Affordable Foam

This was part of an overall home performance improvement project. This company did air-sealing of all of the top plates and soffit spaces in my attic. They also did insulation work in the cathedral ceiling of my master bedroom. This was all done using a professional spray-foam product. The other thing that made this somewhat more complicated than usual was that they had to coordinate with the roofing crew (Yoder Roofing) that was putting a new roof on my house as the roofing crew was going to remove the roof decking over the master bedroom so this crew could spray in the insulation. All this had to be done in a single day so that the roof could be covered up again in case it rained. The 2-man spray foam team dropped off their trailer the night before and got some of the initial setup done. I should mention that we had already hired a different contractor to remove all of the old insulation from the main attic area so it was very clean. They arrived early the next morning and got all their equipment setup and started on the air sealing in the main attic while the roofing crew was tearing off the old roof. The roofing crew got the tear off done before the foam crew was ready to start on the insulation part of the job but there was no bickering or hard feelings. The two crews discussed the options and came up with a workable plan for both. The roofing crew started roofing the other half of the house while the foam crew finished up the air sealing and once they were done with the that the roofing crew tore off the roof decking so the foam crew could do the cathedral ceiling insulation. They had to remove the old fiberglass insulation and in a real spirit of cooperation the roofing crew helped them do that. They sprayed in about 3-4" of foam which took several hours, after which the roofing crew put the new roof decking back down and continued on with the new roof while the foam guys cleaned up. The foam crew really worked their tails off and the one guy running the actual spray gun was a bit of a Houdini with some of the positions he had to get into to do some of the spraying in the attic, plus it was a warm day so it was pretty warm up there. We had some additional air leak testing done afterwards by our home performance consultant (Energy Smart Home Performance) and the foam guys did a tremendous job with the air leak sealing and our bedroom feels much more comfortable with the insulation and ventilation channels they installed. Spray foam is more expensive than normal fiberglass insulation but it does air-sealing that fiberglass does not and it is also more dense so you don't need as much of it to achieve the same R-value. I think 1 inch of foam is around an R-7. I would recommend these guys if you are thinking about going the spray-foam route for insulation.