Insulation Problems

Well Ponzini finished the insulation this week, for some definition of the word "finished". I went through the house and made a close inspection of their work, and I have to say I am Not Pleased. They left lots of cracks and gaps, some of them  so obvious that it is pretty hard to see how they could have been missed.  

Here's some pictures to show what I mean. Every window and door has an uninsulated crevice around it like this one:

We also have a lot of places where there are two structural members right next to each other with a narrow crack between them. In all of these cases, they neglected to seal up the crack, like this crack in the corner next to a window:

The same goes for cracks between headers  and other structural members over the doors:

And in the Bedroom3 chase upstairs, there is even a place where I can shine a flashlight through the crack. It's the blurry light in the middle (sorry, my old point and shoot doesn't have image stabilization in it):

There are gaps between the roof rafters and the main rafter running along the spine of the house:

And in a couple cases, the insulation on the 2x6 walls doesn't look like it's R-19:

Finally, that place in the HRV chase where the old forced air ducts dive under the floor was not properly done:

They will  probably need to staple in a piece of plastic and  foam over it to seal the hole against air penetration.

Now, I have to say,  if I was building a house, I would never build it with these kinds of gaps and cracks. Most houses today aren't built this way, so they are probably easier to insulate. But we have to work with the house we have. Ponzini did a walk through before they bid the job, and we warned them we wanted all the cracks sealed. It's not like they took the job when the drywall was on, then were surprised when they faced a lot more work than they anticipated when the drywall was taken off.

Ponzini is supposed  to come back with Paul tomorrow, and I've sent Paul an annotated  house  plan with locations of all 45 pictures I took, plus 2 zip files with the pictures (43Meg of pictures). We'll see what they do.