Headed to the Interstate Fair? Your House Is Older Than the Fair Rides. Check the Attic.

The Spokane County Interstate Fair opens today at the Fair & Expo Center on Havana Street and runs through September 20. Ten days of livestock barns, carnival rides, elephant ears, and the one weekend a year the whole county ends up in Spokane Valley at the same time.

Here's a thought to take with you past the midway: most of those carnival rides get torn down, inspected piece by piece, and rebuilt every single week. Your attic has not been inspected since the Reagan administration.

We're not saying skip the fair. We're saying that if your house was built before 1990, and most of Spokane County's housing was, there's a decent chance the attic is carrying something that deserves a look more than once a generation. Fair week is as good a reminder as any.

What's actually up there in a pre-1990 Spokane attic

Vermiculite. The big one. Loose, pebbly, silver-gold or gray-brown flakes that look like kitty litter. Sold by the truckload across the Inland Northwest as Zonolite from the 1940s into the 1980s, and most of it came from the Libby, Montana mine, which means most of it contains asbestos. It's often hiding under a layer of newer blown-in insulation, so you can't see it from the hatch. Older homes on the South Hill, in Hillyard, Millwood, Medical Lake, Cheney, and Deer Park, and the farmhouses from Rockford to Tekoa, are full of it.

Insulation that retired years ago. Cellulose settles and fiberglass compresses. What went in as R-38 in 1985 is working at about R-19 today, and your January Avista bill has been quietly paying the difference for years.

A bathroom fan that vents into the attic. Standard practice for decades, and the number one cause of the attic mold we remediate. Forty years of shower steam has to go somewhere.

Whatever the squirrels left. Four decades is a long time for an attic to go unvisited by anyone except wildlife.

And this year: wildfire smoke. If your home sat in the August smoke from the Old Trails, Autumn Lane, or Fairview fires, the insulation pulled it in through the vents. Older, thicker, settled insulation holds it just as well as new material does.

The part where the fair is cheaper than you think, and the attic is too

A day at the fair for a family of four, with rides and food, runs real money. Here's what the attic side costs by comparison:

The look? Cheap. An attic inspection takes about an hour: insulation type and depth, vermiculite check, moisture and mold check, smoke and rodent check, and photos of all of it. Book it at insulationspokane.com/inspections.

The vermiculite test? Free. The Zonolite Attic Insulation Trust tests up to three samples at no charge. We collect and package them as part of the inspection.

The removal? 55% off, courtesy of the company that sold it. If it is Zonolite, the ZAI Trust reimburses 55% of removal, containment, and related re-insulation costs, up to an annually adjusted cap of just under $5,000. That's a court-established trust fund, still paying claims, that most Spokane homeowners have never heard of. We write our estimates in the Trust's format and hand you a claim packet ready to submit.

The upgrade pays you back. Fresh Clean Fiber cellulose blown to R-49 or R-60, borate-treated and naturally resistant to mold, rodents, and fire, starts cutting the heating bill the first cold night. Financing is available, and utility rebates through Avista, Inland Power, Modern Electric, and Vera Water & Power can cover a share of the insulation work.

The fair-week attic checklist

You don't have to go up there yourself. In fact, if you suspect vermiculite, please don't. But from the hatch, with a flashlight, you can check five things in five minutes:

1. Can you see the ceiling joists sticking up through the insulation? That means it's too shallow.
2. Any pebbly, glittery, gray-gold material, on top or peeking through? Close the hatch and call us.
3. Dark staining on the underside of the roof sheathing? That's the mold conversation.
4. Tunnels, droppings, or chewed paper? The wildlife found it first.
5. Does the hatch area smell like smoke, must, or animals? Smells are data.

Any yes, or any "I can't tell," is worth the hour-long inspection.

While you're at the fair

Go ride the rides. Eat the elephant ear. Look at the prize hogs. And on the drive home down Havana, when you pass the neighborhoods of ramblers and split-levels built decades before the fairgrounds got their current grandstand, remember that every one of those attics is due for its once-a-generation checkup, including yours.

Book an attic inspection at insulationspokane.com/inspections or call (509) 879-0495. Selling or buying one of those pre-1990 homes? Same-day inspections through the Home Sale Hotline, (509) 351-2811.

Serving Spokane, Spokane Valley, Liberty Lake, Cheney, Airway Heights, Medical Lake, Mead, Colbert, Deer Park, Nine Mile Falls, Post Falls, and Coeur d'Alene.

Everything Attic. Except Bats. We're Terrified of Bats.

(The livestock barn is safe. Probably.)