Attic Insulation in Liberty, NC

Liberty Homes and Their Attics

Victorian Houses Along Asheboro Street

Asheboro Street, once called Railroad Street, curves beside the raised rail bed. The district's 2000 nomination says Victorian houses for the town's new merchants and those in the professions went up along it. The inventory lists two-story frame I-houses from about 1890 and 1895, upright-and-wing houses, and several with interior brick chimneys. Where one of those chimneys rises through a room ceiling into the attic, warm air slips up around the brick. That ring gets closed with thin aluminum flashing, sealed at its edges with caulk made for high temperatures, and never with foam. Around the chimney we fit a metal shield so loose fill stays off the masonry, which building codes usually want kept 2 inches clear.

Electric Light From a Picker Stick Factory

The first industry in Liberty, the Liberty Picker Stick and Novelty Company, opened in 1910. In 1916 it bought a dynamo and started supplying electricity to the town, the nomination records. So the first wiring in an older house here could have gone in during the late 1910s or the following decade. Wiring that early is likely the knob-and-tube kind ENERGY STAR warns about in houses wired before 1930, since packing insulation around it creates a fire hazard. Before the attic is insulated, an electrician finds out if any of it still carries current. A live circuit of that kind is never buried.