Draft sealing and weatherization
A drafty house fix that shows up on your gas bill rather than only in how the living room feels. Weatherstripping on four doors, gaskets behind the outlets and switches on exterior walls, interior caulk at the window trim and a sealed attic hatch. Half a day of work, mostly with a caulk gun and a screwdriver, aimed at the places air leaves a Michigan house in volumes people would not believe if you told them.
The reason this package exists is that homeowners spend thousands on windows to solve a problem that costs a few hundred to fix properly. Air leakage and thermal loss are different things. Sealing the leaks first tells you how much of the cold you were feeling came from gaps, and it makes any later decision about glass an informed one.
What the crew seals
Four items, fixed scope, one visit. The list is deliberately short because these four cover most of the measurable leakage in a typical house here, and because a longer list would turn a half day into an energy audit we are not licensed to certify.
- Weatherstripping and door sweeps replaced on four exterior doors
- Foam gaskets fitted behind outlet and switch plates on exterior walls
- Interior caulk renewed where window and door casing meets the wall
- The attic hatch or pull down stair sealed and weatherstripped
- A written note of anything larger we found while we were in there
Why outlet gaskets matter more than they sound like they should
An electrical box on an exterior wall is a plastic cup with holes in it, sitting in a cavity that connects to the attic and the rim joist. Hold a lit match near one on a windy January day and watch what happens to the flame. Now count the outlets and switches on the outside walls of your house. Twenty is common. That is twenty small holes into the wall cavity, and the gaskets close them for pennies each.
The attic hatch nobody thinks about
Warm air rises and the hatch is the highest opening in the house. An uninsulated plywood panel dropped into a rough opening leaks continuously all winter and, worse, carries moisture into the attic where it condenses on the underside of the roof deck. We add a foam board panel, weatherstrip the ledge and fit a latch that pulls the panel down tight. Pull down stairs get a sealed insulated cover instead.
Where the cold air in your house actually comes from
Houses behave like chimneys. Warm air escapes high, which pulls cold air in low, and the draft you feel at the ankles in the family room is the bottom half of that loop. This is why sealing the attic side often fixes a complaint about a cold floor two storeys below, and why replacing a window sometimes changes nothing at all.
The low side of the loop usually runs through the basement rim joist, the gap around the plumbing stack, and the space where the foundation meets the sill plate. Those are worth sealing too, and they are often bundled with basement insulation work when a client is finishing the space anyway. If the basement is staying unfinished, we can seal the rim joist on its own.
The attic side is the bigger prize and the one most people skip. Our guide to insulating an attic in a Michigan house explains why air sealing has to happen before insulation goes down, and what happens to insulation that gets laid over unsealed penetrations.
Doors that will not seal no matter what you put on them
Weatherstripping fixes a gap. It does not fix a door that has moved. A slab that has warped, a jamb that has settled, or hinges that have pulled out of soft framing will leave a wedge of daylight no strip can close. The crew will tell you which category your door is in, and the test is simple. If the gap is even top to bottom, stripping fixes it. If it is a wedge, the door or the frame is out of square.
Out of square is usually a repair rather than a replacement. Rehanging a door, shimming a jamb and adjusting the strike plate is normal work for our crews and it is quoted on the spot. When the bottom rail of an exterior door has gone soft, that is rot, and it becomes an exterior door replacement instead.
Windows, caulk and the thing caulk cannot do
Interior caulk at the casing stops air moving between the wall cavity and the room. It is quiet, invisible work and it makes an old double hung noticeably less drafty. What it cannot do is restore a failed insulated glass unit, and it cannot make a single pane window perform like a modern one. A storm window does more for a single pane than any sealant will.
If a majority of your units are fogged or painted shut, the conversation moves to replacement windows, which is design and build work with a very different price and timeline. We would rather seal your house this month and have that conversation in spring than sell you glass in October.
Older houses take this better than people expect
A pre war house in Ypsilanti or a farmhouse outside Manchester usually has solid assemblies and terrible air sealing, which is the best possible combination for this package. The plaster is sound, the framing is real lumber, and the leaks are all at the joints. Sealing those is cheap and the difference is immediate.
Postwar ranches in Livonia and Dearborn often have thin wall insulation and a long low attic, so the hatch and the top plate matter most. Newer construction around Canton is tighter overall but frequently has a leaky pull down stair and an unsealed garage wall. We adjust what gets the attention based on what the house is.
The garage wall, and the air you do not want indoors
An attached garage shares a wall and often a ceiling with living space. Air moves across that boundary, and it carries whatever is in the garage with it. Sealing the passage door and the penetrations in the shared wall is worth doing for air quality alone, before you get to the comfort argument. Larger work on that space runs through garage insulation and heating.
