Residential spray foam insulation in Didsbury is nearly always bought one item at a time. Whole-house projects are rare here. What happens instead is that a household picks the single thing costing them most this winter and deals with that, which is a sensible way to spend money and changes what a first visit is actually for.
Every house here is partway through somebody else's list
Most of these houses have had work done already. An attic topped up in the eighties, a basement finished by an owner two owners back, siding replaced with something added behind it. None of that was a plan; it was a run of separate decisions taken by different people for different reasons over forty years. So the question on a first visit is not what this house needs in the abstract, it is where the last person stopped. A house whose attic was done properly and whose rim joist was never touched needs the opposite of the house next door, and two houses of the same age and the same floor plan on one street routinely need different work.
The work already paid for is rarely written down anywhere
There is no record of any of it. Nobody keeps receipts through three changes of ownership, and nothing in a building file will tell you whether the vapour barrier was carried on behind the addition. That is the real reason an assessment here takes longer than the quote implies it should. The things that have to be established are physical: what is in the attic and how deep it is, whether the rim joist has anything in it at all, whether the basement has a stud wall standing against bare concrete with batt behind it. Each is a short check, and each one changes what the next dollar should be spent on.
Why the next item is not the same in two houses
The order usually recited - attic, then air sealing, then walls - is a general answer, and general answers waste money on a house that has already had two of the three done. The most common finding in Didsbury is an attic that was topped up at some point and a rim joist that never was, which puts the smallest job on the list first. The second most common is a finished basement built straight against the foundation with no air seal behind it, which cannot be corrected without opening something up and therefore waits for a renovation that is happening anyway.
What can be settled without opening a wall
More than people expect, which matters when nobody wants to start taking a house apart to find out. The attic, the rim joist and the crawl space are all reachable, and between them they account for most of the air leaving an older Didsbury house. Walls are the expensive uncertainty. If the siding is coming off anyway the wall becomes a straightforward job and should be done then; if it is not, the honest advice is to spend the money where it can be reached and look at the walls when something else forces the question. See wall spray foam insulation for why the drill-and-fill version of that job disappoints people.
Residential Spray Foam Insulation Didsbury: Common Questions
What is the single best insulation job to do this year? That is the normal case here and it is a reasonable way to buy it. The work is deciding which one.
Does the attic come first? Often not. Where it has already been topped up, the rim joist is usually the better spend.
Can you tell what is in the walls? Not without opening something. What can be checked gets checked and the rest is called unknown.
Size the assembly with the R-value calculator, then get a free Didsbury quote. More on Residential Spray Foam Insulation Alberta.