Crawl Space "Moisture" and Termites
WHAT is that?
Yeah, we had never seen such a thing either. THAT is water droplets hanging from one of the floor joist under the house. The floor joist are large pieces of wood that support the floor. Let me back up a bit. Part of this "process" in buying the house is the Buyers' (that's us) right to inspect the property. Only an idiot would buy a house, especially an older one, without having it looked at to see what they were getting into. In our particular situation, the Seller, a "company" or someone acting on behalf of whoever owns the house, is choosing to disclose basically NO information on the house. It just happened that the day I went to see the house with our Realtor, a local termite company was at the house and obviously treating the house for termites. (More on all this later) Now was that fate or what! Back to the water droplets.....On Monday, August 14th, we had our Home Inspection and Termite inspection done. Both of these inspectors reported very negative issues about all this moisture under the house in the crawl space.
I have to say that we both were really impressed with the inspections that we got. I chose both of these companies myself. The home inspection was done by Pillar to Post, a National Corporation with area Franchises. Our inspector David Mustgrave was wonderful to work with, very patient, helpful and knowledgeable. I have seen home inspection reports before and I feel I really got something for my money this time. (Unlike a very short, nondescript, "give 'em as little as you can get away with" letter I have recently seen from as LICENSED General Contractor....who also list himself as a 'Home Inspector"!) I knew I made the right decision there! I chose Wood Termite and Pest Control to do our termite inspection. Inspector Philip Maready was very thorough and was the first to tell me what I really didn't want to hear, but that was his job. He was all around the outside & inside, up in the attic, in the garage, and down in the crawl space. He came and talked to us when he had finished and explained what he had found.
2 comments:
Nice house but what is underneath it?
This house has only a crawl space under it which has the "hidden" parts of the house's systems such as plumbing, electrical, heating ducts etc. The crawl space allows access to these things for repair and maintenance. The base of the crawl space is just the ground that the house is built on. So in the picture you see the foundation of the house, with the cinder block pillars supporting the wood joist on top of them, which are the support for the floors. (That's a simple female's explaination as to WHAT is built there.)
The "moisture" is there because the house is sitting on top of the ground and in the way of the natural release of the ground's moisture. This house has 2 problems though. 1) It has only 5 vents for 1368 sq ft, and 2) Very bad drainage...ie gutters and other things. This means that there is not enough ventilation under the house to allow any moisture that condenses to dry, and the ground immediately around the house absorbs alot of mosture. These are the combination of reasons that the plastic moisture vapor alone won't work. It's like applying a bandaid to a massive wound.
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