On your belly! Crawl!

Crawlspace crawlspace crawlspace, crawlspace. Crawlspace? Crawlspace crawlspace!

Yep, we're still in there. And we'll be there a lot more in the weeks to come. Right now our project is to lay the vapor barrier down so that crawling in the crawly crawlspace won't be so creepy crawly as we go through the process of running all the pipes for our radiant heating.

Monday night, fresh from a trip to New York City that was really wonderful until 10pm on Sunday night somewhere north of Baltimore when we realized we'd somehow driven past all our dinner options and now everything was closed--this is another story, of course--we shook off our fatigue and put on the suits and crawled on in there.

It's a low-tech task, really. Huge roll of 6-mil black plastic (black instead of clear because, we were told, mushrooms might grow under the clear. Ew.). Scissors. Duct tape. Glue and caulking gun. John also brought in a crowbar and wrenched some pieces of wood off the old chimney that I couldn't get, way back in March, when I was working on the first phase of crawlspace-cleaning.

We thought we'd need two pieces to cover the rear crawlspace, but when we rolled it out to length and unfolded it width-wise, one length covered the distance pretty perfectly. Taped the end to the stuff we'd already laid under the bathroom, cut a slit for the sheet to go around the chimney, taped it again on the other side. It's already a big improvement, sliding around on this thick plastic rather than shuffling through the dust.

Now, how to attach this stuff to the foundation walls? Gluing didn't work too well for the bathroom stuff. The foundation is dusty. But we weren't prepared to deal with nails in the poured concrete (too tired; no nails). So we decided to try gluing again and see how it goes. Maybe a better glue will be the key. I glued one side, John glued the other, we crawled out and hoped for the best. We'll see how it does when it's dry.

It was almost dark. So the other half of the 'space will have to wait. Next time you hear from us we might have our radiant components in hand, all the plastic laid, and we'll be ready to start this heat project for realz.

- Erika