People converting a garage into living space discover all of this the hard way. If that is on your list, read about what a garage conversion involves before you start pricing flooring, because the envelope work is the part that decides whether the room is usable in February.
How to tell whether it worked
Take a photo of your gas meter the day before we come and the same day next month, and compare against the same span last year adjusted roughly for temperature. It is not laboratory grade, but it is honest and it costs nothing. Most clients notice the comfort difference before the bill, because the draft at the ankles is the first thing to go.
A blower door test gives you a real number, and we will happily point you at an energy auditor if you want one. We do not perform that test ourselves and we do not pretend a caulk gun substitutes for it. What we can tell you is which gaps we closed and which ones we could not reach.
What we will not claim
We will not put a percentage on your heating bill. Too much depends on your furnace, your thermostat habits, how many people are home during the day and what the winter does. Anybody quoting you a guaranteed saving from weatherstripping is quoting a number they invented. What we will say is that air sealing is the cheapest energy work available to a homeowner and the one with the least downside.
We also will not seal a house that has a combustion appliance problem without saying something first. A very tight house with an older atmospherically vented water heater can back draft, which is a safety issue rather than a comfort one. If we see that setup, the note goes in writing and the recommendation is to get the appliance looked at by the mechanical trade that handles it.
What to have ready
- A list of the rooms that felt worst last winter, in order
- Clear access to the attic hatch, including moving anything stored under it
- Furniture pulled a foot off the exterior walls where outlets sit behind it
- Any storm windows you own but have not installed, so we can fit them
- Fifteen minutes at the start to walk the house with the crew lead
That first item does more work than it looks like it does. A room that is cold at the floor has a different problem from a room that is cold near the ceiling, and a room that is only cold when the wind blows from the west has a third problem entirely. Ten minutes of your observations beats an hour of our guessing.
Booking it, and what pairs with it
September through November is the right window, and earlier is better because the work is more pleasant and the calendar is emptier. Clients regularly pair this with the fall winterization package, which handles the outdoor side of the same problem, hose bibbs, gutters and the dryer vent. Booked together they are one visit instead of two.
If the house belongs to a parent and comfort is only part of the worry, the bathroom safety package is the other one families book in the same call. Both sit on the repairs and service side, which runs on its own calendar so small jobs do not wait behind large ones.
- Half a day on site for a typical single family house
- No permit required, since nothing structural or mechanical is altered
- Work covered by our workmanship warranty
- Materials carry the manufacturer’s own coverage
- Larger findings quoted separately, never added without your say so
Basements, crawl spaces and the bottom of the loop
Cold floors on the first storey almost always trace back to what is under them. An unsealed rim joist runs the entire perimeter of the house, and in most basements it is bare wood with a strip of fiberglass stuffed against it that does nothing to stop air. Sealing that band is the single highest return item in an unfinished basement, and it is quick work when the ceiling is open.
Crawl spaces are worse and more common out in the townships than people assume. A vented crawl with a dirt floor pushes damp cold air up into the house all winter and moisture into the framing all summer. We will tell you what we find down there and what order to fix it in, and if the answer is a proper encapsulation then that is a larger project quoted on its own terms.
Anyone planning to finish the space later should seal before they frame, not after. Retrofitting air sealing behind finished walls costs several times what it costs today. The sequencing question is covered in our notes on finishing a basement properly, and it is worth reading before the drywall order goes in.
Humidity, condensation and the window that weeps
Sealing a house raises indoor humidity, because the air that used to carry moisture out is no longer leaving. In a leaky house that shows up as condensation on the coldest surface available, usually the bottom corner of a window or the inside of an exterior wall closet. It is not a defect in the sealing work. It is the house telling you it now needs ventilation on purpose rather than by accident.
The fixes are ordinary. Run the bathroom fans longer, vent the range hood outside rather than through a filter, and keep the humidifier on the furnace turned down in January. If condensation is heavy enough to stain a sill, we will flag it and point at the ventilation side of the problem rather than leaving you to find it in February.
Rooms built as three season space behave differently again. A porch converted without a proper envelope will sweat no matter what you do at the trim, and the honest answer there is a four season conversion rather than more caulk. We will say which one you have after ten minutes in the room.
What we are not doing on this visit is rebalancing your heating system. Uneven room temperatures often come from duct sizing or a damper somebody closed a decade ago, which is mechanical work. Air sealing narrows the list of suspects, which is plainly useful when you do bring that trade in. Winter basement issues in particular are worth reading up on in our winter basement notes.
Getting on the schedule
Budgeting a winter of work rather than a single visit? The thinking in our renovation budget guide applies to small work as well as large, and the process we run is the same either way. We serve all six counties, and the towns are listed on our service area page.
To see the standard of finish our crews hold on larger builds, View our Portfolio. When you want a date, contact us now for a free quote and tell us which room in the house you would fix first.
