For the past few months, Rich has been working in the kitchen — installing bucket lights, removing the florescent figures, adding two large skylights, and an electrical outlet that will be accessible from a peninsula I’m hoping to be in place by October.

Before he can enclose the area between the attic and skylights, he wanted to blow in additional insulation. Saturday afternoon, he purchased 15 bales of "green" cellulose material that is ground-up in a special machine then blow into the ceiling.

Saturday evening, before Home Depot closed, we rented the machine so we could start on the distasteful task early Sunday morning. 

With me in the kitchen, feeding the bales of cellulose into the machine and Rich in the attic with the hose, we completed the project in a lightening hour and an half.

We then snapped some pictures to commemorate the event. The speckles in the picture are the dust, which once it settled took a few minutes to sweep up.

Rich looks a bit like an alien with his mask, but it was absolutely necessary because the machine turned what looked like shredded paper, bits of plastic bags, and grayish puff into fine dust. And unlike traditional insulation, it’s safe to touch and doesn’t contain any harmful fiberglass. Plus, it’s produced using ten times less energy than traditional insulation.

Below is the area above the kitchen, which you can’t see any longer because Rich has spent the rest of afternoon sealing in the area with strips of fiberglass insulation. Later this week, he’ll put sheet rock over this insulation… then texture and paint the sheet rock to complete the area surrounding the skylights.

It’s going to be very, very cool because he’s also covering two support beams with sheet rock so when you look up, you’ll see the beams along with the skylights (hard to explain; you’ll have to wait to see the pictures in a few weeks)!