Well, thanks to Mother Nature, you now know that your home is not up to extreme weather.  What that also means is that during the non-extreme weather that the reason your home is “comfortable” is not due to the well-insulated home but due to the well heated or cooled home…. Opportunities exist in this situation to better prepare your home for comfort but also for energy efficiency and savings.

What is the best approach?  That is something that will be different for each home/ homeowner/ family.  I would say the three basic approaches that I would suggest fall into three categories.

1. Do the whole attic, remove the existing insulation, and foam it! (Bonus for families with unfinished bonus rooms or attics that are tall enough to become finished space and increase the useable space in your home while adding comfort to the entire home)
2. Insulate the areas of the biggest opportunities unfinished basements, accessible crawl spaces at or below grade (not the same as knee walls in attics or upstairs), garage ceilings, bonus rooms, etc.…
3. Bite the bullet and fix the areas that are the cause of the biggest frustrations, living rooms or bedrooms that are finished and not livable in the extreme temperatures. These solutions are targeted at the areas of your home that are finished but not meeting your needs and therefore come at a higher cost but also provide a bigger impact!

Let’s talk about the whole attic.  Attics that are unfinished represent the biggest area for improvement in a finished home.  I often tell the story of closing on my home in the summer of 2006.  Mid-century modern home, built in 1951.  It had 180K BTUs of heat from a nearly 25 year old furnace and 3 tons of cooling that was over 15 years old.  By all accounts the equipment was getting pushed to the max during extreme temperatures and the house was fairly drafty as any house of this age would be… but the attic had 3” of old existing insulation on the floor.  3” that would be rated as old, in poor condition and not doing much… Probably less than R5 given the typical standards of the Building Performance Institute for rating old insulation.  Bronson Shavitz, now the head of Shavitz HVAC in Skokie was the field tech at that time and he came to my home on our first day of ownership to look at the equipment.  He looked at both the AC and Furnace and said, this won’t work.  You need to replace both before anyone is living here.  He said you have two babies and a wife who will not be happy with the performance of this home during the heat of the summer and the cold of the winter.  I thanked Bronson for his honest observations of our home and said, “Dude, I cannot afford to do that.  I just bought my first home, have two babies…. And I just started a spray foam insulation business… Can you fix the stuff?”  He agreed with a serious caution, that the fixes are not long-term fixes that they will get me through one, possibly even two seasons but not more…. The following week, I had my foam truck at the house and foamed the attic.  We were able to live through that summer, which was hot with zero significant issues keeping our house cool.  The AC worked, and it did its job.  The rule of thumb for attic renovation with foam is that it will stop 95% of the heat from leaving in the winter and reduce the tons of cooling required by 50%… We did that and you can do that to.  Is that everything, no… Is that something that most people reading this can do, yes.  Costs for this project vary depending on many different factors but the opportunities also vary because turning your attic into a climate controlled usable space in the days of work from home… may be of great interest to you, regardless, if your attic is unfinished it is the first and often the best option to fixing your needs for comfort and reducing the comfort issues in the rest of your house because… when you air seal and insulate the attic now reducing the loss of heat by 95%, you also dramatically reduce drafts in the rest of your how… How?  You stop the need for makeup air or negative pressure in your home, pulling cold air into that opening.  No negative pressure = no draft!

Is the attic enough?  The answer depends on the results.  Again, let’s talk about my house.  After that first winter and summer in my home, the issue of the unfinished basement was a real topic of conversation.  Walking on cold floors, realizing the value of that basement to a growing family…. The second area of opportunity was the unfinished basement, both areas to be finished and areas over un-insulated portions that would not be finished now… or possibly ever.  This second step for us or another step for you, was exactly that.  Foam the uninsulated basement.  Wow, that make a huge difference.  Old homes like mine and yours do not benefit from the current requirements of 2” of rigid foam on the outside of the foundation walls during construction.  Stopping that cold from transferring into the home and the basement and therefore the whole house, does a massive amount to change the way your home feels.  My basement on the coldest days of the winter was no more than 50 degrees or so at night when the outside temperatures were at or near zero.  It was cold enough in my basement that on those nights when I was changing laundry in the basement, I would still grab a jacket to go there… it was cold and after we foamed it, it was not cold.  In our case we framed the walls, foamed and drywalled it now making the livable space in our home, a midcentury ranch nearly twice the size as it was before.  Did we do this first, no… we did it second.  Why did we do the attic first, we did the attic first because the attic foam job made a difference for the whole house, it made a major change and remember, that was when we bought our house for our first family home, we had two babies and we were just starting this spray foam insulation business.  This basement project was not until we owned the house for 6 or so years… and it was before we did the modifications to the HVAC equipment.