end above the 2x6 support wall rather than overlap at the sides like the original joists did. Rather than call and say...

The fact that they are making him repair what seems to be a relatively minor break (hard to gauge size from the photo) would suggest that the HA is pretty anal. I would read through the HA rules and see what they say and go from there. It would probably be a good idea to get rid of those two...

Maybe I am missing something here. If someone hires a contractor to build something, such as a wall and/or floor, does it need to be specified that the item needs to be plumb, square and straight? If one of the specifications on said construction might cause it to be crooked by, oh let's...

Also the framing on a 1919 house is such that the blown insulation probably couldn't fill all the voids, especially around windows and in corners due to cross-bracing within the framework. Check your cold spots against the plugs outside, and if there are no plug holes in the immediate area...

Because a pane of glass for a storm window is cheaper and easier to replace than a double pane window. We can get some pretty sizeable hail and occasional windblown debris that has cracked our storm windows before.

I often wonder why people don't still build the old-style storm cellars out in the yard. You can see them all over the place around here (NE Kansas) wherever there used to be an old house. The wooden doors are rotted off, but the cellar itself is usually sound, even after decades of neglect...

Can you use storm windows with double pane windows, or will the heat trapped between the two cause the seal on the double pane windows to fail?