Casa Blanca: Colorado Off-Grid House Build, Ep. 26: Mud Room Insulation Round 1

Welcome to a fun video about setbacks and course changes! I've started insulating the mud room in preparation for drywall, and plan to finish the room as completely as possible before working through the rest of the house, so this will be a dry run for how we're insulating, finishing, trimming, etc before we buy materials in larger quantities. This is one of those times when basically everything just went wrong, or at least not to plan. I've spent months researching insulation options and landed on dense-packed cellulose as the best option for this project. The first step (blowing mesh) took longer than I hoped, but more or less went well and I got faster as I proceeded. So off I went to Home Depot to pick up an initial load of insulation and rent the blower for a few days to get a room or two done as practice. Home Depot offers the blower rental for free for a a day if you buy 10 or more bags of insulation, and Lowes does the same but at 20 bags. Either way, I figured I might have a bit of cost overrun if the installation ran long, but nothing I couldn't manage. What I apparently never considered is that neither Lowes nor Home Depot HAVE the machine. It really feels like false advertising to me, because they explicitly call this freebie out as a feature, but neither has the machine. Why they stock the product and not the installation tool is beyond me, but they don't. Dropping back and punting I noticed that Lowes had quite a bit of Rockwool in stock and it gets rave reviews, so I loaded up the truck with as many bundles as would fit (only 8) and headed back to the site. I then ripped off all the carefully-installed blowing mesh and started in on the Rockwool installation. Boy, this stuff gets great reviews but I cannot for the life of me figure out why. It is very bulky to transport so even with a decent-sized pickup I figure I'd be looking at TWENTY trips to get it all (or eight with a trailer, but even that's a lot since Lowes is 90 mins each way from the site). It's also insanely expensive at about 3x the price of fiberglass or cellulose. And finally, it was really awful to work with: fine for standard-width stud/rafter bays but hard to position in odd sized bays and it puts out a lot of dust - my hair and even teeth are full of grit from dust that came down while installing the material overhead. I spent like $650 and didn't even get enough to finish the mud room, which is only a small fraction of the rest of the house. I'm not sure what to do at this point. I did find the cellulose blower at another store 2.5 hours away, but the round-trip drive on that is most of a day's rental so that'll add considerably to the cost. And my local lumberyard carries fiberglass, which is old school and not very great, but cheap, easily available, and they deliver which is a huge plus. I hate to mix-and-match insulation through the house, but our single biggest priority is getting the CO and we need drywall over insulation for that. So it seems like we might just have to go with fiberglass and upgrade it some day in the future. :(