Some of the oldest housing in the valley sits here, and the attics show it. A century of owners means a century of small decisions overhead: a layer added in one era, a bath fan run through in another, a section pushed aside for wiring and never put back. What you end up with is coverage that is deep in some bays and nearly bare in others. We connect homeowners with insulation contractors who spend their working days in older Salt Lake County houses. Call 801-644-9000 and tell us what the house is doing.
Insulation in an old attic is usually a record of everything that has happened up there. Someone laid batts between the joists at one point. Someone else blew loose material over the top years later and stopped where the roof got low. A third person pulled a section back to run a vent or a wire and left it folded over. Walk an attic of this age and you can often read the sequence in order. What matters for comfort is not the deepest spot but the thin ones, because heat moves out through the weakest part of the assembly first.
Settling adds to it. Loose material compresses over the decades and loses much of what made it work, and batts sag away from the framing as the house moves around them. Storage makes it worse, since a sheet of plywood laid over the joists for boxes crushes whatever is beneath it. The area out over the eaves is often bare, because it is the hardest place to reach and the easiest to skip. A contractor should walk the whole attic rather than look in from the hatch, and should be able to tell you where the coverage actually stops.
Houses from the early part of the last century were wired for a very different set of demands, and many have had circuits added in layers ever since. Before anything is blown or laid over an attic floor, someone needs to know what is under it. Open splices outside a box, cloth-wrapped conductors, abandoned runs that may or may not still be live, and old fixture connections all need to be looked at first. Burying that work makes it harder to inspect later and can create a hazard nobody sees until something goes wrong.
This is one of the places where we will tell you to slow down. If the attic holds wiring of uncertain age, the sensible order is an electrician first and insulation second. The same goes for recessed lights of unknown type, chimney and flue chases that need clearance kept around them, and knob-and-tube-era work that has never been evaluated by anyone. A good insulation contractor raises this before quoting. If one is willing to cover it all without a word, that tells you something useful about how the rest of the job would go.
In a house that has been through several remodels, much of the heat loss is not through the insulation but around it. Every project left a hole: a chase for a plumbing stack, a gap where a wall was moved, an opening above a dropped soffit in the kitchen, a penetration nobody patched. Warm air rises through those openings and carries moisture along with it. Add material on top and you have put a blanket over a set of open channels, which is why some houses feel about the same after the work as they did before it.
Sealing those paths is unglamorous work. It means foam and caulk, rigid blocking over the larger openings, and careful attention at the attic hatch and along the top of interior walls, and it takes longer than blowing material does. It is also the part that changes how the house feels. Ask any contractor how they intend to handle air sealing before adding depth, and how they plan to reach the areas above old plaster walls where the framing is not open. The answer separates the ones who understand old houses from the ones who do not.
Not always. If what is there is dry, undamaged, and free of rodent activity, new material can often go over the top of it. It should come out when it is wet or stained, when there is evidence of animals, when it is hiding wiring that needs work, or when the attic floor has to be air sealed properly first. In older Salt Lake City attics, removal comes up more often than in newer houses, simply because there is more history up there.
Usually, but not until the wiring has been evaluated. Insulation is not an electrical repair, and covering questionable connections does not make them safer. Have an electrician look at what is up there, correct what needs correcting, and confirm that junctions sit in accessible boxes. Once that is settled, the insulation work proceeds normally. Any contractor who waves the question off is not the one to hire.
It can be, and it is usually done by drilling small openings and filling the cavities rather than opening the walls up. Whether it makes sense depends on how the walls are framed, whether bracing or blocking breaks the cavities into sections, and what the siding is made of. Attics almost always come first, because they cost less to address and they matter more. Have someone look and tell you plainly what is behind the plaster.
Cold rooms, drafts, ice at the eaves, or an attic you have never been in. Any of it is a place to start.