Attic Insulation in Reidsville, NC

Reidsville Homes and Their Attics

Story-and-a-Half Cottages Built for the Factory

When American Tobacco expanded in the 1910s, prominent local citizens had small frame houses built to rent to the plant's Black workers. Many went up between 1915 and 1930, in clusters across the northern third of the city. The city's 1986 multiple resource nomination describes the usual plan: one room wide, two rooms deep, a story and a half high, with a shed roof over the back room. For the North Washington Avenue group, it describes an upstairs room whose knee walls slope up to a narrow flat ceiling. That shape leaves only a sliver of attic overhead. The wedge-shaped spaces behind those knee walls are often leaky, and the floor cavities under the walls can stand open. We seal and insulate the side wedges and those openings, not only the strip above.

Courtland Place and the Postwar Subdivisions

Courtland Place, the city's first planned subdivision, opened in southwest Reidsville in the early 1920s with curving streets and park land. The 1986 nomination notes that bungalows and revival style houses went up there in the 1920s and 1930s, but that most of its building came in the late 1940s and 1950s. Later middle class streets followed near the Pennrose Country Club and along Richardson Drive. The housing figures on this page date about half of Reidsville's homes to before 1970. A kitchen from those years may have a boxed soffit above the wall cabinets with its top open straight into the attic. ENERGY STAR counts these dropped soffits among the big leaks: we rake the insulation aside, cap and seal the opening from above, and lay the insulation back across the top.