Basement insulation in Fort Worth TX - a basement that stays dry and comfortable

Most people who call about a basement tell me the floors upstairs stay cold, the basement smells damp or the power bill keeps climbing. What moves the price is how much wall there is, whether drywall is already up, which material the walls can take and whether any water has to be fixed before we start. The schedule mostly turns on that water repair and on how much finished wall has to come down, and your own price comes from the estimate when I come out to look. If part of your house sits over a crawl space instead, crawl space insulation is its own job, and I can look at both on the same visit.

Water comes first. I go over the walls for damp spots, stains, cracks and a musty smell, and if anything is wet or leaking we have it fixed before any insulation goes on, because insulation over a wet wall just hides the problem and holds the water against it. Once the walls are dry, our crew seals the gaps around pipes, wires and the rim joist, the wood band sitting on top of the foundation wall, so the new insulation isn't fighting a draft. Then we insulate the walls with a material that handles moisture and clean up before we leave. I'll walk you through what we found, so you know your basement a little better than when we arrived.

On bare concrete I usually reach for closed-cell foam insulation, the dense kind that blocks moisture as well as air. It costs more than boards or batts, and I still think it's worth it against a basement wall because it seals and insulates in one pass. Open-cell foam insulation is lighter and softer, so it suits walls and rooflines above ground better than concrete that can pick up damp.

Basements aren't common in Fort Worth, and the ground is a big reason. A soil summary for the city finds that shrink-swell clay, soil that swells when it's wet and shrinks when it dries, limits houses without basements on 42% of the mapped land inside city limits, while a shallow water table limits basements on under 1% of it. For your job, that means water rising from below is rarely what's behind a damp wall, so when I find damp I look first at how rain reaches the wall and at cracks where the clay has pushed and pulled over the years.

We're based in Fort Worth and do the same work in many of the cities around it, including Haltom City and North Richland Hills. Basements are just as rare there, so each one gets the same slow look at the walls before we talk about material.