Insulating a difficult-to-insulate house

Post date: 2021-10-19 06:17:35
Views: 73
We live in a virtually uninsulated 1905 Chicago worker's cottage (if you aren't familiar, think of a brick Cape Cod with the doors on the short end). We'd like to investigate insulating the roof with rigid foam sheets above the roof deck, but we're having trouble finding contractors who will even talk to us about it.

Our goals are making the thermally terrible second floor more comfortable in summer and winter (the second floor tends to be >90 F on sunny days in the summer and some rooms can dip to 40 F overnight in the winter) and reducing the house's carbon footprint.

The asphalt shingle roof is in decent condition but is probably 15+ years old, and there are a couple of other items on our to-do list we could roll into a roof replacement (replace aging flashing, fascia and gutters; demolish a now-unused chimney below the roofline; penetrations and mounts for rooftop solar panels), so we're interested in moving the thermal envelope to the roofline with above-the-sheathing rigid foam (as described here or here). But we're having trouble finding a Chicago-area contractor willing to do this, let alone one with experience.

So far, the quotes we're seeing fall into two camps: "rehab the top floor and add spray foam insulation between the rafters after gutting it to the studs" or "demolish the existing roof, add a bump-up addition, insulate the addition's new roof with spray foam." These both involve a significant amount of work we're completely uninterested in (a gut rehab/addition) just to add insulation. They're also probably outside our budget, and are additionally unattractive because they seem likely to result in a house that's unliveable for days or weeks--our bedrooms and sole bathroom are all on the top floor.

Moreover, my general philisophy of working with contractors is "don't ask them to do things they haven't done before or aren't comfortable doing," so we're really interested in finding someone who is actually excited by this sort of job. But it seems like we're striking out over and over again, and it's clear that everyone we've talked to so far is offering to do work that's squarely within their comfort/profit zone, the same thing they've done dozens or hundreds of times before. I'm also fairly sick of dealing with contractor FUD, stuff like "you shouldn't do this because insulating your house won't reduce your bills enough to break even so you should renovate/add living space and a second furnace at the same time]," "that kind of insulation is illegal in Chicago," or even "insulation like that doesn't work in our climate"). To be clear, I don't think any of these things are true--well, maybe the first one, but our goal is to reduce our carbon footprint and maybe make the house more comfortable, not quickly recoup our investment via lower bills. I'd note we encountered similar BS responses while getting quotes for other new, unfamiliar projects: "Air-source heat pumps don't work in Chicago winters, so we don't install them," "you need at least 2000 square feet of open space in your basement for a hybrid electric water heater, so we can only put them in larger houses," etc., etc.

A couple of other notes: Our roof is Monopoly house-simple (though we do have a dormer). We know this makes the roof/fascia unattractively thick, and we aren't restrained by any sort of historical district, HOA, or sense of architectural or aesthetic decency. We're probably already way past the point of diminishing returns with air sealing and other cheap-and-cheerful measures. Likewise, the kneewall spaces have been insulated (fiberglass batt and loose cellulose) to relatively little effect. Longer term, we're interested in switching to all-electric heat, probably heat pump mini-splits with some sort of radiant backup, also for decarbonization reasons.

So, to turn this into a question: we're interested in specific contractor recommendations, but since that seems unlikely, if you dealt with a similar situation (doesn't have to be a roof, or even insulation, any green building retrofit will do) somewhere else, we'd like to hearing about your experience and strategies for locating contractors. And, of course, if you can make a compelling case for the bump-up addition, or explain why this actually is impossible/"illegal" in Chicago or anywhere else for code or climate reasons, I'm listening.
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