Everett is the one city in our service area where we recommend closed-cell most of the time, and it is not because we prefer selling the expensive product. It is arithmetic. The old houses north of downtown have shallow wall cavities, steep little attics, and damp vented crawl spaces over bare soil. When you only have three and a half inches to work with, R-value per inch stops being a spec sheet detail and becomes the whole decision.
This page is the narrow version. If you want the product itself explained, read closed-cell spray foam insulation first. If you want the whole city, including the newer South Everett and Silver Lake stock, that is on the Everett spray foam page. What follows is only the closed-cell decision in an Everett house: where the inches justify the price, where the salt damp does, and where we will tell you to spend less.
The short version
Two Everett conditions stack: the oldest housing stock we work in, and the most marine exposure. Shallow cavities mean you need every R you can fit per inch. Persistent damp off Port Gardner Bay means whatever goes in has to survive getting wet. Closed-cell answers both in one pass. In a roomy vented attic it still loses to blown-in on price, and we will tell you that.
Why the Everett premium is real and the Seattle one is a judgment call
Shallow cavities are the entire argument
Rucker Hill, Northwest Everett and Bayside are full of houses built between roughly 1900 and 1930, back when the mills and the waterfront were the whole economy. Balloon framing, uninsulated exterior walls, an attic with a settled inch or two of something, and a vented crawl space that has never had a proper ground cover. Nobody in 1911 left you room for insulation, because insulation was not a thing yet.
So when we open a wall in one of these houses we are not choosing a thickness. The thickness is already decided and it is small. Old framing is not standardised, so we measure rather than assume, but a typical bay gives you somewhere around three and a half inches of usable depth. That is where the two foams separate hard. Filled with closed-cell at roughly R-6 to R-7 per inch, that bay lands around R-21 to R-24. The same bay in open-cell at roughly R-3.6 to R-4 per inch lands around R-12.6 to R-14. Same wall, same day, same crew, close to double the result, purely because the space is tight.
Salt air, persistent damp, and a longer heating season
Everett sits right on Port Gardner Bay, further north than the rest of our service area, and the heating season here runs a little longer, a little cooler, and a little wetter than Seattle’s. That does not change the physics. It changes which failure mode you should be worried about.
Inland, insulation usually fails because somebody installed it badly. In Everett it more often fails because it got wet and stayed wet. Fiberglass that absorbs moisture loses most of its rated value while it is damp, then compresses and never recovers. Blown-in mats down. Both become rodent bedding once they are soft. Most of the older houses we get into are on their second or third round of insulation, and every previous round is lying in the dirt. Closed-cell does not absorb and hold water the way those materials do, which in a crawl space forty feet from salt water is worth more than the R number on its own.
What you actually have to work with in a pre-1940 Everett house
| Assembly | Depth you usually find | Closed-cell | Open-cell | Our call |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Balloon framed exterior wall | About 3.5 in | R-21 to R-24 | R-12.6 to R-14 | Closed-cell, if the wall is genuinely open |
| Sloped ceiling or dormer cheek | 3.5 to 5.5 in | R-21 to R-38 | R-12.6 to R-22 | Closed-cell, headroom is not replaceable |
| Upstairs knee wall | About 3.5 in | R-21 to R-24 | R-12.6 to R-14 | Closed-cell, plus sealing the floor behind it |
| Rim joist and sill | 2 in is plenty | R-12 to R-14 | R-7.2 to R-8 | Closed-cell, every time |
| Crawl space stem walls | No depth limit | Specified to target | Not suitable here | Closed-cell, after the water is sorted |
| Open vented attic floor | As deep as you like | Overkill | Overkill | Blown-in. Do not buy foam for this. |
Read down that last column and the pattern is obvious. Closed-cell wins wherever the depth is fixed and loses wherever it is not. If you want the product comparison without the Everett framing, it is on open-cell vs closed-cell spray foam.
In these houses, the first job is usually taking something out
Budget an Everett closed-cell job as two pieces of work, because it normally is. There is almost always failed material to get out first: soaked batts hanging out of the floor joists, matted blown-in, rodent contaminated insulation that has to be bagged and carried out through a small hatch. That is insulation removal, it is its own day, and it is priced separately.
We will not spray over it. Foam applied on top of wet, compressed, contaminated material traps the moisture and the smell against your framing permanently, and the only remedy after that is removing the foam as well. Where the honest answer is that you need the old material out and something conventional back in rather than foam, that is insulation replacement, and we will quote it that way.
Water comes before both. Standing water, a torn or missing ground cover, a downspout dumping at the foundation, active rodents. All of that gets resolved before a drum comes off the truck.
Cold wet sheathing is the Everett quality risk
Most of this work happens between October and March, because that is when people notice they are cold. In Everett that means spraying onto cold substrate that is also carrying marine damp, and closed-cell is fussy about both. Out of range, it bonds poorly, yields less foam than you paid for, and can pull away from the wood a year or two later. You will not see any of that from the hatch.
