Do you think a lot about what is under your house? I know I am obsessed by it. Ask me anything and within a short amount of time I'll get around to talking about crawlspaces. That's why I was so shocked a few weeks ago when the pest control service we have a contract with said we had a couple of "leaking pipes."
Ah, no biggie. Just call the plumber..............and call another plumber.............and call another plumber...............and another........
Well, what we found is that plumbers on Whidbey Island either have heard about us and don't like us, or they have so much business that they just call people back at their leisure, or we live on Whidbey Island and everybody just kind of makes it up as they go along.
Finally got a plumber out who said.......he wouldn't work on the house because there was too much debris under it, including dead rats, etc.
What?
So, we contacted a company that cleans out and repairs crawlspaces. Did you know there were companies that specialize in this type of difficult work?
These are the photos from under the house. It had really deteriorated.
Yech. And I mean, YECH!
I knew it had been a couple of years since I had been under the house, and I could tell at that time that the insulation wasn't all that great, but I thought we had everything basically done. And we should have had it basically done. The guy who I contracted with 10 years ago to repair the house had put in insulation, etc., but now we see he had not done as good of a job on this as he did on the carpentry.
One thing he forgot to do was to hire a pest control service to close up all of the potential entry points. In the 10 years too much damage had been done. Mostly by rats, which are interesting creatures around here. They do tons of damage if you are not careful, but (and this is the weird thing, so cue creepy music) you never see them. Never. You see mice, voles, chipmunks, squirrels, etc., but never see rats.
I really don't like having to do something twice. If it's done right the first time you shouldn't have to. But we had to. It wasn't done right.
So, we hired an off-island company to completely redo the underside of the house. The first step was pulling out all of the old junk. A crew of five spent almost an entire day doing this:
Looked kind of empty and bare:
The next stage was to get a plumber out. We finally got one from Oak Harbor, 50 miles away. As we said, the ones closer to us must be flush with money because they just didn't call us back. (Note to people who live elsewhere----if you are a plumber come to South Whidbey and open a business!). We also had the local pest service (Surety Pest Control---a shout out to them because they were always reliable and on-time) come out two times and closed up holes where pests could come in.
The final stage was installing the new insulation:
This whole enterprise was not cheap. However, it was necessary. It illustrates the value of budgeting for the unexpected.
It is also worth noting that the nine or so men who worked on this project didn't speak English as their first language. It was hard work, and I didn't want to ask too many questions. They got paid, were willing to do it, and if any people who spoke English as a first language would have wanted to they could have. Not only that, anybody who spoke English as a first language could open this type of business on Whidbey Island. We had to contract with someone whose business was located several miles away.
We are pleased with the results. Our home is more secure, more solid, as a result.
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