Our home was built in Michigan in 1929. It's a cinder block basement w/ cement floor, and at the top of the basement wall we can see where wood framing rests on the top of the cinderblock, so I'm assuming it's a wood frame house on top of the cinderblock foundation. I see wood panels under the aluminum siding outside (which is where chipmunks are going, but that's a different story).
Our house is IMPOSSIBLE to heat, so I'm thinking we have no insulation. The walls inside are plaster. When I look at the little cubby space behind the wall in the 2nd floor (it's a sloped roof, and the walls of the room are straight, so there's that little unfinished triangular space where you can store stuff behind the wall along the length of the house), I DO see some kind of old insulation in the rafters; it's black paper with all this crumbly red nasty stuff behind it. It looks like the equivalent of the fiberglass stuff you see today, just all crumbly and cruddy. I can't look down the walls, though, because the slope goes out past the walls, so the floor of the cubby space comes to a point where the sloping roof is going down.
Is the only way to tell what's behind our plaster cutting holes and tearing out whatever we come to until we see either insulation or the outside surface of the wall? Might there be a better, less damaging way (like taking one panel of aluminum siding off, removing that big wood siding piece, etc., except that actually seems harder)?
I'd like to know if we can use that blown insulation stuff, but I think I need to know what's behind there to know if it's possible.
Thanks for any tips, ideas, etc.