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I spent a fair part of the afternoon today on my knees, or on my hands and knees, trying to fix a mold problem that seemed to be originating from the crawl space under our cabin. We’ve been dealing with an increasing amount of mold smell in the house this fall, and it recently occurred to us that the mold might be coming up from the crawl space.
The crawl space is enclosed in the same kind of corrugated sheet metal that was used as siding on the cabin. Corrugated metal roofs are a dime a dozen in the South. Sheet metal is cheaper than shingles and can be put up a whole lot faster. It’s cheap, it’s durable, and it keeps the rain out. Metal siding is not as common as metal roofing for residential spaces, but it is a thing. Whether it’s a good thing, I’m not so sure. But the couple who built the cabin we’re living in were young, broke, about to be married, and needing a place to be alone with each other. So, metal siding.
Metal siding is definitely not ideal in an off-grid situation. It heats up fast and cools down fast. It sweats and collects condensation. In a humid climate like this one, that can be problematic. I remember when we first moved to Tennessee, we kept seeing billboards asking “Moldy Crawl Space?” and advertising mold remediation solutions. Tatiana and I were both struck by how many billboards were advertising to the same pain point. “There must be a lot of moldy crawl spaces here,” we laughed.
We noticed a little bit of mold in early autumn last year, but as soon as the weather got cold and we started firing up the wood stove, the mold smell disappeared. We’re both sensitive to mold, so we took note. But the smell went away so quickly and stayed away so completely that we figured it was just a passing thing.
Last winter we had decided to insulate the crawl space with bubble foil to try to keep the pipes from freezing. We’d spent a long, uncomfortable afternoon crawling around in the dirt under the floor joists installing that insulation. Maybe it had helped a little with keeping the pipes from freezing? Maybe not.
But, spring eventually came, the pipes stopped freezing, the weather got warmer, and it started raining. And it kept raining. And when it wasn’t raining, the skies were gray and low and the air was still and humid and then it rained some more and then it stayed humid and…as we went deeper and deeper into one of the wettest, most humid summers in Tennessee history, we totally forgot that we had insulated the crawl space and that insulating the crawl space might lead us directly into the situation advertised on those billboards we’d laughed at.
D’oh!
So today, after waking up with sinus congestion and some tightness of breath, we decided something had to be done. Tatiana looked up universal building codes on crawl spaces and found, to our complete lack of surprise, that the crawl space we had inherited ticked exactly zero of the boxes of what should be done to keep your crawl space clean and free of mold.
One of the things we learned is that crawl spaces must be ventilated on all four sides of the house; out of all the missing regulatory compliance items, this seemed like the first one to address.
One side of the crawl space already had a large vent in the form of a moveable piece of sheet metal that served as ‘the door’ to the crawl space. We had kept this opening blocked off in order to keep the dog — and other small mammals often known as “rats” or “possums” — from exploring (or living) under the house. But if we could find something solid enough and vented enough…
Tatiana pointed to the gate we had built and installed on one side of the yard when we were putting up the fence just before we moved out to the farm.
We had put this little gate in on the low side of the yard thinking we’d use it to go down to the Piney Creek. But we never ended up using it and it had slowly become submerged in about two feet of sand. The sand was carried by the rains from the dirt ‘road’ that leads to the cabin along a drainage canal I’d dug in front of the house during the spring rains last year and deposited against the wood frame of the gate. (The romantic in me sees this ever-spreading deposit of sand as a miniature Mississippi Delta, in my own yard.)
“We’ve never used that gate,” she said.
“It’s perfect,” I replied.
I dug out the gate, replaced it with a spare piece of fencing, and then replaced the sheet metal “door” to the crawl space with a nice, ventilated door.
Voila! Vent number one installed.
Next, I got out the tin snips and leather gloves and spent a couple hours on my knees cutting vents in the siding on the other three corners of the house. I don’t love cutting sheet metal even when it’s not attached tightly to more sheet metal, but I stayed with it and cut rectangular openings in the siding on the remaining three sides of the house with only the very slightest amount of blood spilled.
I then cut matching rectangles from a roll of hardware cloth (also dangerous and gnarly to work with), spray-painted them black to match the siding, and fastened the hardware cloth to the siding with metal roofing screws.
Before attaching the hardware cloth, I needed to cut away some of the bubble foil insulation so the air could actually move through the new vents.
As I was reaching through the first ventilation hole to cut a corresponding hole in the bubble foil insulation, I was greeted by a warm, moldy breeze. And I saw mold growing on the side of the bubble foil closest to the metal siding.
That’s when it hit me: I needed to pull all of that bubble foil insulation out. Now.
In her research on crawl space best practices earlier this morning, Tatiana had informed me that all the experts agreed you should wear a respirator and gloves when tackling a moldy crawl space, if not a full respirator face mask and Tyvek suit.
I don’t have either of the latter, but I do own a respirator that I bought a couple years ago when I was making a lot of orgone devices. So I went back to the shop where some of our stuff that can’t fit in the cabin or the shed is still stored, and dug through some totes looking for the respirator. I finally found it in a cardboard box marked “Orgone, mask, dixie cups.”
I had left a couple of old shirts that I was using as rags when mixing the resin for the orgone devices in the box. Both shirts had been turned into mouse nests and were full of mouse poop and other detritus. I took the shirts out of the box, shook out the debris, then dug deeper to find the respirator. Which, to my great relief, had been stored with the mouth piece facing down and had no mouse droppings in it.
After a thorough inspection I donned the respirator, pulled on a pair of construction gloves, and crawled under the house, pulling out all of the bubble foil — and finding a large, moldy puddle on a folded sheet of insulation right beneath one of the places in the house where we’d noticed a strong mold smell. It was a promising start to my remediation efforts.
Tatiana was waiting outside when I emerged from the crawl space a half hour later. I remarked that I had forgotten just how awkward it was to breathe through a respirator. The inside of the respirator mouthpiece was soaked with sweat and condensation, my neck was itching where the straps dug into my skin, and I felt a little lightheaded.
“I can’t believe I worked a job where I had to wear one of these for 12 hours a day, seven days a week,” I gasped.
“What job was that?”
“It was that job on the Alaska oil pipeline,” I said. “I took a picture of ‘the hole’ — this circle cut into this enormous oil tank that was the only way in and the only way out of the tank. For years after that summer in Alaska, I would pin that picture of 'the hole’ up in my cubicle at every job I had, just to remind me that no matter how boring my job was and no matter how much I didn’t want to be there, it was nowhere near as bad as that pipeline job.”
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Hey, thanks for reading! I just got back from a trip to Atlanta to spend time with my son and I’m feeling a little woozy from my mold remediation efforts today, so I hope this intro hangs together well enough to justify your decision to click the link or open the email.
Next stop — Valdez, Alaska, four years after the Exxon Valdez oil spill.