Foundation | It's Great To Be Home

Flashback: Sub-Par Subfloors

April 21, 2009 By Liz - It's Great To Be Home 7 Comments

Once demo was complete on our house and we had salvaged the carpet to be used later, we got a bit of a nasty surprise. Our subfloors were sub-par.

In a perfect world, all subfloors should be made of plywood, which is strong, durable and made of a single piece of wood. Instead, our subfloors were made of particle board – not so great for a subfloor. Particle board is made of wood chips that are glued together and compressed – that means that a subfloor made of particle board will basically disintegrate if it gets wet – eek!!

Since we were putting down hardwood floors in a majority of the house, the particle board subfloors were an even bigger concern for us – as you all know, hardwood floors can get expensive and we didn’t want all of our money to go down the drain if our subfloor got wet. So, we sucked it up and sprung for new subfloors everywhere that we were installing wood floors or tile. We chose to keep the particle board in the areas that were staying carpeted (just three bedrooms) since these rooms were unlikely to get wet and carpeting would be relatively inexpensive to replace.

Once the decision had been made to replace the subfloors, the old particle board had to be chipped up – a nasty, messy job.

The black moisture barrier, a plastic tarp which is designed to keep moisture from the crawl space away from the subfloors, then had to be removed. Once that layer came up, we were greeted with a series of lovely holes where water damage had caused the plank subflooring to completely deteriorate in some places.

My favorite is the makeshift wooden bridge that we had to use for awhile to get from the den to the bedroom wing of the house – classy, right?

But, in the end, all of those holes were covered with brand new plywood, creating the perfect surface for our hardwood floors. Whew!!

Did you have any “sub-par” surprises in your home?

Flashback: Fun With Foundations

March 31, 2009 By Liz - It's Great To Be Home 9 Comments

Ever seen one of these before?

You’ve probably seen them about a million times but never noticed them. Don’t worry, I never knew what they were until we moved into our house. Turns out this little guy is a vent for our pier and beam foundation – who knew??

The whole point of foundation vents is to create air flow under your house. Basically, a pier and beam foundation is constructed over bare earth that tends to continuously produce small amounts of water. Without air circulation under the house, water vapor will accumulate over time and lead to mold, wood rot and a whole bunch of other fun problems. I got to learn all about this when we bought our house.

Our foundation had 8 foundation vents – sounds like a lot, right? Well, contrary to popular belief, 8 is NOT enough (pun intended). In fact, proper ventilation requires 1 square foot of vent for every 150 square feet of crawl space – that means that a house like ours with 2,600 square feet of crawl space needs about 17 vents! Our inspector told us that we didn’t have enough vents for proper cross-ventilation, so the first thing that we did after we bought the house (other than ripping down wallpaper) was install 6 new foundation vents (like the one pictured above, which faces out onto our covered patio). I know, I know – that only gives us 14 foundation vents and we’re supposed to have 17. We’re rebels, what can I say?

Unfortunately, some damage had already been done to the joists under our house before we added the new vents. Moisture had accumulated and caused wood rot on a number of the joists that support our floors, so some of the joists had to be replaced completely. While adding the new foundation vents will keep us from having any problems with moisture in the future, the inadequate number of foundation vents, and the fact that many of them had been covered with metal plates, proved to be a bad combo for our little house.

You might be asking if you read that right – a bunch of the vents were covered up with metal plates? Yep, that’s right – the prior homeowner had screwed metal plates onto the vents to keep cold air from getting under the house during the winter to keep her house a little warmer. Turns out that’s not an uncommon practice – if you look closely at the picture of the vent above you’ll notice a screw in the middle of the vent that can be used to attach a cover onto the vent. The jury is out on whether it’s ever a good idea to cover your foundation vents – some say it keeps your house warmer in the winter because cold air isn’t getting in the crawl space, but other experts say that it’s a bad idea to cover the vents because it encourages moisture and mold growth under your house. We are a little skittish from our joist-replacement experience and now err on the side of caution by keeping our vents open year round – we just wear socks in the winter to keep our tootsies warm.

How do you guys like your foundation vents – covered, uncovered? Don’t care? What’s your stance on wearing Christmas socks after the new year? Go ahead and comment – you know you want to!

Want to find out more about keeping your home dry and mold-free? Check out this great resource from HGTV.

There’s A Leak In The Crawl Space, Dear Liza

March 24, 2009 By Liz - It's Great To Be Home 8 Comments

Ahhhhhhhhhh, so excited to have had a good night’s sleep last night! Oh, where to begin. Things first went downhill about 8 days ago, when our hot water went out (I discovered this the hard way when I tried to take a shower – yikes!!). My hubby fiddled around with the water heater in the attic for awhile, and we were both puzzled when it looked like nothing was wrong with the water heater – the pilot light was on, so we should have been getting hot water. The recirculating pump was ok, too. How weird!

While we’re pondering the mystery of the cold shower, we notice a funky, musty smell in the laundry room. We decide that it’s probably our gutters backing up into the crawl space - we’ve been meaning to clean them out for some time (those suckers were seriously clogged!). Not great, but probably not a serious emergency, right?

It’s now Monday and hubby calls American Home Shield (our home warranty company) to send out a plumber to check out that pesky water heater (if it’s not the pilot light then the problem is over our heads) – they can’t send out a plumber until Tuesday, but no worries – we can put up with the minor inconvenience of showering at my parents’ house for another day, right?. We’re pretty psyched that we’re going to get this problem fixed (and our hot water back!) for just the $60 service call . . .

Until the plumber shows up on Tuesday and confirms our suspicion that there’s nothing actually wrong with the hot water heater. Instead, it turns out that there’s a ginormous leak in the crawl space under our house. Awesome.

Fast forward a few hours – we now have these huge, noisy monsters all over our house:

Let me explain. Apparently a hot water pipe that ran under our house sprung a leak back in the day and was patched with an old school patch that couldn’t stand the test of time – it sprung another leak on Sunday and was pumping out hot water into the crawl space under our house every time we turned on the hot water for a shower, to do laundry, or to run the dishwasher. After 3 days of this, we had INCHES of standing water in our crawl space that led to that funky, musty smell in the laundry room (the leak was right under the laundry room). All of that standing water had to be pumped out by a water removal company, the plumber patched the pipe, and dehumidifiers and fans were brought in to dry out the water-logged ground under the house. The water removal company put in 3 dehumidifiers (one for each crawl space and then an extra) and bunches of fans (both in the house and underneath). Those dehumidifiers are seriously noisy – they purge water into the sink through plastic hoses about every five minutes and it sounds like a chainsaw - we had one of these puppies right outside our bedroom door which led to a serious lack of sleep over the past week.

But hooray – the fans and dehumidifiers were finally removed yesterday morning, and we can finally sleep again!! So much for that $60 service call (let’s think somewhere in the thousands instead). Nice, right? But, it’s not all bad news. It turns out that we got the problem fixed just in the nick of time – any longer and the standing water might have damaged the joists supporting our house, our new subfloors, or our new wood floors. Yikes! That would have been WAY worse than the minor inconvenience of a few cold showers and some noisy dehumidifiers.

What minor distasters have you guys had in your house? Do tell, I’d like to commiserate!!