Imagine the beating a house built in the 1960s on a stone bluff overlooking the Atlantic Ocean in Marblehead, Mass., must take. The new homeowners knew it would require a lot of work. They would be gutting the home and starting over: new wiring, new plumbing and new insulation. One big problem, however, was that the home’s existing framework would not support the local building code’s R-value requirements (R-38 in the roof and R-20 in the walls). The low pitch of the roof posed another challenge.
In order to install conventional insulation, contractors would either have to build a sister frame or, worse, completely reframe the home. Either of these methods would have been costly and time-consuming, but Paul Dion, president and building envelope specialist at Closed Cell Structures, Danvers, Mass., had another solution: spray polyurethane foam insulation.