Crawl Space Excursion

Last weekend I went on an investigative trip under my house to see if I could figure out why my kitchen is always the coldest room in the house*, and why, if I put my face down near the floor in front of my washer/dryer that there is enough breeze to blow my hair back.

Last year in a fit of desperation I put Gorilla Tape all along the bottom of my baseboards where they met the floor (just in the laundry area, you can't see ii I swear!)  It helped a tiny bit but not enough.  With the washer/dryer pulled out I simply cannot see any big holes that would account for the draftiness.

So under the house I went.  I knew that at some point before my time someone had reconfigured the back of the house mostly because when I tore down the old wooden deck it revealed a set of concrete stairs 5 feet to the right of where my back doors are -- and when I looked closely at the brick above them I could see that there used to be a door there and it had been bricked in.  

Here is a post with a photo of the old deck.  So to the right of the doggie door and to the left of the electrical meter is where the old door was.. http://my1929tudor.blogspot.com/2010/12/foundation-to-build-upon.html

(This renovation also explained how a 1929 house had a doggie door within the brick wall -- I am pretty sure doggie doors with metal sides and sliding doors didn't exist in 1929...)  Anyway, the view under the house also confirmed the reconfiguration, although it didn't shed any light on the specifics.

Last week I went to the Dallas Public Library to get a copy of the original house plans -- multiple sources had told me they were on file there -- they are not -- and the librarian said she wished she knew who had started that rumor -- but I did find other information about Nettie and her family which is just SO interesting -- but alas, another post!

I could see that while the sub floor in the rest of the house was diagonal planking, the area under the laundry area was simply plywood.  And it was clear that some re-jiggering had been done before me -- and sort of rigged.  And I found a huge hole where the electrical for the dryer ran up from under the crawl space up into the wall, and I could see all the way up, through the wall, to what I  believe was the ceiling!  My light wasn't strong enough to reach all the way up, so who knows if it went to the ceiling or all the way into the attic.  Um yes, hello drafty...

Fast forward to yesterday... Red and I went to  Home Depot and bought some R 5.0 rated foam insulation in a 4'x8' sheet.  (As it turned out we should have bought 2.)  We were able to cut it and fill 2 full "bays" -- we put it up against the sub floor and tacked it up with blocks of wood on the sides of the joists.  Red also stuffed some regular pink rolled insulation up into the opening that the electrical runs through and we blocked another similar hole nearby.

I also have an area of hardwood floor right inside my back door that has a little too much give in it when you walk on it.  I measured inside the house to pin point where that area was, and then did the same measurement down under the house and discovered that the sub floor had been cut off (where the plywood began) and that the ends of those sub floor planks weren't supported.  We added a 2"x6" on its edge with hangers between the joists to support that.  It helped some, but taking a closer look at the floor from up in the kitchen, the hardwood floor boards aren't properly attached to the sub floor.  It is an area that is maybe 6-8 planks and it's maybe 1-2 feet lengthwise.  (For now I'm not doing anything about that, now that I know it isn't a structural issue.)

I took my phone down with me, intending to take photos (and I won't lie, I wanted a form of communication in the unlikely event I somehow got locked in down there.  Irrational.  Whatever.) but it was in a zippered pocket under my zippered zoot suit, and I never did retrieve it to capture the moment.  Here is one photo that I took last week on my investigative mission -- it shows a split in one of the sub floor planks.

I have a few others too, but it's difficult to tell what they are out of context so I won't torture you with them...

I also discovered that the pipe that leads up to my front of the house water spigot must have a leak in it.  The dirt around it is damp...The good news is, all but about 2 feet of the pipe is already above ground and exposed so I don't have a ton of unearthing to do.  And the part that is underground is not very far underground.  And, it isn't a gusher leak -- the area isn't muddy, just damp -- but I do need to take care of that.

We are both sore today -- lots of duck walking while carrying things, lots of sitting on piles of rocks and brick and then working overhead.  I will see next time it gets cold here if it's improved, but it seems like it will have to be.  Maybe when I am doing there doing that I will also pile up the broken bricks and larger rocks to the middle area, away from the perimeter which is the path of travel... And this time when I go I will definitely wear a breathing mask in addition to the Tyvek zoot suit.  It's super dusty down there.  (But bug free, which is the most important thing of all in my book.)

*  Another thing to check off on my 2012 Manifesto!  Yay me!

August 16th: Vents -- those breezy little things near the floor

The house is on a pier and beam foundation. And the crawl space is generous, I'm told, at least on the one side of the house where the slope is greater. Many things are under the house -- I'm positive none of them are creepy (although at this very moment I have the crawl space door unlocked and open because I fear I might have an angry skunk trapped under my house... it's... aromatic.) At any rate, one of the things under the house is the HVAC system and all the ductwork. No basements here.

Anyway as a result, my HVAC vents are not up on the walls near the ceilings like newer homes. Not a big issue, really, except that I've discovered that furniture arrangement requires a bit of forethought so that you don't completely block airflow. (A stroke of luck put the wine rack directly over the floor vent -- it's divine how the A/C blows gently on all my bottles of wine! Equal to the beauty of that is the horror that in the winter that same vent will blow heat on my bottles of wine... hmm...)

Anyway, because the baseboards were painted white, so were the metal air vents. I used a heat gun (what a great invention!) and a putty knife, and scraped off the many layers of many colors of paint. It went pretty fast. I sanded down the rough spots, and bought some spray paint in sort of metallic bronzy color to blend in with the new baseboards. I re-installed two. Yes, just two. The other 4 languished on my back stoop for weeks. Other projects came and went, but my 10x6" gaping holes in my baseboards remained. I ran out of spray paint... having not written down the name of the color, when I bought a new can I bought the wrong color. The vents were just the albatross around my neck for no particular reason.

Then I was talking with a neighbor about the possibility that I had birds in my chimney. She told me that since we used to have floor furnaces (exactly what those are isn't totally clear to me) that we have these metal tube chimneys that run from our crawl space up through the roof. I indeed have two of those in closets. She told me until she got hers covered with wire mesh on the roof (there is an asbestos issues to remove them I'm told, so lots of people just work around them) that she had an issue with raccoons. As in, raccoons falling down the tube and ending up in the ductwork under the house. Comical no?

Yes, I thought it was comical too, until I realized that quite possibly those ducts were connected to the current HVAC system, which -- are you ahead of me? -- yes, which open up into those gaping 10x6" holes in my baseboards! All I could envision was a little bandit peering out at me from the baseboards one evening while reclining and watching my favorite episode of Bones. Moments of panic ensued.

But... they passed. Somehow I managed to rationalize that that chain of events simply could not be strung together, and that there was nothing to worry about. The vents languished for a few more weeks. And this past weekend? Finally, the vent painting was completed, and some of the vents were even marginally modified for better airflow, and put in place. Sorry to be anti-climatic -- no raccoons scurried into my living space. They still have a chance though -- if they saw a piece of tin foil they just had to have, they could probably bully their way in -- the vents aren't affixed with screws -- the baseboards are holding them up quite nicely.