Carl the Gee-Whiz Wonder Boy's Blog

I've been work­ing really hard get­ting ready to insu­late our attic. The insu­la­tion was min­i­mal, barely up to the top of the joists in most cases, so 6–8 inches in most places. This was awful. Last year we had Home Depot come out and give an esti­mate for insu­la­tion work and they big $2000 which was a let-down as we didn't have the cash at that time.

We finally had the extra money to try again this year so got an esti­mate from a com­pany my father-in-law rec­om­mended, Williams Insu­la­tion. Esti­mate: $425. Yeah, 25% the amount of Home Depot's con­trac­tor. The esti­ma­tor also did a walk-through energy audit and sug­gested some really use­ful things.

The esti­ma­tor actu­ally found a whole sec­tion of attic we had never known about. He real­ized there was a gap along two whole sides of the house and sug­gested we cut a hatch to check it out. He turned out to be right — we found a space 40'x5' with even less insu­la­tion than the other main attic area. This was along the whole front and kitchen sides of the house.

I reported my find­ings and he came back for a free re-estimate. Amaz­ingly, this added only $100 to the esti­mate, bring­ing it to $525. Frankly, we would have paid twice that and been happy about it. Five hun­dred bucks is a no-brainer!

The main prep work was to imple­ment his main sug­ges­tion. He told us to tape up all gaps in the metal cas­ings of can lights and ven­ti­la­tion fans, and encase them in sty­ro­foam to fully air-seal them. He sug­gested the $2 sty­ro­foam cool­ers from Wal-mart, which turned out to be the per­fect shape and size for most of them. We had one larger fix­ture — the heat lamp in our shower — on which I used a larger, bet­ter cooler meant for ship­ping frozen goods.

I spent many hours up there the past few weeks, but par­tic­u­larly the past week­end. I spent half of Sat­ur­day and almost all of Sun­day skit­ter­ing around in the tini­est cor­ners seal­ing every­thing. It had to be done care­fully and cor­rectly to make it per­ma­nent, at least until the fix­ture itself fails. I wanted to never have to crawl through all the new insu­la­tion to reach and work on this stuff.

Over­all I sealed up 4 can lights above the kitchen, the rest being below the floor of the lit­tle play­room. In the main attic I replaced the non-working bath­room fan with a new one and sealed it up, and sealed up the other one that I replaced last year. I also ran duct­ing from the fans to exhaust out­lets in the roof. There was one reg­u­lar can light to enclose, then one huge heat lamp to enclose. All of those took a lot of work because of the cramped space. Much of it I had to work one-handed, hold­ing myself on a joist with the other hand. It was brutal.

Mon­day night I worked from 9pm to 3am fin­ish­ing up the var­i­ous bits, includ­ing seal­ing up the huge hall­way fan. It was quite a trial after a full day of work, boy scouts, and hang­ing out with Asa (my Lit­tle from BBBS). I was a mess of insu­la­tion, sweat, Great Stuff expand­ing foam, and grime.

The big pay­off was Tues­day morn­ing when the insu­la­tors came. In just an hour they crawled to all the dark cor­ners of the attic and blew in insu­la­tion to the 20" mark. This gives an insu­la­tion of R-60, which is higher than even the lat­est stan­dards for this part of the coun­try. The work was fast, effi­cient, and looks great — a uni­form sea of pink energy and money-saving fluff.

We've noticed our fur­nace run­ning much less and the house feels warmer, par­tic­u­larly the upstairs office. We are super happy about the project. In fact, it's kind of embar­rass­ing how excit­ing the insu­la­tion is to us. The insu­la­tion plus the work involved in prep­ping for it was really reward­ing and feels like the best improve­ment we've done to the house since we replaced the doors. And the energy-saving aspect makes us feel gen­er­ally good about our­selves and our house.