Wall insulation in Tallahassee FL - full walls, checked for water first

Most calls start with one room. It's the bedroom along an outside wall that won't cool down, or a wall that feels warm when you put your hand on it, and the power bill keeps creeping up even after the attic insulation got done. A lot of older houses have little or nothing inside those walls. The price moves with how much outside wall there is, what's on the outside of it, which side we drill from and whether the siding check turns up repairs. The schedule mostly turns on those repairs and on whether you'd rather wait for new siding. I'll look at the house in person and go over what I found before you get a number.

I start outside, because the siding tells me more than the drywall does. Peeling paint, soft boards or stains below the windows mean water's getting in somewhere, and that gets fixed before we fill anything, since insulation over a leak just hides it. Then I'll tell you plainly whether filling the walls is worth doing now or makes more sense when the siding gets replaced. When it's a go, we open a few spots to see what's already in there, seal the gaps we can reach, fill each stud bay, the space between two studs, packed tight so it isn't left to settle, and close every hole back up. I check the walls before we call it done and walk you through what we did and why.

Insulation slows heat, but air slipping through gaps around outlets, windows and the bottom of the wall walks right past it, so a lot of wall jobs pair well with air sealing services, where we close those gaps first. If your house sits over a basement, basement insulation deals with the cold floors above it, which the wall work won't touch.

Tallahassee's Building Inspection Division issues the permits for building, renovating or adding on, and the city's permit list names alterations but doesn't mention wall insulation by name, so that list alone doesn't settle whether your job needs one. If your house sits outside the city limits, the permit comes from Leon County Development Services instead. We find out which side of the line your address is on, check with that office, and handle the permit paperwork when the job needs one.

A lot of what we fill around here is older frame houses with lap siding and next to nothing in the walls, plus some brick. Additions and the room over the garage were often built later and insulated differently from the rest of the house, so I check those walls on their own. We see the same mix on jobs in Bradfordville and Quincy.