My heating bills have been absolutely ridiculous all winter because the original insulation in my attic was basically just a two inch layer of dusty old wood shavings. I rented one of those giant blowing machines from the hardware store and bought twenty bags of loose fill cellulose, thinking it would be a fun, satisfying DIY job to just shoot the fluff into the rafters. Instead, it turned into an absolute disaster of zero visibility and breathing in recycled newspaper dust.
The setup alone was incredibly annoying. You have to park the massive machine in the driveway, feed the giant bags of compressed paper into a hopper that mulches it up, and run a huge ribbed hose all the way up through the living room and into the attic hatch. My wife was downstairs feeding the machine while I was stuck up in the crawlspace, and the moment she turned the motor on, the hose started bucking around like a wild firehose, spraying gray fuzz all over my face before I could even aim it.
Working up in that tight space was pure claustrophobia. The dust cloud got so thick within five minutes that my headlamp couldn’t even pierce through the air, so I was basically blindly waving a giant pipe around in the dark while trying not to step through the drywall ceiling. The static electricity up there was insane too. The fine gray lint kept sticking to my sweaty arms, my clothes, and the inside of my safety goggles until I could barely see two inches in front of me.
The attic has a nice, thick ten-inch blanket of insulation now, but the rest of the house is a total disaster zone. The hose leaked at one of the plastic joints in the hallway, so a fine layer of gray paper dust settled all over the living room TV, the curtains, and the kitchen counters. I have to spend the next two hours running the vacuum cleaner over absolutely everything before it gets into the air vents, which completely ruins the satisfaction of finishing the actual project.