Let’s get back to my work studio – my carpenter-ant-infested, soon-to-be-sawdust studio. Last week I wrote that I was likely going to tear it down. A number of you seemed to think that was a bad idea – wasteful, even, not to mention a lot of work. But I think, at this point, that deconstruction is the only option. Ordinarily, my remodeling philosophy is use what you’ve got. We’ve got limited resources on this planet, so why not make do and all that, eh?

Right now, the interior walls of the studio are uncovered except for a half-assed arrangement of rigid foam insulation – some blue Styrofoam panels, some coffee-cup-looking white polystyrene bead board, some paper-faced polyisocyanurate. (The ants love the polyiso. Must have a great mandible-feel.) No walls, just foam. So for a long time – entirely too long – this is what the inside of my studio looked like.



(Shameful, right? Such a lovely building, and I had to go and dump all my disorganized junk inside.)

You can see the small gaps where each of the panels join up, particularly among those smaller panels lining the ceiling; there are also gaps where the panels abut the building’s frame. Gaps mean air infiltration, and infiltrating air brings with it the heat or cold from the inhospitable outside world. This is what builders and architects mean when they talk about building a “tight” house. The studio, as you can see, is not a tight house.

Originally – that is, before I knew the ants had taken up residence – the plan was to seal those seams with caulk or expandable spray foam, then finish the interior walls with a bunch of reclaimed siding I had picked up from around Colorado: some tongue-in-groove redwood panels off craigslist, a hundred board feet or so of some oak slats from Boulder’s Resource Yard, some old pine paneling from a small room we had torn down last year. It was all going to be very rough-looking and macho. (Or like a branch of Urban Outfitters. You decide.)

Trouble is, the foam panels aren’t very thick. The walls are framed with 2x4’s, meaning I was only going to get a little over 3 inches of insulation on them. And three inches of rigid foam, in insulation terms, is about an R-15 wall. (R-value is a measure of a material’s resistance to heat transfer. The higher the number, the better the insulation.) For me, living in Colorado, an R-15 wall is weak. R-15 against a snowy 10 degrees is like a cotton blanket on a camping trip. There is a gas heater in the studio – but I don’t want to have to crank that thing all winter. And that R-15 value is what the rigid foam would get me in an ideal world, that is, in a tight, well-crafted building. Even a case of spray foam wouldn’t seal up all the kinks and gaps in our little building.

So even before the ants came marching in, I was already succumbing to the lure of a fourth R: Rather than Reduce, Reuse, or Recycle, I’m in heavy flirtation with Replace. Naughty, I know. Next week I’ll lay out some more support for this option; in the meantime, friendly readers, any more suggestions for what I should do with the studio as it is now?