Insulating South Hill.
South Hill climbs the slope above Fairhaven, and its streets filled in fast after the streetcar reached Garden and 16th around 1909. Most of the neighborhood was built in the 1910s and 1920s, with a heavy concentration of Craftsman and European Revival homes from the late 1920s. These are beautiful houses, but they were built long before insulation was code, so the attics are usually thin and settled and a lot of the walls are barely insulated. The bedrooms get cold, and the heating bill shows it.
The catch on South Hill is age. A lot of these pre-1950s homes still have some knob-and-tube wiring, and by code we can't bury live knob-and-tube in insulation, so we always check for it before we touch an attic. Once that's handled, the highest-impact work here is usually air sealing the attic floor and topping the attic up to about R-49, plus dense-packing the empty walls where it helps. We air-seal first, manage the moisture, then insulate, and we size the job to capture the PSE rebate.
What we see on South Hill homes.
Common home styles
1910s to 1930s homes, with thin or empty, knob-and-tube common. Cold rooms, settled attics are the moisture issues we run into most here.
Popular jobs
Attic air-seal-and-top-off, air sealing, dense-pack wall insulation are the recurring work on South Hill 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 South Hill that means paying close attention to cold rooms, settled attics, then insulating to current WA energy code.