Save Money How To Install Crawl Space Vapor Barrier DIY #how #howto #diy

welcome to you can do it so today we're going to be going underneath this house here and we're going to be uh kind of cleaning up underneath there raking out any sharp objects so that we can begin to lay the moisture barrier so stay tuned and we'll show you how you can do it the first step that we did was we measured and drew a perfect map of what the entire bottom crawl space looked like or correction chris drew the amazing map and we measured it all out so that we would know exactly how much of this vapor barrier we needed to order keep in mind you want to overlap a good overlap is six to eight inches however we kind of did a uh overkill on the overlap and we measured so that we would have at least a two foot overlap that is the picture of what the entire bottom crawl space looks like it's 1300 square feet so what we did was we ordered 2 000 square feet so that we could also go up the sides of the wall with it the next thing i did was i took a cobweb broom and i went through and i got rid of all the cobwebs the last thing you want is to have this beautiful vapor barrier on the bottom of your crawl space and then all these cobwebs dangling hanging off and just kind of making it look tacky so i went through the entire crawl space and got every single cobweb out and then of course go around and pick up any large debris chris also raked up all the rocks and we gathered those and took them out as well so that there wasn't any large sharp objects the next thing because this is going to have a dehumidifier in this crawl space chris went around every single one of the vents he put in exterior uh insulation into all of those vent holes and then he used the zip system flashing tape which sticks like crazy to concrete and taped up every single one of the vent holes so that no air can get in and cause humidity underneath this crawl space he also filled in every gap with uh the spray foam again just to eliminate any sort of airflow at our property because we have such a big front yard we went ahead and measured out and cut all of the pieces that go underneath this crawl space you're not going to want to do that when you're underneath the crawl space or you'll probably invent some new curse words just because it would be really hard to try to work this out underneath so do it in an open area cut it all out we also knew exactly what the width of this crawl space was going to be in each one of those sections so we cut each one of the large sections to the perfect width and then rolled it up and i labeled them i cordoned off that crawl space into three areas a b and c so i put a swatch of painters tape on that roll and i marked that that was the a and if you see chris is rolling up the scrap we actually use that scrap to go around all of the pillars underneath beneath the crawl space so you'll see that it does not go to waste and i accounted for that when i was doing the square footage mapping so again this is the second section that we're cutting out and this would be section b according to our drawing and chris is doing a nice cut there we of course roll it out and cut off the excess chris is wrapping up that excess for our pillars and i'm rolling up the b uh getting that ready to take as well and then we do one more cut for area c but i do not show that on this video just for sake of time but again do all your work outside in a large open area it will alleviate a big headache underneath now you see what i'm doing here i'm measuring one two three and four and then i'm going to give a cut down i went on the longer side of that pier and i just measured four times showing you one more time doing that and then cutting straight down that's just an easy dirty way to go ahead and do your measurement there without having to do a precise measurement all the way around i of course gave a little bit of extra so that i would have an overlap of at least six inches then you're going to want to take a brush and brush off all that excess uh dust that might have accumulated on those piers so that the zip system flashing tape sticks nicely but as you see here what i'm doing is i am just placing this where it needs to go and i'm taking small pieces of duct tape and just placing them in position you're going to want to wrap these piers like a christmas present so if you're not good at wrapping christmas presents maybe you ought to hand this off to someone who is but you're gonna wrap all the way around cutting down uh the extra area of the vapor barrier so that you can wrap you know of course obviously all the way around that if you did not cut in those those gaps there it would not wrap properly around that system i don't show this uh next step but i do take that same zip system flashing tape and i go all the way around the perimeter of this pier and so i of course through the miracle of filming and showing you all of the front piers have been properly wrapped i went up about four feet this is not a full encapsulation had it been i would have gone almost all the way up with just a small uh inspection gap of about five or six inches for a pest inspector you can see on the wall that we did use the duct tape first to place that uh wall vapor barrier and then we went along with the zip system flashing tape and you did see chris use that zip roller to really smash that zip tape right onto that concrete and we do that every time we rolled around the entire perimeter we went ahead and we did the whole rest of the underneath and i'm just showing you the last section that we did and how we did it so as you unfold it you go all the way down the entire span of that crawl space and again because i pre-measured this it works out beautifully it's a perfect length with the nice two-foot gap overlap and of course you only really need to go six to eight inches for a good vapor barrier but because we had so much extra plastic i went ahead and and did a nice two foot over overlap i didn't mention this before but the the uh vapor barrier we use we ordered online it's 10 mil the stuff you get at the big box stores goes up to 6 mil so if you're doing a proper vapor barrier you're going to want to order something online that's built to last and so 10 mil is an excellent thickness for a vapor barrier in this case chris did go ahead and put a couple vapor barrier stakes down because that is a step there he wanted to make sure that there was a good play in that plastic so that you didn't step on it and accidentally rip a hole through it so that's what he's doing right there and then he just does an extra tape right over those stakes just to protect the stakes and and so somebody doesn't accidentally trip over them so we're just kind of finishing up this look here and again that tape is also built for vapor barrier seams so make sure you get the right stuff for the right job and it'll make your life easier i see notch around each one of those piers and then i use that vapor barrier seam tape and i also tape all those seams but again i don't show that on there you wrap them like a present try to make them look as pretty as you can and of course make sure that there are no gaps anywhere so this is our finished product 1300 square feet of vapor barrier down there all the walls they go up anywhere between two to four feet depending on where that wall is located and the piers they are also all wrapped with that zip system flashing on the top and then the white seam tape on the bottom and really that's for aesthetics more than anything i didn't want black tape all over the place so we went ahead with white and that is the dehumidifier that chris installed in a different video if you'd like to see that video just click in the playlist that is labeled crawl space vapor barrier and dehumidifier and you'll see the install of that and of course it's already working at 45 humidity down there and our project is finished thank you so much for watching be sure to like subscribe and hit that bell for all our upcoming videos

Channel: You Can Do It

Views: 123,072

Keywords:

Id: HH8OEC2Azgo

Length: 9min 55sec (595 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 05 2022