05-09-2019, 11:32 PM
Scattered throughout the countryside in Central New York are stately old brick buildings that must have been a b***h to heat. If my life had gone differently I might have bought one and tried to renovate it. That would mean insulating it decently, but how to do so and still show off the ornate brick that old industrial tycoon money, long since gone, had payed for as a form of conspicuous consumption? It is a real dilemma. Those old multi-wythe weight bearing brick walls worked OK as long as ungodly amounts of heat were pumped through them keeping everything dry and unfrozen. The proper way to insulate them is to put the insulation on the outside but then it might as well not be a brick building. There are ways to insulate on the inside as long as heroic efforts are made to minimize wetting of the exterior bricks. The primary problem is freeze-thaw damage of the exposed masonry and if the bricks are not wet then it doesn't matter how cold they get.
Whether old brick or less old concrete block construction, I would usually come across the same complaint, that of losing interior space if they built up the walls on the interior. Now granted we are usually talking about different camps here but using myself as an example I have often cruised both tiny house websites and old masonry house websites during the same sessions. I also have visited small-cabin.com where people go on about building cabins that are, well, small, which need to be heated so they spend quite a bit of time talking about stoves, wood-burning or otherwise. The consensus is often that with a cabin this small and a stove this big insulation is not a problem.
The intersection of all these is that if you build your living space small enough it gets much easier to heat. The folks worried about losing space from insulating on the interior should remember that the day before they were dreaming about living in a tiny house, so build the tiny house INSIDE the old stone house which will now serve as an elaborate rain-screen.
Boats are often built by gluing strips of wood together and I doubt you could get a more weather-tight envelope than that but you would have to encapsulate the wood with epoxy like they do in boat building. Otherwise the concerns with water getting between the boards is valid. Lots of details to think about. However if you had a big supply of cut-off 2x4s for free then I can see going down that road.
The original builders of log cabins had a wealth of trees that we can only dream of but no sawn lumber so not surprisingly they piled them up in the way that cost them the least in terms of labor. Log cabins today are pretty much examples of the tail wagging the dog.
Whether old brick or less old concrete block construction, I would usually come across the same complaint, that of losing interior space if they built up the walls on the interior. Now granted we are usually talking about different camps here but using myself as an example I have often cruised both tiny house websites and old masonry house websites during the same sessions. I also have visited small-cabin.com where people go on about building cabins that are, well, small, which need to be heated so they spend quite a bit of time talking about stoves, wood-burning or otherwise. The consensus is often that with a cabin this small and a stove this big insulation is not a problem.
The intersection of all these is that if you build your living space small enough it gets much easier to heat. The folks worried about losing space from insulating on the interior should remember that the day before they were dreaming about living in a tiny house, so build the tiny house INSIDE the old stone house which will now serve as an elaborate rain-screen.
Boats are often built by gluing strips of wood together and I doubt you could get a more weather-tight envelope than that but you would have to encapsulate the wood with epoxy like they do in boat building. Otherwise the concerns with water getting between the boards is valid. Lots of details to think about. However if you had a big supply of cut-off 2x4s for free then I can see going down that road.
The original builders of log cabins had a wealth of trees that we can only dream of but no sawn lumber so not surprisingly they piled them up in the way that cost them the least in terms of labor. Log cabins today are pretty much examples of the tail wagging the dog.