Spray Foam Insulation for Lakewood Century Homes That Deserve Another Century

Cleveland Spray Foam Company spends a lot of time inside walls that were nailed together when Woodrow Wilson was president, and no city gives us more of them than Lakewood. Famously one of the most densely built cities between New York and Chicago, Lakewood was essentially finished by the 1920s, which means spray foam insulation here is almost never about new construction and almost always about a beautiful old house that leaks like the day it was framed, because on the day it was framed, nobody insulated anything.

Lakewood owns that age proudly; this is a city that puts plaques on its century homes. Our job is making sure the next hundred years are more comfortable than the first.

Balloon framing, and why your walls work like chimneys

Most Lakewood houses are balloon framed, meaning the wall studs run in one continuous piece from the foundation sill all the way to the roof, with the cavities between them open at the bottom and open at the top. Physics does the rest: warm air rising through the house pulls basement air up through every wall like a flue, all day, every day. It’s the reason a Lakewood living room can be drafty with the windows locked tight, and it’s why these houses burn the way old fire captains still talk about, because the same open channels that move air move flame floor to floor. Closing those channels is the rare project that’s an energy upgrade and a safety upgrade in the same visit, and it’s the heart of the air sealing work we do across this city.

Sealing a century home without touching the plaster

Nobody in Lakewood wants their plaster opened, and the good news is the house doesn’t require it. Balloon-frame chimneys get corked at their ends: from the basement, foam seals the cavity bottoms at the sill and rim; from the attic, it caps the open tops of the wall channels at the plates. Knee walls, attic slopes, and any cavity a renovation happens to open get treated as the opportunities they are. And where these houses offer only their original full-dimension shallow cavities to work with, closed-cell foam earns its keep, delivering the most sealing and R-value per inch of any material we could put there.

The lake is a few blocks away, and the walls know it

From the Gold Coast towers to the streets off Clifton and Detroit, Lakewood lives closer to Lake Erie than almost any of its neighbors, and that proximity keeps humidity pressing on hundred-year-old wood in every season. Old framing survives here by drying out between wettings, which is exactly why we spec these houses conservatively: seal the air paths that carry moisture into the walls, use closed-cell where dampness is part of the picture, and leave assemblies able to dry the way they were built to. It’s the difference between insulating an old house and embalming one.

Lakewood’s up-down doubles get the same care, and they’re some of our favorite projects: one sealing job, two units that stop fighting each other’s drafts, and a building that finally costs what it should to heat.

If you own one of this city’s century homes, you already know it’s worth keeping. Tell us what it’s doing, from the drafty parlor to the freezing third-floor room, and we’ll come take an honest look. The plaster stays on the walls. The house gets its next hundred years.