Read the surface, not the forecast
Infrared readings on the actual sheathing or stem wall, in several spots, including the coldest exterior corner. Air temperature at the hatch tells you nothing useful.
Dry it before you bond to it
Damp wood is the Everett version of this problem. We want the framing dry and the surface above dew point, so there is no invisible film of condensation for the foam to sit on.
Condition the space first
Close it up, get heat and air movement in, and let the substrate come up. It can cost a morning. It is the cheapest insurance on the entire job.
Thinner lifts, more of them
Closed-cell goes on in controlled passes. In cold wet conditions we build the depth in more passes, not fewer, and we watch material temperature and pressure through the day.
If a crew tells you the weather does not matter to foam, that is the thing you have been reading horror stories about, happening in your driveway. Here is what a quality install looks like, in enough detail to check ours or anyone else’s.
Where we will tell you not to buy closed-cell in Everett
- A roomy vented attic you are keeping vented. If there is space to pile depth on the attic floor, air seal the ceiling plane and bury it in blown-in. Same R for a fraction of the price. That is a smaller invoice and we will still write it.
- Any house with a roof or drainage problem that is not fixed. A roof near the end of its life, gutters running behind the fascia, grading that sends water at the foundation. Foam over an active water problem hides it and makes the eventual repair worse.
- Closed walls that are staying closed. Foam goes into an open cavity, it is not injected. If your original plaster is staying, spend the money under the floor and at the attic plane. See wall insulation for when the wall genuinely is open.
- Interior walls for quiet. Closed-cell is rigid and dense, and it couples the two sides of the wall together. It is not a sound product.
Cost, and why your heating bill here is an electric bill
Closed-cell is priced by the board foot, one square foot at one inch thick, and in this market it commonly runs about $1.00 to $2.00 per board foot installed, against roughly $0.50 to $0.70 for open-cell. As a whole project reference, 1,000 square feet at three inches often lands somewhere around $2,200 to $5,400. Trade labour in this region runs roughly $95 to $175 an hour, which is why removal and tight access move the number so much: both are pure hours.
Snohomish County PUD is the electric utility here, and a lot of Everett stock heats with electricity, so there is nothing to disguise the loss. With electric resistance heat, every inch of R you could not fit in the cavity shows up on the statement every month for as long as you own the house. That is the argument for paying more per inch in a shallow assembly, and it is also why we will not quote you a savings percentage. Too much depends on the house, the equipment, and how warm you keep it. After we have been under the floor we will tell you which assembly is costing you the most and what fixing that one should reasonably be worth.
A firm price needs someone to actually look. Anyone who prices your Bayside house over the phone has not seen the part of it that decides the number.
Everett questions about closed-cell
My Everett house is small and old. Is closed-cell overkill for it?
Usually the opposite. The small old house is the best case for closed-cell, because everything about it is shallow: the wall bays, the rafters, the sloped ceiling under a dormer, the knee walls. When you cannot add depth, the only lever you have left is R-value per inch, and that is exactly what you are paying the premium for. The house where closed-cell is genuinely overkill is the one with a big open vented attic and plenty of room to just pile blown-in on the floor.
Does living this close to salt water damage spray foam itself?
No. Cured closed-cell is not corroded by salt air the way exposed fasteners, flashing, and metal hardware are. The marine exposure matters for a different reason: it keeps everything around the foam damp for most of the year, which is what destroys fiberglass and blown-in, and which is why the material we choose has to be one that does not absorb and hold water. If foam is being applied outdoors or anywhere it will see sunlight, it does need a coating or a covering, because UV degrades the surface over time. Inside a crawl space or a wall cavity that is not a concern.
My crawl space is wet right now. Can you still spray this winter?
Not until the water is dealt with, and that is not us stalling the job. Closed-cell needs to bond to a dry substrate in a workable temperature range, and marine damp on cold framing is exactly the condition that causes adhesion failure. More importantly, sealing a wet crawl space is money spent covering up the actual problem. The usual sequence is drainage and a proper sealed ground cover first, then let it dry, then remove whatever failed down there, then spray. In an Everett winter that is often two visits rather than one, and we will lay out the schedule before you commit to anything.
How do I know I actually got closed-cell and not open-cell with a skin coat?
This is a fair question and it is the most common way homeowners get cheated on this product. Closed-cell cures rigid, you cannot push a thumb into it, and it is noticeably dense. Open-cell stays soft and spongy and you can compress it with a finger. Ask before the job for the product name and the manufacturer data sheet, ask for the number of sets used on your house, and measure the depth in several places yourself once it has cured. We put the product, the thickness, and the assemblies in writing in the scope, and we walk the finished job with you and check depth together.
Should I foam the walls of my Rucker Hill house or start under the floor?
Under the floor, nearly always, and the reason is access rather than performance. The crawl space and the rim joist are reachable today, they are where the cold and the damp are getting in, and in a balloon framed house they are the bottom of the path that air takes straight up the inside of your walls. The walls themselves only become a foam job when they are already open for a remodel or a siding replacement. If you are planning that work anyway, call us while the cavity is open rather than after the drywall goes back on.