Crawl Space Safe?
Am I insane to want to get into my brownstone’s crawl space? I want to see if the insulation company I hired did the correct job of installing blown-in insulation and also want to inspect the wood in there for water damage and/or rot problems. Does anyone have any suggestions for SAFE ways for me…
Am I insane to want to get into my brownstone’s crawl space? I want to see if the insulation company I hired did the correct job of installing blown-in insulation and also want to inspect the wood in there for water damage and/or rot problems.
Does anyone have any suggestions for SAFE ways for me to get in there?
Or maybe I should send in a trained monkey with a camera strapped to its head?
Thanks so much, Bob, this is good to know. I wouldn’t be surprised if they did dislodge some of the plaster….it seems these little side effects happen more often than not, unfortunately.
I ventured there but only 5 yards or so. If you really curious: arrach video camera to R/C truck and drive it around.
mopar,
They were supposed to only step on the joists, but I suspect they also stepped, or maybe just leaned on the wood lath while crawling around up there. I hope the guys working in your house were more careful.
We put up with expanding ceiling cracks over our bed for years, which was REALLY dumb. When we finally had a tin ceiling installed in that room a couple of years ago a large chunk of ceiling (and the plaster medallion) fell right after I took down the light fixture. The fixture’s wide brass pan, attached to a gas pipe, had been keeping the ceiling up. I’m lucky that it didn’t fall until I was down off the ladder. I could have been killed. We also could have been killed had it fallen while we were in bed. Good thing the pan and gas pipe were strong! All we had a lot of last minute cleaning up to do before the tin ceiling installers arrived. Interestingly the medallion survived intact, so I’ll eventually use it elsewhere. Otherwise, I’d have had it covered up with the tin.
Bob, they stepped only on the joists, right? How did they break the plaster keys? We just had electricians in our attic — I hope they didn’t do anything to the plaster.
Have you ever had Point Beer???
When not entertaining the neighborhood kids as Pogo the Clown, Gacy worked as a building contractor. DIBS lived in Milwaukee at the time, but we got Dahl.
IMBY, I was living in Chicago when Gacy was up to no good. Ever heard of Steve Dahl’s (shock radio jockey) version of “The Wall?” about gacy???
“All in all it’s just another kid in the crawl.”
BHS,
I don’t know if most houses have access. My house SORT OF has access to the cock loft. In the closet where there’s a ladder leading to the roof hatch there’s a sheet metal plate. The plate covers a hole punched in the plaster (by a previous owner). If you remove the nailed on plate you can get into the cock loft. You can almost stand in the front, but it goes down to about a two foot height in the rear. The guys who blew in cellulose insulation 30+ years ago discovered it and crawled in with their insulation-blowing hose. It saved them some work, at the cost of damaging my front bedroom ceiling. Since they only broke plaster keys, the damage wasn’t apparent for a long time.
Everyone knows that a ‘crawl space’ is where you hide the bodies of young runaway boys.
I would think there were more midwestern transplants reading this forum.