I've been reading a lot about insulation and am in the process of renovating one room in our house. At the moment there is no insulation in the exterior walls. We blew 10" of cellulose into the attic a few years ago and I've sealed the rim joist with XPS. It seems that exterior walls are the next step.
Rather than repair all the dings, I opted to pull down the drywall on the exterior wall and throw some insulation in the wall while I'm at it. The walls are framed with 2x4s. I've considered framing an additional 2" of wall depth to get the wall to 5.5" (using 2" of spray foam and r-19 fiberglass), just filling the 3.5" void with XPS (I've got a couple of 2" sheets left over from the rim joist and a math error), or using a combination of XPS and fiberglass in the same manner as the spray foam- essentially flash and fill using XPS for the flash. I need to do this one room at a time so I'd prefer to not contract someone to come in to spray each time. I'm OK with the idea of cutting XPS to fit and great stuffing it into place, but I'm not sure if the performance is worth the extra cost or if there is any risk I'm not realizing.
The house is brick and vinyl siding. Eventually I'd like to replace the vinyl with cement siding so I can paint and update the house occasionally. At some point I'd be able to wrap about half the house to help seal things up, but I'm sure the XPS will do an OK job if I am careful in fitting.
Any thoughts or recommendations? I've spent way too much time reading about this and need to get busy with wrapping this up. Thanks in advance for any advice you can offer.
Rather than repair all the dings, I opted to pull down the drywall on the exterior wall and throw some insulation in the wall while I'm at it. The walls are framed with 2x4s. I've considered framing an additional 2" of wall depth to get the wall to 5.5" (using 2" of spray foam and r-19 fiberglass), just filling the 3.5" void with XPS (I've got a couple of 2" sheets left over from the rim joist and a math error), or using a combination of XPS and fiberglass in the same manner as the spray foam- essentially flash and fill using XPS for the flash. I need to do this one room at a time so I'd prefer to not contract someone to come in to spray each time. I'm OK with the idea of cutting XPS to fit and great stuffing it into place, but I'm not sure if the performance is worth the extra cost or if there is any risk I'm not realizing.
The house is brick and vinyl siding. Eventually I'd like to replace the vinyl with cement siding so I can paint and update the house occasionally. At some point I'd be able to wrap about half the house to help seal things up, but I'm sure the XPS will do an OK job if I am careful in fitting.
Any thoughts or recommendations? I've spent way too much time reading about this and need to get busy with wrapping this up. Thanks in advance for any advice you can offer.