This One Started With Rodents

Got back from a project outside St. Paul not long ago and this one ended up being a bigger cleanup than insulation job at first.

The homeowner knew rodents had been in the attic at some point. What they didn’t know was how much of the fiberglass had been affected. From the access hatch it didn’t even look that bad. Honestly, for the first few minutes I thought we might only be dealing with a few isolated areas.

Wasn’t the case.

Once we got moving

The deeper we got into the fiberglass, the more damage we found.

That’s usually how it goes.

You pull some back. Then some more. Then a little more. Before long you’re looking at insulation that really shouldn’t stay in the house anymore. We weren’t interested in burying it under fresh material and pretending the problem disappeared.

The old stuff needed to leave.

It was one of those attics.

Hard to explain unless you’ve been in a lot of them.

The attic had that dusty smell that older insulation sometimes gets. Not terrible. Just old. The kind of attic where you can tell things have been happening up there for years without anybody paying much attention to it.

Which is normal, honestly.

Most people never go into their attic.

The spray foam part

We sealed the attic. Then the rim joists.

Then we went back and checked areas again.

One thing that always surprises homeowners is how much time gets spent on work they won’t ever see afterward. Once insulation covers everything up, nobody knows where the leaks were. They just know the house feels different.

That part mattered.

Funny comment from the homeowner

At one point he looked around and said something like, “Well, I guess the rodents were more comfortable than I was.”

Made me laugh. Not wrong though.

Somewhere around mid-afternoon

The job started feeling different.

The old fiberglass was gone. The air sealing was finished. The attic looked cleaner. Even the light coming through the hatch seemed brighter for some reason.

Maybe that’s just something I notice.

Anyway, that’s when we started blowing the new cellulose.

Bringing it back together

We installed rodent-deterrent cellulose all the way to R-60. The coverage came out nice. Even. Clean.

Nothing flashy.

Just one of those jobs where the attic finally looked like somebody cared about it again. Kind of like cleaning out a garage that’s been ignored for ten years. Same space. Completely different feeling.

That was it.

Wrapping up

By the end of the day the old rodent-damaged fiberglass was gone, the attic and basement rim joists had been sealed with closed-cell spray foam, and the house had a fresh layer of R-60 rodent-deterrent cellulose. The homeowner seemed relieved more than anything else, which I understood after seeing what came out of that attic. If you’ve got old insulation, rodent activity, or just a house that never seems quite comfortable, Call us or visit our website for a FREE evaluation!