Insulating our garage

This is what the garage looked like before we got to it – much less stuff piled up!

You need:

1. Some insulation
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2. which, as it says on the packages, expands a lot when opened
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3. actually, a heck of a lot
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This is almost embarrasingly easy – it comes in strips that push in between the wall uprights and stay there because they’re just a fraction wider than the gaps between the beams:

The only tricky part is that the wall isn’t quite twice as long as the bits of insulation, so I had to trim every second one down to size to get it to fit nicely:

All done:

This is also pretty easy – it comes in a big roll that’s a bit wider than the wall is high, so you just unroll it and staple it up. The only tricky part is making sure it goes on straight, because the top of the uprights is 8 feet up which is a little bit awkward to hold plastic against, it keeps on wanting to fall down.

This was trickier to do:

• It’s the roof, so the insulation has to be pushed in overhead and wants to fall down a lot more than it did on vertical walls. It still stays in place, but it was fiddlier
• It’s the roof, so I had to clamber around on the trusses to get things up there
• The trusses meant that I couldn’t put one long strip of vapour barrier all the way across, I had to do a strip between each pair of trusses and make sure they overlapped. This probably isn’t the greatest way to keep air from flowing, but it should be good enough to keep the insulation from falling on my head which is mostly what I wanted.

Here’s another view, and also the second wall of the garage that got insulated: