You know how to do the weatherstripping on your doors and windows, right? Did you know that this technique can help other parts of your home as well? Yes, you can seal leaks throughout your house once you understand how and why. Here are four unusual places you need to weatherstrip.
Garage
Image via Flickr by youngthousands
Which parts of your home have the most contact with the outdoors? The answers are your doors, your windows, and your garage. Since you’re already weatherstripping the first two, you should understand the potential benefits of the third.
Your garage gets a lot of drafts in various places. Presuming you have a garage door, the sides don’t align perfectly with the rest of the housing exterior. You also might have an underground area accessible from the garage. You could even have siding that doesn’t fit perfectly. You can stop these air leaks by weatherproofing your garage.
Baseboards
Using the same logic, baseboards are the next primary place for unwanted leaks. Baseboards easily fall out of place. A single bump from a vacuum cleaner could dislodge the boarding enough that a gap occurs. Also, many insects and rodents love the taste of wood. They will eat their way through the baseboards, creating gaps that are difficult for you to see unless you bend down to examine the spots.
These gaps will let a breeze into your home. Thankfully, several kinds of weatherstripping like reinforced foam, which is easy to install. Meanwhile, tape weatherstripping is cheap and compresses easily. You can install it in the gaps, but you should wipe down the baseboards before using this kind of weatherstripping. Otherwise, it will quickly lose effectiveness.
Attic Hatches
The hatch that leads to your attic is another place that gets drafty. Your attic isn’t an area you enter often, but it does circulate a lot of air. Some of that air will escape into your home if you don’t use weatherstripping. When this happens, the rest of your home will get the same musty smell that persists in unused spaces.
You will notice certain signs of poor ventilation in your attic. If you see condensation or frost, the air isn’t circulating well. The weatherstripping will do more than safeguard the rest of your home from poor smells. It will also save you on your utility bills. That’s because you’ll have better airflow in the attic.
Crawl Space
This issue is like the baseboard problem, only taken to a higher level. The walls of your home keep most bugs and rodents from getting inside. Your crawl space is different. It’s an outdoor area that seems inviting to animals and pests alike. While you’d think of this area as damp and cold, creatures that have spent a lot of time outdoors view it as a warm, dry area where they can nest.
Weatherstripping can stop these pests from nesting. Use V-strips and sweeps to plug any gaps in the crawl space, paying particular attention to the door. You’ll wall off your home’s interior from an unwelcome invasion.
The four areas listed here will all benefit from weatherstripping. Best of all, this process is so easy that even a novice can add weatherstripping to an entire area in an hour or less.
James Hendrickson is an internet entrepreneur, blogging junky, hunter and personal finance geek. When he’s not lurking in coffee shops in Portland, Oregon, you’ll find him in the Pacific Northwest’s great outdoors. James has a masters degree in Sociology from the University of Maryland at College Park and a Bachelors degree on Sociology from Earlham College. He loves individual stocks, bonds and precious metals.