Meet the Santa Clarita Team Behind Thistledown Insulation Santa Clarita
You’ll see the same faces from the first estimate to the final walk-through. That’s deliberate. Our crew lives here in the Santa Clarita Valley, shops at the same grocery stores, and drives the same stretches of Soledad Canyon Road and Bouquet Canyon Road that you do. We’ve built this team slowly since 2003, keeping people who treat attics the way they’d treat their own homes. What unites us is simple: we name what we’ll protect before the work starts, we write down the price before anything gets touched, and we clean up like it’s our own house. The people below are the ones who actually do that work.
Our People
Marcus T. – Lead Technician
Marcus has been with Thistledown for 14 years, longer than any other crew member. He grew up in Canyon Country and spent his early twenties doing rough framing, which means he understands how a house breathes from the inside out. He holds certifications for both Owens Corning and Johns Manville insulation systems and handles most of our spray foam jobs, where precision matters most. When he’s not in an attic, you’ll find him coaching his son’s baseball team at Newhall Park. Homeowners regularly mention that Marcus stopped to explain exactly what he was doing and why. That’s not an accident. It’s how he was trained, and it’s how he trains everyone else.
Elena R. – Senior Installer
Elena joined us eight years ago after working in high-end residential construction, and she brought an eye for finish work that most insulation crews don’t have. Her specialty is dense-pack and blown-in attic insulation in the older homes around Saugus and Valencia, where irregular joist spacing and odd attic geometry make every job different. She’s our go-to person for Knauf and Rockwool installs and is known for making the attic hatch area look cleaner than when she arrived. Outside of work, she keeps a vegetable garden that her two kids mostly ignore but happily eat from. She’s also the one who reminds the whole crew to label the breaker panel before we start so there’s zero confusion.
Devon K. – Service Coordinator
Devon is the voice you’ll hear when you call. He’s been answering phones for Thistledown for six years and has a stubborn habit of solving problems on the first call, which is why he asks a lot of questions about your attic access, your home’s age, and whether the space above the garage feels hotter than the rest of the house. He schedules every job, confirms by text and phone, and makes sure the crew knows about pets, kids, and any specific door or gate instructions before they ever pull into your driveway. Devon is a Saugus native and a punctuality enthusiast. The running joke in the shop is that he’s never once been late, not to a job, not to a meeting, not even to his own wedding rehearsal.
Andre W. – Installer Apprentice
Andre joined the crew two years ago through a local trade program and is working toward his insulation installer certification. He grew up in Palmdale and commuted to College of the Canyons before deciding he’d rather build his career with his hands than sit through another semester of Zoom classes. Marcus and Elena both train him, which means he’s learning two different installation philosophies at once: Marcus’s technical, measurement-first approach and Elena’s clean-finish, detail-obsessed approach. He runs the hose, keeps the job site organized, and is usually the one under the eaves in the tightest crawlspaces. Andre rides a mountain bike on the weekends and claims the hills around Castaic are underrated. We’ve told him to stop suggesting team rides when the temperature hits triple digits.
One Standard, Every Job
Every Thistledown location operates as an independently owned Cedarwell-family company, which means we share standards without being a chain. The Cedarwell Care Promise is what ties our crews together: we lay drop cloths across your hallway and wear shoe covers from the front door to the attic hatch, we ask before we move or touch anything that isn’t part of the job, we respect quiet hours when kids or babies are napping, and we explain the price before the work begins. Marcus, Elena, Devon, and Andre all know that shoe covers and a written estimate are not extras. They’re the baseline. And before anyone leaves your home, someone takes a photo of the clean-up. You get that photo. It’s not a bonus. It’s how we prove the promise.
We choose insulation from eight brand lines, Owens Corning, Johns Manville, Knauf, Rockwool, CertainTeed, Icynene, Demilec, and GreenFiber, so the right product gets matched to each attic and each family. Where a choice exists, we select pet-safe options so the dog can stay home during the job. And every job, no matter how small, carries the 365-Day Done Right Promise. If it’s not done right, we make it right. No debate. No fine print.
Thistledown is the soft fluff of the thistle, one of nature’s lightest insulators. The name is a promise about how carefully we work. The people above are the ones who keep that promise in every attic we touch across Santa Clarita, Valencia, Saugus, Canyon Country, Newhall, and Castaic.
Written by Neil Barron, Owner at Thistledown Insulation Santa Clarita, serving Santa Clarita since 2003.