Typical job One to two days depending on attic size and access
Standard Air seal first, then insulate, then confirm ventilation
Scheduling Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Service area Six counties across Southeast Michigan
Why sealing comes before insulating
Insulation slows heat moving through a surface. It does very little about heated air escaping through a hole, and an average older house has a surprising number of holes into the attic: the top plates of every interior wall, the bath fan housing, recessed light cans, the chimney chase, the attic hatch. Air moves through those all winter and takes its heat with it.
Blowing another twelve inches of loose fill over an unsealed ceiling buries the problem instead of fixing it. Worse, it can hide the evidence. The frost patterns and the dirty streaks in old insulation are the map of where air has been leaking, and once they are covered nobody can read them.
So the order is sealing, then insulation, then ventilation. Seal the penetrations, bring the depth up to a consistent level across the whole ceiling, then confirm the soffit intake is still open and the baffles are in place so the roof deck stays cold. Skip the third step and you trade a heat loss problem for an ice dam problem. Our background on the choices is in the Michigan attic insulation guide.
Signs your attic is working against you
Ice dams along the eaves
A ridge of ice at the gutter line means the roof deck is warm enough to melt snow that refreezes at the cold overhang. That is heat escaping the house, not a gutter fault, and adding heat cable treats the symptom while the cause keeps running.
Rooms over the garage stay cold
Bonus rooms and bedrooms above an unconditioned space are the first to show a gap, because the floor, the knee walls and the sloped ceiling are all part of the envelope and all three are usually missed. Owners run a space heater in there for years before anyone looks at the assembly behind the drywall.
Uneven depth across the attic
Look across the joists with a flashlight. Insulation pushed aside near the hatch, flattened under stored boxes, or thin over an addition tells you the ceiling is not performing evenly no matter what the average depth says. Heat finds the thin spot, and one bare bay over a bedroom is enough to make that room the cold one.
The season decides how it goes
An attic in July is brutal and the crew works shorter stretches, so the calendar runs longer. October and November are the comfortable months for this work in Southeast Michigan, and the results show up the same winter on the heating bill.
If ice dams were the reason you called, book before snow rather than during it. Sealing and insulating a ceiling that already has ice on the eave does nothing until the melt, and the diagnostic work is easier when we can see the attic floor. Many owners bundle it with winterizing the house.
What the job covers
The same order on every attic. Anything found outside this list gets written down and quoted separately rather than added once the crew is already up there.
- Inspect for existing moisture, pest activity and knob-and-tube wiring before anything else
- Air seal top plates, chases, the chimney gap, fan housings and wire penetrations
- Box and seal the attic hatch, and weatherstrip it so it closes tight
- Fit baffles at the eaves so soffit intake stays open once the depth comes up
- Blow loose fill to a consistent measured depth and leave a marked ruler so anyone can check it later
Bath fans venting into the attic get corrected rather than insulated around, which is the same fault we fix during exhaust fan installation.
Where our work stops
Wright’s Repairs is a renovation and repair crew, and an attic turns up several things that are not ours to handle.
Work we take on
- Air sealing, baffles, hatch boxing and loose fill top-ups
- Knee wall and attic floor insulation on finished bonus spaces
- Ventilation checks at soffit and ridge
Work we do not take on
- Spray foam application, which goes to a specialist contractor
- Knob-and-tube wiring, which has to be dealt with by a licensed electrical contractor before anything gets buried
- Vermiculite, which may contain asbestos and has to be tested by a qualified laboratory and abated under license
Where we find vermiculite, active roof leaks or wiring that cannot be safely covered, we stop, document it and hand it to the right trade before any insulation goes down. Burying a fault under a foot of cellulose is how a small repair becomes a demolition. The comparison of materials is covered in spray foam versus fiberglass.
Questions homeowners ask
Related repair and maintenance work
Attic work rarely stands alone. These are the services homeowners most often schedule alongside it.
The rest of the envelope matters just as much, so owners usually add draft sealing at the rim joist and weatherstripping at the doors. Below grade the same logic applies to basement insulation and to a crawl space vapor barrier. Anything an inspector flagged upstairs routes into home inspection repairs.
The full catalog sits under Wright’s Repairs services. View our Portfolio or contact us now for a free quote.
