Attic Insulation in Snow Hill, NC

Snow Hill Homes and Their Attics

Greek Revival and Victorian Houses on Greene Street

The district's oldest houses line Greene Street southwest of the business core. The 2000 district nomination describes four frame Greek Revival houses from about 1850 to 1880, with center halls and chimneys built on the outer end walls. A chimney on an end wall stands outside the house, so it does not pass through the attic floor. Many of the later Victorian houses in the inventory have interior brick chimneys instead, and those do rise through the ceiling. Around each, we bend aluminum flashing over the opening and run heat-rated caulk along its edges, then set up a metal dam so the blown fill stops short of the brick.

Bungalows From the Kinston Railway Years

A thirteen-mile railway to Kinston opened in 1908 and set off a building boom, though rail service ended in 1931. The nomination counts dozens of Craftsman houses from the 1910s to the 1930s, most of them simple cottages and bungalows, some with wide shed dormers and some built as rental houses. Where a bungalow has finished rooms under its roof, short side walls close off narrow attic spaces behind them. ENERGY STAR lists the area behind and under those knee walls among the leakiest in a house, so we seal and insulate those pockets and not just the attic above the ceiling.

Postwar Houses on West Harper Street

In 2009 the district was enlarged to take in West Harper Street, where twenty houses went up from about 1929 into the 1950s, and its dates were stretched to 1955. Besides a bungalow and several period cottages, the street holds Minimal Traditional and brick ranch houses. A ranch sits under a shallow roof, so the attic has almost no headroom over its outer walls. Those edges are where the insulation layer can run thin. It has to be filled out without burying the soffit vents, so baffles go in first to hold an air channel open.