How Topside Attic Insulation Was Born
In 2016, Wes Okafor was running blower-door tests across Chicago and the surrounding suburbs, and he kept seeing the same thing. Homeowners would pay thousands for new attic insulation, then call him a year later because their upstairs was still freezing. His blower-door numbers told the story every time: air moving through unsealed top plates, around can lights, past plumbing chases. The insulation was there. It just wasn’t doing anything.
The breaking point came on a job in a brick bungalow on the northwest side. The homeowner showed Wes a receipt for a full attic insulation install from another company. Six months old. Attic was full, but the thermal camera showed heat streaming out of the ceiling like the insulation wasn’t even there. He ran the blower door and found the attic floor was swiss cheese of unsealed penetrations. The previous crew had simply blown insulation over the problem. Wes spent the afternoon sealing, then re-tested. The numbers improved by more than half. He showed the homeowner the before and after readings side by side, and she just sat down and put her head in her hands. She’d paid for work that never addressed the actual problem.
That day he made a decision. Nobody should pay for insulation that can’t perform because someone skipped the sealing step. Topside Attic Insulation started with a simple rule: seal first, then insulate. In that order. And document everything so the customer can see what they bought. The company has since grown to locations across the country, but that founding rule still drives every job.
Wes Okafor’s Personal Connection to the Insulation Trade
Wes didn’t grow up dreaming about insulation. He grew up in a drafty house, and he remembers exactly what it felt like. The living room was warm, but the hallway leading to the bedrooms dropped ten degrees in the winter. His mother would hang a blanket over the hallway opening to keep the heat in the front of the house. Every night, same routine. He’d watch her tuck the edges of the blanket under books and think it was normal that half the house was cold.
Years later, when he started doing blower-door work, he walked into his first hundred attics and realized how many people still live like that. They just pay more for it now. He’d crawl into an attic in July, and the heat would hit him like a wall. The air smelled like old wood and fiberglass and sometimes mouse droppings. He’d find insulation compressed under storage boxes, pulled back around bathroom fans, missing entirely over bay windows. And every time, he’d think about that blanket in the hallway.
What gets him out of bed is the test. The blower door doesn’t care about feelings or sales pitches. It measures air leakage, and the number either improves or it doesn’t. You can’t argue with it. Wes has spent more than ten years in this trade, and he still gets satisfaction from watching a homeowner see their before and after numbers for the first time. If he weren’t doing this, he’d probably still be running diagnostics on something. He likes systems that make sense, and he likes showing people evidence that their money did what it was supposed to do.
Meet Wes Okafor - The Person Behind Every Job
Wes Okafor is the Owner & Founder of Topside Attic Insulation He started in energy auditing, running blower-door tests and thermal imaging for homeowners who wanted to know why their energy bills kept climbing. That work taught him to read a house the way a doctor reads a patient: symptoms first, then diagnosis, then treatment. He brought that diagnostic mindset into insulation, where he found an industry that often skipped straight to treatment without ever looking for the cause.
Wes is state-licensed and holds the insulation and energy auditor credentials required for the work he oversees. But what sets him apart from a corporate franchise technician isn’t a certificate on the wall. It’s that he genuinely enjoys explaining how a house works to the person who lives in it. He keeps a mental library of every house he’s ever tested, and he can tell you which neighborhoods tend to have unsealed rim joists and which builders used cheap duct sealing. He’s the kind of person who will sketch a diagram on a notepad to show you where your air is leaking. His commitment is simple: every customer gets the truth about their house, in writing, before anyone asks them for a dollar.
Our Promise to Homeowners
We work under a set of standards we call the Haven Standard, and every promise in it is specific enough to hold us to.
Have it in writing. Clause 1 of the Haven Standard means you get a flat price, a written scope of work, and a written warranty before anyone starts. No verbal estimates that change later. No “we’ll see what we find.” If it’s not on paper, it’s not a promise.
Evidence on every job. We photograph what we find and record the readings before and after. When we leave, you get documentation of what was actually done. Not a summary. A record.
No surprises. No door-to-door upsells, no scope creep, no “while we’re in here” additions. The price we quote is the price you pay. That’s been our policy since the day Wes watched that homeowner in Chicago realize she’d paid for nothing.
Our Credentials
Every Topside Attic Insulation location operates under the same requirements:
- State-licensed. Every pro working under our name is required to hold the license their state requires for insulation work. We don’t ask you to take our word for it; the license number goes on the page.
- Insured and bonded. Every location carries the insurance and bonding its state requires for residential work.
- Background-checked crews. Verified before they ever set foot in your home.
- Documented experience. Since 2016, locations operating under the Topside name have sealed and insulated homes across multiple states, with a written record left behind on every job.
Why these matter: insulation work happens in the parts of your house you’ll never see. You’re trusting a stranger to work above your ceiling and inside your walls. The license means they’re accountable to a state board. The insurance means you’re protected if something goes wrong. The documentation means you can verify the work was done as promised. We think you should expect all three, and we build our hiring requirements around that expectation.
Rooted in the Communities We Serve
Topside Attic Insulation has locations serving homeowners across Chicago, Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, Indianapolis, Charlotte, Atlanta, Miami, Minneapolis, Arlington, Cleveland, and Plano. Each location is independently owned and operated, staffed by local crews who know the building styles and weather patterns of their region. What unites every location is the standard they agree to work to: the Haven Standard, with its written pricing, verified crews, and documented results. Wes started this company in Chicago, but the mission was never about one city. It’s about every homeowner who deserves to know what they’re paying for.
Written by Wes Okafor, Owner & Founder at Topside Attic Insulation, serving homeowners since 2016.