The long anticipated, eagerly awaited day finally came today. I’m talking about insulating our attic. Finally did that. Never want to do it again. Last fall I purchased 76 bags of cellulose insulation at Lowes. It sat in the basement for a year, with several bags getting ruined in a flood last spring. At the time, I was involved in a major project that included a lot of travel to Florida, so my time at home was spent with my family instead of working on the house.

This year was different. The weather today was perfect, not too hot, not too cold, so I had no more excuses. Last weekend I crawled around in the attic stapling up the rafter spacers I placed in the soffits. These provide a gap between the installation and the roof sheathing allowing air to flow up to the ridge vent. I noticed that the attic was much cooler today than it would have been before I opened up the soffits.

I did a fair amount of research on this and found that blown cellulose insulation is a good product. I did not want to roll out more fiberglass because the pitch on our roof is pretty shallow, and it would be almost impossible to get it under the very narrow part of our roof.
I found I was right when I stapled the rafter spacers last weekend. There were some areas that I had a real hard time getting to. Lowes has a pretty good How To Library on home insulation, R-values, etc.

My friend Dan and I headed off early this morning to pick up the blower and the replacement bags of insulation. We got everything all set up by about 10:30 am and began to work at a steady pace.

One thing that I found was the cellulose insulation created lots and lots of dust. At some points it was difficult to see in the attic, so I would have to move on to another area until the dust settled. Dust also filtered its way down into the house, and covered everything. My wife and daughter were out all afternoon, but upon return I was given a few dirty looks.

All in all it took us about four hours to fully insulate the attic. I left a small crawl way down the center of the house because I really don’t want to crawl through the insulation to get to things if at all possible. The rest of the attic is filled to between 12 to 14 inches deep. That should bring the attic insulation up to about R-49, which is the recommended R-value for this area (it is now the recommended attic insulation R-value for the whole country). Considering that most of the attic had 6 inches, with one area only having 3 inches, I think we should see substantial savings on our heating costs this year.

The cellulose insulation was pretty easy to work with. There is a chart on the side of the insulation bag, which gives you the R-value for several insulation depths for attic application:

There is also a blown insulation calculator on line. I found it easy to understand and calculate how many bags I needed based on the square footage of our house and the insulation depth required. Even so, I still over calculated and we ended up returning several bags to Lowes at the end of the day along with the blower.

This evening, my back, legs, knees, head, arms are all sore from spending four hours crawling around in the cramped attic. All in all, it feels pretty good.

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