We went below zero last night and are staying there until Tuesday. The forecast for the rest of the week is completely upwards with nights above zero starting on the 23rd. Let’s see if that lasts!

The Eternabond hasn’t arrived yet and it’s too cold to apply it anyway, so I’m pretty much on hold in the loft. It was super damp in there this morning with the windows covered in condensation, but five minutes with the dehumidifier solved that. I’ll have to keep leaving it on 24/7.

It snowed lightly today, so going out for plywood was out of the question (remember, I have a hatchback so I have to carry big things on the roof!). I continued work on the insulation. The styrofoam panels I have are too thick, so I have to halve them, a surprisingly tough job.

Instead of sleeping, I’ve been lying awake at night thinking about the next steps in this project. One thing that bugs me is that there aren’t many places into which I could secure the new flooring:

Everything in blue is thin paneling over insulation over thin paneling over insulation over fiberglass. That’s it! The red lines are where I have something structural into which to screw. I’ll come back to the green marks.

So, obviously, the flooring can’t be in too many pieces if I want any sort of structural integrity at all. The best thing would be to bring in one piece, but I really don’t think that would be manageable. I also won’t have anything to cut it with once I get here if I try to bring it home in one piece and concede that I need two. It’s going to have to come home in two pieces.

The green marks indicate where there is padding around the interior of the C. This padding is about a half inch taller than the floor, so I need to remove to be able to install the floor flat. I will replace the padding with some 1 1/2″ or so thick wood I found in the basement (a real Ali Baba’s cave, it seems). This will give me some additional place for screwing in the flooring so that both sections can get a bit of extra support along the interior side of the C. I’ll make sure to take pictures when I get to this point!

That leaves the sides. Intellectually I know that if the manufacturer didn’t feel the flooring needed any additional support on the sides, it mustn’t have needed it, but I’m still getting the willies since all the weight in the loft is right smack in the middle. I might get thicker plywood after all! 😀