Attic Insulation Tear Out and Joist Cleaning Across 650 Square Feet in West Hartford

This is the attic of an older West Hartford home, and it looked its age. The roof is decked in wide plank boards rather than sheet material, and across the underside of those boards the wood had gone grey and blotchy, darkest in the bays and around the brick chimney chase where the mortar had weathered open. Old insulation sat loose over the plank attic floor, broken up and shedding, with debris scattered across the boards. Attics in this part of West Hartford get here the same way.

The pre war housing stock was framed before anyone was thinking about air sealing, warm damp air from the living space works its way up through gaps around the chimney chase and the attic hatch, and in a plank decked attic with limited ventilation that moisture condenses on the cold underside of the roof boards through a Hartford County winter. Do that for a few decades and the boards record it. What the homeowner bought was a clean out, and the order of operations is what makes that work.

Nothing was touched in the attic until the route out of it was protected, because every bag of old insulation has to travel down through the middle of the house. Canvas floor protection went down the attic stairs and along the hallway. Poly containment was set at 130 square feet, taped floor to ceiling, with an airlock and a decontamination chamber so the crew and the debris had one controlled way in and out, and the stairwell itself was sheeted off at the top.

Three negative air scrubbers ran on site across three 24 hour periods, keeping the attic under negative pressure so air moved into the work zone and through a HEPA filter rather than out into the bedrooms below. The crew worked the job in full protective equipment. With that in place, 650 square feet of insulation was torn out and bagged in the attic rather than carried loose, and then the surfaces it had been covering were cleaned. The joist and roof board system was heavy cleaned across the same 650 square feet, and visible mold growth was cleaned off the wood with a peroxide based cleaner formulated for remediation work.

That distinction matters. This was physical removal and physical cleaning of the wood, not a coating sprayed over it. All of it, insulation and debris together, left the property in a single 12 yard dumpster. It is worth being just as clear about where this scope stopped. No new insulation was installed. The attic was handed back clean and bare, which is the correct condition to reinsulate from but is not the same thing as being reinsulated, and that decision now sits with the homeowner.

No air sealing was performed, no antimicrobial or encapsulant coating was applied, and no mold testing, air sampling or clearance testing was part of this job. Nothing was done to the roof, the chimney or the attic ventilation, so the moisture path that stained those boards in the first place is still there. Old fabric wrapped ductwork runs through this attic and was left undisturbed. Wrap of that age can contain asbestos, Green Restoration is not licensed for asbestos work and does not disturb it, and anything involving that ductwork would be coordinated with a licensed abatement contractor as a separate scope.