Bye, Bye, Mold!

I should have done this years ago!

My house has always had a musty smell to it.  And I always knew it came from the crawlspace.  How?  Well, when you opened up the crawlspace, you smelled the smell, only worse!  And after a good rain, the house just permeated with a musty smell.

The old vapor barrier.  Dirty and moldy.

It was in pretty rough shape.

Time to rip it out!

So it came as no surprise to me that the vapor barrier that I pulled up...well, smelled.  But what DID surprise me was how much it smelled!  I quickly realized I needed help this evening, so I called Mom and asked for her help in stuffing the barrier into trash bags upstairs while I fed them to her.

Pulling all of the vapor barrier up was fairly easy...just grab and pull.  But getting it out of the crawl was a chore.  It took Mom and me about an hour to cut it up, stuff it into trash bags, and carry it to the garage.  And, wow, what a mess!

I laid down an old bedsheet to protect the carpet, but even then we had a mess!

I mean, I had mold spores everywhere just floating in the air.  I was wearing a face mask, but my throat was still struggling!

This stuff was just gross!  Damp and covered in mud and mold!

Yes, this should have been done years ago!  I was removing the smell for good!

This will set me up for tomorrow when I plan on digging the sump pump to a recommended depth.  So it was a great day...a day of removing years and years' worth of smelly, musty, plastic!

The old vapor barrier is gone!  Look at that damp crawlspace!

And we also pulled out over a hundred feet of cable that was just going every which way in the crawlspace.  A good day indeed.  Thanks, Ma!