Walking on (thin) ice

Despite all our efforts to make our home more energy efficient and better heated, our work is never done. I guess that's just a fact of life for any home over fifty years old. During a cold snap a few weeks ago, we noticed that the floor in our office was quite chilly, even though the crawl space below it was now insulated and the heat in the room actually works.

On closer inspection, D saw that there was actually a small gap below the baseboards, allowing cold air to blow between the office and the crawl space. I protested that the crawl space ceiling (i.e. the office floor) had been thoroughly insulated so the space should not matter, but D pointed out that insulated still did not necessarily imply that it could sustain a comfortable room temperature. The crawl space is, after all, more a part of the outside than the inside.

Time for some props. We brought out some Great Stuff Gaps & Cracks. It expands once it's in place to help fill, well, gaps and cracks.

Applying it was pretty easy (says the person who watched and photographed without actually participating):

You can see in these two pictures exactly how it looked as we were applying it. D deposited the strip of foam across the whole line were the floor meets the wall across the two walls with baseboard heat, which also happen to be the two exterior walls of the room. The hardest part of the project was moving the furniture out of the way.

(Also scary to see all the dust that had gathered behind said furniture...Makes me wonder what is lurking behind the piano in the living room, the one giant piece of furniture we own that is not on high enough legs for us to see underneath.)

I can't tell yet if we're seeing any real improvement. The temperature outside this winter has swung between frigid and spring-like, so we haven't had enough cold days in a row to judge the floor temperature (with a very unscientific walking around bare-foot test). But in any case this small fix won't hurt.