Ceiling spray foam insulation in Wetaskiwin is complicated by something the newer towns on this site do not have: on a great many of these houses part of the upper floor is inside the roof, so above those rooms there is no attic at all.
A room in the roof has no space above it
The older houses here were built with the upper storey partly within the roof structure, which produces sloped ceilings following the rafters, short knee walls at the sides, and a flat section in the middle. Only that flat section has anything above it. The sloped parts have a cavity of whatever depth the rafter gives and nothing else, and they cannot be reached from a hatch. That is the single biggest difference between a ceiling job here and one in a post-1991 town, and it decides most of the scope.
What is behind a knee wall, and why nobody has looked
Behind the short vertical wall at the edge of an upstairs room there is a triangular void running the length of the building, open to the eave, and on most of these houses it has never been opened. It frequently contains the original insulation, a good deal of dust, and occasionally storage somebody put there in 1970 and forgot. It is also unconditioned space directly against the wall of a room people sleep in. Getting into it is the most productive hour of most surveys in this town.
Plaster, and what it means for working on a ceiling
On the oldest houses the ceiling is plaster on lath rather than drywall, which changes two things. It is a better barrier to sound and a worse one to air, because a century of movement has cracked it in ways that are invisible under paint. And it is considerably less forgiving to work on: it does not patch like drywall and it comes down in sheets if it is disturbed. Where the work can be done from above, that is always the route on a plaster ceiling, and where it cannot, the household needs to know what opening one actually involves.
The chimney nobody has used since the furnace was changed
Nearly every house of this age has a masonry chimney running from the basement to above the roof, and on most of them nothing has vented into it for thirty years. It is still there, it still passes straight through the ceiling plane, and the gap around it where it crosses is frequently the single largest opening in the whole surface. Sealing that crossing on a Wetaskiwin house is straightforward and it is done in a material intended for a chimney penetration rather than with the same foam used across the rest of the plane, which is a detail worth confirming is in anybody's quote.
Ceiling Spray Foam Insulation Wetaskiwin: Common Questions
Why are the upstairs rooms the cold ones? On a house with rooms in the roof that is the normal pattern, and the knee wall voids are usually why.
Can it be done from the attic? The flat part yes. The sloped sections and knee walls have no attic above them.
Can plaster ceilings be insulated? Then working from above matters more than usual, because plaster does not patch like drywall.
Size the assembly with the R-value calculator, then get a free Wetaskiwin quote. More on Ceiling Spray Foam Insulation Alberta.