Ashford has been a Houston County railroad town since 1889, and its houses and farm buildings sit in some of the wettest air in Alabama. We seal both.
Ashford sits east of Dothan with U.S. 84 running just south of town, tied to it by County Road 55. The area was settled by 1830 as part of old Henry County, the rail line arrived in 1889, and the town incorporated in June 1891 with roughly 300 residents. It even made a bid to be the seat of Houston County when the county was created in 1903, losing out to the bigger city up the road. The restored Alabama Midland Railroad depot downtown is on the National Register of Historic Places, which tells you how long this town has been standing.
Timber and a turpentine works carried Ashford early on, then the economy shifted to farming, cotton gins, and a fertilizer plant. That history is why the town still has a mix of in-town houses, farmsteads, and working outbuildings, and it shapes the spray foam work we get asked to do here.
Houston County lies in the Coastal Plain on sandy, shallow soils, and the Dothan Regional Airport station records roughly 54 inches of rain a year in the 1991-2020 normals, with July nights averaging about 73 degrees. Air that warm and that wet, pulled through foundation vents, condenses on the cooler joists and subfloor under a house instead of drying anything out. The Department of Energy's Building America program found that vented crawl spaces in humid climates have experienced serious moisture and mold problems for exactly this reason.
If you've got a musty smell that shows up in July, fiberglass batts hanging loose between the floor joists, or a floor that feels soft near the bathroom, that's the crawl space talking. Crawl space encapsulation closes the vents, foams the foundation walls with closed-cell, lays a heavy ground barrier, and turns the space into part of the conditioned house. The DOE puts the payoff at up to 20 percent in heating and cooling energy on top of the moisture fix.
The Wiregrass grows roughly a quarter of the nation's peanuts, and the farms around Ashford keep pickers, tractors, and dried crop under metal roofs. A bare steel roof cools below the dew point on a humid night and rains condensation onto whatever is parked beneath it. Metal building insulation with closed-cell spray foam bonds to the underside of the panels, stops the condensation at the surface, and stiffens the skin of the building at the same time. We foam shops, equipment sheds, and hay barns and size the thickness to how the building gets used.
July highs at the airport station average about 93 degrees, and an Ashford attic under a dark shingle roof runs far hotter than the air outside. Moving the insulation to the roof deck with open-cell foam brings the ductwork inside the conditioned envelope, which matters because so many Wiregrass homes run the air handler up there. EPA estimates an average 15 percent savings on heating and cooling from air sealing and insulating attics and floors over crawl spaces. Our attic insulation page walks through when foam makes sense and when a simpler top-up does.
Tell us what you're seeing: the smell under the house, the shop that drips in April, the back bedroom that never cools off. We'll come out to Ashford, look at the actual crawl space, attic, or building, and write up a quote that names the foam, the thickness, and the square footage so you can compare it against anyone else's. Call (334) 466-1193 or use the form on this page, and we'll call you back to set up a visit.
Every climate, code, and efficiency figure on this page traces to a public, authoritative source. We do not publish statistics we cannot cite.
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