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Insulation!!

 One day my husband found some 2.5 inch foam insulation panels on craigslist for ahway cheaper than retail. He needed them ASAP. The only people who were available asap to travel the 2.5 hours to Arkansas to get them was me and my mother. So we hooked my mom's 16' stock trailer to our Excursion and hit the road Thursday morning.

It was raining when we left. It didn't stop raining. We finally got into Arkansas and found the chicken farm where they were dismantling some industrial size chicken houses. (I am not an industrial size chicken farmer so please let me know if I do not refer to something by its proper technical term.) I was in sporadic contact with the owner and he told me there would be a "crew" to help load the foam boards. Still raining.

We pulled in, and a dampish gentleman met us at the gate. He was upset, because his "crew" didn't show up, but he pointed the way.

The chicken houses are long, maybe 100 ft long with wide lanes between them that are full of rainwater. Sometimes calf deep rainwater.

There were several stacks of 20' x 4' styrofoam insulation boards randomly laying where they had dismantled the houses. We drove down through the rain to the first stack. I put the truck in 4 low and kept it moving pretty fast, otherwise I would've gotten major stuck. We picked up that stack and decided where to go next. By that time the crew had shown up. By crew I mean the boss's helper. (Yes I mean one guy). We joked a little about his pay....but he didn't think it was super funny.

Still raining. My Brooks running shoes were soaked through.

The next stack was down another long lane that had a largish creek flowing through the middle of it. I think it was just a drainage ditch, but at this point it looked like a rather large creek. We didn't think I'd be able to get back down the lane, so we decided to back the 70 yards or so down to the stack.

I'm not a "backer". This was 2 years ago and I'm much more comfortable "backing" a trailer. But at the time. Not so much.

My mom on the other hand grew up on a farm. She can back in the dark with one hand tied behind her back. She's Chuck Norris at backing.

She backed down to the stack.

 Still raining. Since my shoes were already full of water I jumped out, crossed the creek/drainage ditch, helped load as many more boards as we could cram in, figured out how to tie the whole thing together (the door on the stock trailer wouldn't close), paid the guys, and we gunned it out of there!!!

About 20 minutes down the road toward home the rain stopped and the sun came out!!

We picked up about 45 boards and paid about 200 for them. It was an amazing deal.
We have been very blessed to have gotten so many good deals on this project.

I already talked about the pole style framing we put all around the house in a previous post. We screwed the foam board insulation to the framing.

 Then a few weeks later we unscrewed some of the boards and blew in the bagged insulation.


Up next: Our concrete floors!
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