No word of a lie, I am THIS close to becoming a hobbit-like anti-social Howard Hughes troglodytic crawlspace dweller that descends the basement steps in the dark and ascends, filthy and abnormally bent, once night has fallen. No, I think I do hobbits an injustice. They’re much more social than I am these days, not to mention cleaner.
But I could ignore the crawlspace below the family room no longer, with its dirt floor, mummified spiders, mouse poop and who-knows-what-else half disguised by poorly installed sheets of 6 mil, mangy batts of fibreglass pink and some of the most head-scratching improvised framing known to man. I was frustrated by what I found above the floor so I wasn’t expecting much from below.
I kit up with a respirator and head-to-toe coverage, having to forgo the safety glasses because of fogging issues. I stand in the cold and drafty subterranean walkway between the main house and carriage house where I will spend the my next chunk of time. Where to start, where to start, I ponder, invoking some saintly guidance. St. Francis of Assisi said: “Start by doing what’s necessary; then do what’s possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible.”
Utility knife in one hand and crowbar in the other I tear and rip and put aside what is salvageable. I feel the burn of the pink on my exposed cheeks and know that by the end of the day my entire face will be prickly hot. Damn, I don’t like that stuff.
It is ugly, but I find nothing dead. There’s an old sterling silver dinner knife, beer cans and liquor bottles, a piece of old china, bricks and cut stone. I vacuum the floor joists and the stone walls and plumb the breadth and depth of the rubble foundation. I toss the garbage, hump the stones to my snow-covered cairn, and rake the powdery dirt. I need a high degree of tidy to sort out the possible from the impossible.
First, the rude facts. A new floor had been installed over the old pine t&g but there is a gap that ranges from two inches to nearly six from one end to the other. Not that big of a deal if the floor was continuous and I could blow cellulose, but the old floor of the west wall was filleted twenty four inches out, floor joists and all. The crawlspace air flows freely under the new floor, rendering it chilly to the barefoot. The north end has been unceremoniously chopped as well, for reasons I can’t ascertain. Although the structure is balloon-framed, the new “joists” were laid atop some new framing a la platform. And that lower framing doesn’t appear to match up exactly with the upper wall that rests on top of the new floor. The south wall is filled with original studs, a few of which turned to powder at a touch, interspersed with new “studs” which rate the quotation marks they’re contained within. There are, of course, no sill gaskets and the untreated studs perch directly on the gappy rubble foundation. An external deck was attached with no regard for proper flashing, drainage or fundamental siding practices and so that cavity has relentlessly welcomed many years of weather. This poor, sad wall, without a doubt, will need to be completely reframed. The external door, a plywood sheet with 2” of rigid foam bearing raccoon claw marks, is ugly and the largest single source of air leakage in the house. But at least the problem is obvious and easily remediated. And then there is the additional framing and “supports” that make me crazy.
On the plus side, the old flooring looks to be in perfect shape, save its untimely amputation and the original 22‘ full-size 2×6 floor joists are gorgeous. The space itself is bone dry. Maybe I should be thankful, too, that despite being a dog’s breakfast the structure doesn’t even so much as squeak. It is going nowhere soon.
But with such disarray, how on earth will I ever manage a continuous air barrier and effective r-values? How I crave to disassemble the whole crummy kit and kaboodle right then and there! I tuck my Sawzall safely out of sight and go upstairs for tea and saintly intercessions.
“Do what is possible,” I chant to myself as I descend the stairs once again. I can air seal and insulate the space and rebuild the door. I can toenail faux floor joists where the deeper ones have been cut to create a cavity for batt insulation. I can 6 mil and seal the dirt floor to the walls. I can prep the dirt floor walkway for an insulated slab. At some point I accept that it will be an exercise in making the space incrementally better, with an eye to material reuse, not in making it perfect. I remind myself that every project is subject to some kind of constraints.
But while I’m busy working the possible I will be dreaming about disassembling it sometime in the future and doing what is currently impossible: making the entire carriage house, in conjunction with the main house, super-energy efficient.
The drawings and energy modelling start next week.