Attics are nasty

And I’m not talking about ancient Greece, either.  I’ve been making forays into my attic over the past couple of days, stringing Cat-5 from the hub at the southeast (front) corner to the outlet boxes on the west (back) side.  This project involved making mess with half-inch drills and jigsaws, and cutting an irregular hole in the ceiling because there’s no room to allow cutting a neat hole in the ceiling.  The cable that I’m going to pull has been pulled, and the next Thing to Do is to mount the outlet boxes and wire the ports, at which point I can go on and start to seal up the wall that’s been torn out the last two weeks.  At least I’ll be working with eight-foot wallboard panels instead of twelve-foot panels, as I was on the ceiling, and on a vertical surface instead of over my head.

The attic is just about hideous, and it needs a LOT of clearing up.  At some point a previous owner blew in insulation—I think it’s urethane and not fiberglass—and by now it’s absolutely filled with dirt and filth and rodent shit and who knows what.  Having to lie in the stuff, fishing cable through invisible-but-palpable holes, was plumb nasty.  I want to shop-vac the whole mess out and lay new rolled insulation between the joists, because the old insulation’s in such bad condition I can’t believe it’s doing its job any more, and L wants to put down a plywood decking over the whole thing after that (which is a pretty good idea, really, as long as we do it with drywall screws where we can get to electric cables and such for maintenance afterward).  ’Course, getting the plywood nursed underneath the furnace unit, which lives in the attic, could turn into a logistical tangle.

There are several other things that need doing up there, as long as I’m doing, like un-bolting and removing some older HVAC pipes that were just cut off and abandoned when a previous unit was pulled out.  They’re punched through the south wall of the house, and the hole they come through is so much bigger than the pipes are that it’s an open invitation to rats and birds to come in.  The south gable vent needs new screen put on it as well—looks like squirrels or rats have been chewing at the old screen, and sparrows or something have built nests in the louvers that need to be cleaned out.

The worst part of doing anything in the attic, though is the insufferable heat.  Because of the way the roof is built (wood shingles on open decking), I can’t install insulation against the roof, and the sun on the charcoal-gray comp shingles (the top layer) turns the place into an oven.  One day I might take a thermometer up with me, out of morbid curiosity.

The Dustpuppy takes the UN’s yak and returns to Pusat Tasek.  Fnord.