Monday, May 29, 2006

Installing fiberglass wool roof insulation

I spent Saturday crawling and wriggling around in a friend’s roof helping to install insulation. It is dangerous and difficult being both physical and mental torture. The air quickly becomes filled with millions of minute glass fibres that itch and burn on your skin and are most probably carcinogenic or lead to silicosis. You have to take immaculate care to only weight the joists otherwise you would wreck the plaster ceiling which is only made from paper and chalk after all. The trusses that make up the roof confine and limit movement and the reduced vision through the foggy goggles made for head banging back wrenching fun. There are all the lights and electrical wiring waiting like punji sticks to electrocute you and whilst we wore masks and enclosed goggles to fend off the fibres we could see very little through the goggles and had to keep removing them and I am not sure how effective the masks were at doing anything other than helping to create a feeling of hot humid claustrophobic enclosure. I have thrown out the fibre contaminated clothing including my underpants. The beers afterwards were well deserved.
Sunday we went to a friends place for a BBQ which was infinitely more relaxing.
We are now counting down the hours before we fly away on a holiday to Port Douglass – Just north of Cairns, Far North Queensland, more commonly named “EF EN Que”

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Many thanks for helping to make Kim & Keiran's house that much warmer!

Steph said...

Holy shite. Isn't that kind of stuff meant to be done by professionals??

unique_stephen said...

Next time Steph, next time