Attic Insulation in Lenoir, NC

Lenoir Homes and Their Attics

Mill Cottages on Spainhour Street and Underdown Avenue

On the ridge above the old Bernhardt planing mill and Lenoir Cotton Mill sites sits Lerinco, a workers' neighborhood whose name came from a local realty firm. The 1987 county survey called it Cotton Mill Hill and dated its small frame houses to about 1913. The city's 2018 survey found plans taken from a mill-building textbook of 1899, plus one-story hip-roofed cottages two rooms deep and saltbox houses. A hip roof slopes down on all four sides, and a saltbox runs its long roof low at the back, so these attics are tight at the edges. Insulation can run thin there, and baffles keep the soffit vents open while it is filled in evenly.

Bungalows and Period Cottages Between the Wars

From the 1920s into the 1940s, neighborhoods such as Fairfield, Maehill Park, Freedman, Kentwood and West End filled with Craftsman bungalows, Period Cottages and Colonial Revival homes, almost all of them frame. The city's survey sketches the Period Cottage as a side-gabled house in brick or frame, with either one floor or a half story above. It also records several one-and-a-half-story bungalows with large dormers. In a Lenoir bungalow with bedrooms up under the roof, short knee walls close off slim triangles of attic along each side. ENERGY STAR names that hidden space, and the floor cavity beneath it, as a usual leak path, so it is sealed and filled too, not just the strip over the upstairs ceiling. In houses of this age, an electrician also checks for knob-and-tube wiring first.

Brick Ranches in Joyceton and Lakeside Terrace

After the war, Lenoir spread outward. The Joyceton subdivision south of Southwest Boulevard was platted in 1952. The survey found it mostly one-story ranches of the 1950s, such as a 1956 brick house under a low hipped roof. Lakeside Terrace Circle, subdivided in 1959, added split-levels and long, low ranches with carports or attached garages. Lenoir's Census numbers, shown higher on this page, date about half its homes to before 1970. A low roof leaves little room where it meets the outside walls, which is where the insulation can be thinnest. A split-level can hide two attics at different heights, and each one is checked and measured.