Really, you went with insulation rather than indoor plumbing and electricity? :)

I'm a Canadian and my first thought was insulation, too. Also heat. Natural gas piping isn't something you'd want to DIY.

Natural gas piping is done at such low pressures in residential environments that it's basically a joke. I think it's about 0.5psi (or 14" of water column) which in the grand scheme of pressures is very low. People can generate greater pressures with their lungs.

http://hvac-talk.com/vbb/showthread.php?1587361-What-is-typi...

http://www.personal.psu.edu/ref7/apparatus/2003%20competitio...

EDIT: I'm not saying that one should do their own natural gas piping as in many places it's technically illegal unless you're a licensed plumber. But it's certainly not rocket science. The only reason it's "harder" than plumbing compressed air is that if compressed air leaks a tad, it's no big deal. You have to get rather tight on gas piping because of the consequences of a leak, not because it's so difficult to get it tight.

I think that was the GP's objection to DIY. Not the actual installation process, but long term leakage issues if you do it incorrectly.

In Most of Canada and a lot of northern states, if you have no insulation then you soon won't have indoor plumbing, but you'll have a nice ice skating rink in your house.

In all fairness - People have been building houses in similar climates for 5000 years, and while they didn't have indoor plumbing, they surely built their houses to some standard of insulation.

I was reaffirming the reasoning behind rtpg and Pxtl's prioritizing insulation over indoor plumbing and further explaining why it is a necessary pre-condition to indoor plumbing.

I spent my summers in rural Russia, occasionally in the winter. I'll take the insulation over the indoor plumbing and the electricity, and trust me, so would you if that was the binary choice.