I have a 1960's chalet-style house, with the upper floor built within the roofspace.
I'm redecorating one of the upper rooms at the moment and have cut a small 'hatch' in one of the walls to investigate the insulation situation... The walls are made of foil-backed plasterboard fastened onto wooden studs and then a plaster skim applied. The back of the plasterboard is exposed to the eaves and, as you can imagine, provides little or no insulation.
There is quite a lot of space behind the walls, ie about 1.5m between the base of the wall and the roof, so no real issues about working behind the walls. The hatch that I have cut is about 40cm wide (ie between studs) and 60cm high.
How would I best go about insulating these walls? I've done searches on the forums and have found varying pieces of advice about using Kingspan or Celotex insulation boards, but am unsure exactly how to use them:
- do I need to leave a gap between the boards and the plasterboard?
- do I need to use some kind of vapour control membrane, or is the foil backing on the plasterboard enough?
- are there any other options? eg, are the basic polystyrene sheets any good? would just stapling some SpaceBlanket to the studs be acceptable?
Ideally, I'd like to do the job as quickly and cheaply as possible, but still effectively, so any advice would be much appreciated!
Cheers
Matho
I'm redecorating one of the upper rooms at the moment and have cut a small 'hatch' in one of the walls to investigate the insulation situation... The walls are made of foil-backed plasterboard fastened onto wooden studs and then a plaster skim applied. The back of the plasterboard is exposed to the eaves and, as you can imagine, provides little or no insulation.
There is quite a lot of space behind the walls, ie about 1.5m between the base of the wall and the roof, so no real issues about working behind the walls. The hatch that I have cut is about 40cm wide (ie between studs) and 60cm high.
How would I best go about insulating these walls? I've done searches on the forums and have found varying pieces of advice about using Kingspan or Celotex insulation boards, but am unsure exactly how to use them:
- do I need to leave a gap between the boards and the plasterboard?
- do I need to use some kind of vapour control membrane, or is the foil backing on the plasterboard enough?
- are there any other options? eg, are the basic polystyrene sheets any good? would just stapling some SpaceBlanket to the studs be acceptable?
Ideally, I'd like to do the job as quickly and cheaply as possible, but still effectively, so any advice would be much appreciated!
Cheers
Matho
