About a week ago we got the first solid rain of the season. This was good in the sense of "it's nice to see water again," but less than ideal in that I still get some moisture issues in my crawl space.
I'm pretty sure that the flooding won't recur, but when the dirt in the crawl space gets a little bit damp (which it still does) it gives off a pretty musty odour. I don't really make a habit of sticking my nose down in my crawl space, so for the most part this isn't a big issue, but unfortunately there's one or two places where the smell can seep up into the rest of the house.
The major place it comes in is through the bathrooms. The two bathrooms are separated, back to back, by a wet wall. This is basically an extra-wide wall with a gap between, making room for all the plumbing and whatnot that needs to fit in that space. However, all that space, combined with the necessary holes along the bottom that the plumbing goes through, means they quite often end up essentially open to the crawl space. Thus we get musty crawl space air inside that wall. And, naturally, that wall itself is far from airtight due to all the plumbing poking through the drywall to reach the various fixtures.
On a previous project I made some minor improvements to this situation by plastering up around the drain pipe for one of the sinks. However, sealing up all these spots perfectly is a fairly tall order (in fact, one place that the air is leaking in is through some screw holes in the back of the medicine cabinet, which would be quite awkward to seal), so this evening I decided to attack things from the other direction.
Armed with a can of Not-so-great Stuff, I crawled down into the dankness and got to spraying. The plumbing leading up to the sinks was pretty well sealed already, but had a few cracks around it. The plumbing for the toilet stack was, likewise, fairly well sealed. However, the shower drain stack, supply lines for the toilet and supply lines for the shower went through two wide open rectangular cut-outs, and so I did my best to foam them up.
Dispensing spray foam above your head in a crawl space is not the easiest task in the world, but I did nonetheless put in an effort to foam it up. I'm not sure if I managed to completely plug up the two huge holes; the way spray foaming something like this works is that it either falls out about 5-10 minutes after you spray it in due to it being just a little bit too heavy and too soft to support itself, or enough of it stays in place long enough for it to start setting up, and it sticks around long enough to inflate to full size over the next day or so.
I'm hoping that I'll end up with the latter, but if not I can always get another can and go at it again, as annoying as that would be.
No pictures this time, since, well, I was crawling around in the mud under my house with a can of spray foam. Taking my phone down there would be begging for trouble.
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