Home Maintenance Triple Whammy

I've known for a long time (well, since I bought the house almost 20 years ago) that the insulation in the attic spaces was woefully inadequate.  The house was built in 1972 and the two roofs only have about 3" - 4" of insulation between the joists that has compressed over the years (from dust and settling) to the point where we are losing a tremendous amount of energy.  It's estimated (by some mythical government agency that I can't verify - but it sounds right) that 42% of a house's energy loss is through the roof.  I've looked into doing it myself, but the roof pitch is extremely shallow I have about 3 feet of head room) and there are very small openings to get into the spaces.  The old body just can't do it any more.

So I had an Owens-Corning distributor come in and he talked me into adding 17" of cellulose attic insulation (R-49 rating) and soffit vents.  I want to see how they're going to get the vents in because there is very little room because of the shallow pitch.  They estimate that doing this will lower my utility bill by 20% - 25%, with a payback of about 3 years - we'll see.  I have so little insulation now that it has to save me money.  How much is the question.  This happened 2 weeks ago and is scheduled for this Friday.

This is basically what they will do in my attic (illustration).  That roof pitch is pretty much what my roof pitch is.  Getting in between each rafter with a soffit vent is why I'm not doing it.

This is another illustration of the soffit vents.  Note that this guy has plenty of room because the roof pitch is twice what mine is.

This is not my attic, but is what it should look like when it's done.  They will put these gauges at different points in the space to make sure the insulation is spread evenly. 

Monday I started noticing our Kenmore Elite refrigerator was making gurgling noises after the compressor shut off.  Sometimes that's an indication of low freon or the evaporator is freezing up.  This is one of the few items in my house that has an extended warranty, so The Mrs. scheduled a maintenance guy to come this Friday.

We had our garage doors and one of the openers replaced about 2 months ago (again, I'm too old to do that hard labor crap).  Last week the opener started making a grinding noise from the drive motor.  I went through all of the troubleshooting checks in the manual and couldn't figure it out.  So after multiple calls to Home Depot, I finally am getting the installation contractor to come out and take a look at it - this Friday. 

Triple Whammy!  Contractor party at my house!

And to top it all off, if I can get these guys out of the house by 3:15PM, I will be able to attend our first meeting ever with the principal of The Pudge's middle school (otherwise The Mrs. will have to go it alone).  We got his report card last Friday and he failed math.  We don't fault The Pudge at all on this - it's a teacher problem.   We are now hearing from multiple parents that had problems with this teacher last year (thanks for the heads up).  The Pudge has never gotten anything lower than a "B" on his report card - ever.  I think that will be a post for another time.

And then there's the weekend...