How we’ve made our 100-year old home more energy efficient, part 3 (hint: it’s white and it comes in a squeezy tube)

Caulk Caulk Caulk Caulk.

That’s the answer to one very effective way we’ve made our 100 year old rustic Carolina farmhouse more energy efficient.

To weatherize our home after our disastrous 1st winter in which we heated all of lower Pittsboro, North Carolina, we caulked and caulked and caulked some more. Oh – did I forget to mention that in that first, expensive, wasteful winter WE WEREN’T EVEN LIVING IN THE HOUSE AT THE TIME? All of that energy was being spent heating a house to just-barely-warm so Mark, our lead auditor, home renovator,  and the husband of this writer, could work on the house before we moved in our family.

Over the course of that winter we used 150 tubes of caulk in our house. Yes, 150. I am not exaggerating. I can produce the receipts if you want.

This house was very, very leaky – largely because every single wall of the house except for the small bathroom/laundry add-on that was here when we moved in, is constructed out of bead board. Not the bead board you buy at the big-box lumber store that comes in flat, solid sheets of paneling; no, bead board that is made from individual boards. Every place the boards fit together was a place for a potential air leak. Every air leak was a place to caulk. The boards range from 3 1/2″ wide to 1 1/2″ wide.

The math: 2700 square feet = 9 rooms (plus 2 big hallways) built of 2 1/2″ (on average) boards = a heck of a lot of cracks to seal = 150 tubes of caulk.

The crazy thing about the caulking is that when we started it was largely for cosmetic reasons. We repainted the entire downstairs and once we’d put on the primer we saw the cracks and the cracks and the cracks. They looked bad! So we caulked them up. We weren’t going to do the kids’ rooms (upstairs), but at the last minute I decided that all the dirt falling down from the attic through the cracks in the ceiling was a health hazard – so we sealed their rooms up, too. Thank goodness we did. I can only imagine the dirt and the air leaks and high energy bills we’d have if we hadn’t done that.

We had a great deal to caulk in this house. It made a huge difference. We’ve lived here 4 years and we’ve never had energy bills like that first year, (in fact, our bills now are a little less than half) and a lot of it is owed to the caulk. We don’t have a lot of insulation in the walls (although we do have a well insulated attic and crawl – more on that later), so if you think about it all that stands between us and the outside are the boards that make up the walls and wood siding…and caulk.

Even if you don’t live in a house with 50 cracks in every wall, however,  you, too, can benefit in the power of caulk. Caulk is cheap and pretty easy to use and although we recommend gloves to preserve your manicure, water-soluble caulk is pretty much non-toxic and can be smoothed out with a fingertip.

Places for any homeowner to caulk:

• around the escutcheon plates of your plumbing fixtures (the plastic plates that cover the plumbing where it comes out of the floor/wall)
• around any obvious cracks (like where baseboard or crown moulding touches the wall)
• around electrical outlets/light switches (here’s an article on how to do this effectively)

Caulk caulk caulk. The d.i.y. weatherization person’s very best friend.

Hey – here is part 1 of this series on how we weatherized our old house.

And here is part 2.