Archive Oct. 26, 2009: Insulating After the Fact

There were a lot of considerations that were not factored in when the Communist era apartment blocs were built throughout Romania. One of these potential issues was insulation. The cold outside air and the warm inside air interact through the concrete slab walls and voila- extreme mold! In our spare room this is compounded by the fact that the apartment bloc manager has chosen not to pay for our state-run heating system to be fixed in that room because all the apartment owners beneath us have installed their own personal heating systems.

So to combat the mold in the extra bedroom our landlord decided to internally insulate the room. Yes, it is possible. External insulation was ruled out because it is costly to hire daring men called ‘alpinists’ to set up scaffolding on our bloc and risk their lives while providing our spare room with insulation. The cost effective choice, to insulate internally, has proven to be a learning experience for us all.

A few candid moments from the week long project:

The project was supposed to start on Monday but the worker was not able to meet with the landlord’s friend to buy supplies because the friend was sick and Monday was the holiday ‘Sfantul Dumitru’ or Saint Dumitru (still not sure why this was a factor). But, we loaned the worker the money so he could start the job as planned.

Industrial strength adhesive being used to glue blue foam strips to the wall... we hope that nothing else will be permanently adhered to the wall by the week’s end (hopefully not the cause of the worker’s chronic cough)

Offering to provide lunch for the workman- an important custom that encourages the worker to work longer (and get the job done sooner)instead of leaving early. The gentleman working for us has high work ethic- he refused any coffee break, food, or water- wow!

- Function, not esthetics, is the priority- we now have a strange perhaps ‘contemporary’ terraced look to our spare room’s ceiling and walls. Hmmm...