Yesterday and today Thom and I worked on stripping the forms for the house stem wall. We also brought over a load of recycled rigid foam insulation for the house stem wall. I bought the foam from a contractor in Greenfield for less than half the cost for new material. The contractor had ordered a whole truck load from Insulation Depot.com intending to use some for his own projects and sell the rest. It is unclear what the foam’s previous purpose was. It has a quarter inch of cement on one side as well as marks that indicate several other foam board sheets were perpendicularly attached. Although the foam boards don’t look like they are in good shape they will do the job. The cement parging makes each sheet quite heavy and will hopefully be more helpful than not. We need to parge the foam anyways to protect it. We will apply one layer to the exterior and two layers to the interior of the stem wall for a total of 6 inches (about R-30).

Our first load: 77 sheets to cover the vertical surface of the house stem wall.

The recycled foam boards stacked at our property

The stem wall of the house with the forms stripped