I live in the Midwest US and this may be the first of a few questions this week as I remodel the bathroom.
While ripping out the crooked, old, decrepit, pink ceramic wall tile in my bathroom I found the source for my heating-bill woes. There's hardly any insulation in the exterior walls (ceilings are more or less ok). This is a job I would hire out. I'd like to know for the purpose of planning my finances, whether this is a $1500 job or a $5000 job, just a ballpark guess, but there's a twist that worries me.
The house is a 50 year old ranch with full brick exterior walls, and the exposed badly-insluated perimiter is about 130 feet. I'm assuming a contractor would drill holes and blow something in to fill the cavity. This is where the details get a bit excruciating and I hope this makes sense.
The walls, starting outside and working in, are
- a layer of traditional red brick
- a layer of some fiber-board stuff about half an inch thick
- about an inch of air
- a layer of insulation literally one inch thick [fiberglass with an interior backing layer that is silver]
- about 1.5" of air
- sheetrock.
The twist to this is that the one-inch-thick insulation was made to be stapled up in such a way as to leave a pocket of air on either side of it - basically if you're looking down from above it's a thin insulating layer in the middle of the air pocket between the studs.
Each 'X' in the picture shown, taken from above, is a stud, the hyphens mark the insulation layer:
X---------------X---------------X---------------X---------------X---------------X
Can blown-in insulation be done so as to fill up both air gaps - the one closes to the bricks as well as the one behind the thin layer of fiberflass ?
Thank you !