Insulating Bellingham.
Bellingham is a mix, and that's the whole challenge of insulating here. Downtown and the older neighborhoods up the hill from Bellingham Bay are full of pre-war homes with little or no wall insulation and thin, settled attics. Out toward Barkley and the newer east-side developments, the houses are framed to a better standard and usually just need an attic brought up to current code. So in a single week our crew might dense-pack the empty walls of a 1910s house near downtown and top off the attic on a 2005 build out by the mall.
What ties it all together is the climate. The whole city sits in marine zone 4C, cold and wet for most of the year, so wherever we work we air-seal and manage the moisture before we insulate. That means sealing the attic floor and the rim joist, laying a crawlspace vapor barrier, and getting the attic ventilation right, then bringing the attic to about R-49, the walls toward R-21, and the floor to R-30. Most of this work is rebate-eligible through PSE, and we size it to qualify and help with the forms.
What we see on Bellingham homes.
Common home styles
1900s to today homes, with mixed, many under-insulated. Varies by area are the moisture issues we run into most here.
Popular jobs
Attic air-seal-and-top-off, dense-pack wall insulation, crawlspace floor insulation and vapor barrier are the recurring work on Bellingham homes, matched to the housing stock and the moisture.
Moisture & prep considerations
Like everywhere in Bellingham, we air-seal and get the moisture under control before we insulate. In Bellingham that means paying close attention to varies by area, then insulating to current WA energy code.