Crawl space vapor barrier in Clarksville TN - ground moisture kept off your floors

Most people call because of a smell in the hall closet, floors that feel cold and clammy, or a home inspector's note about torn plastic. The price moves with the square footage, how much room there is to work, whether old plastic and junk have to come out first, and whether the job grows to include drainage fixes, sealed vents or crawl space insulation. The schedule turns on the same things, plus any outside drainage work that should be done before the plastic goes down, and I'll give you your own number once I've been under the house.

I start by crawling the whole space, looking for standing water, wet wood, old plastic that's torn or bunched up, and anything that's been living down there. Then I walk the outside, because plastic on the dirt won't do much if water's running in from a yard that slopes toward the house, a gutter dumping at the foundation or a sprinkler aimed at the wall. Once that's settled, we talk about whether your vents should stay open or the space should be closed up, since that changes how the sheet goes in. Our crew clears out the old material and debris, lays the new sheeting with the seams overlapped so there's no open path between pieces, holds it down at the edges or runs it up the walls and piers, and hauls everything out when we're done.

Some jobs reach past the crawl space. If you've got a damp basement wall or another spot where moisture needs stopping, that's our vapor barrier installation work. A house also pulls air in at the bottom and lets it out at the top, so attic air sealing cuts down how much crawl space air gets drawn up through your floors, which matters because the attic is usually the draftiest room nobody lives in.

Which office you deal with depends on your address. Inside city limits, the City of Clarksville Construction Division issues building permits and follows a project through to the end, and if you're outside any city, Montgomery County Building and Codes issues them instead. Whether a vapor barrier on its own needs a permit is something we confirm with that office for your house, so before we start I find out which one you fall under and what it wants, and when a permit is needed for our part we take care of it. If you'd rather pull a residential permit yourself as your own contractor, the city requires a notarized Homeowner Affidavit, and if drainage or other work belongs to another trade, I'll tell you so.

The crawl spaces we see around here tend to share the same trouble, with older vented spaces, plastic that's torn or slid off the dirt, and gutters or flower beds sending water back toward the foundation. We handle it the same way on jobs in Oak Grove and Pleasant View, water first and plastic second.