Transformation Tuesday: Eliminating Mold in a Nasty Crawl Space

A part of yesterday’s Monday Motivation blog involved getting rid of the mold in your basement in order to improve your home’s and your family’s health. I must’ve put something into the air by talking about mold, because within an hour of posting, I encountered two customers with major mold problems.

The first was through one of our system design specialists, who came to talk to me about the house he’d recently inspected. There was so much mold in the house - emanating from the crawl space - that the owner (our customer) had developed mold toxicity and had to move out while it was abated. Mold had literally started producing toxins in his body. It reminded me of a case study we posted last year, where our customer had lifelong respiratory difficulties and had lost both of his parents to respiratory-related illnesses, only to find out that it was the mold in the crawl space that had likely killed them.

The second was via an appointment I set while assisting our appointment center during a busy period. The woman who called had recently purchased a home with her husband, only to encounter a severe musty smell coming from the crawl space, which was boarded up. The previous owners were no help, as they had never gone into the crawl space themselves. It’s likely years of mold growth causing the smell, and we’ll have quite a job ahead of us to encapsulate the crawl space.

I’m glad that I’ve never lived in a home with a crawl space, because it seems like they do nothing but harbor spiders and cause headaches - proverbial and literal, given the illnesses that mold can cause or exacerbate. It’s why we have one gallery after another - so many that I’ve run out of creative titles. It’s so easy to ignore a crawl space, to write off a musty smell, to spend time and money on basically anything else.

But looking at photos from the projects our production crews tackle, I know there’s hope. The CleanSpace line of products from Basement Systems is truly miraculous in what it can achieve. By installing the vapor barrier system, and depending on the severity of the moisture problem, a sump pump and/or dehumidifier, we can drastically reduce and control the humidity in a crawl space and therefore eliminate mold growth.

You’ll never be able to finish a crawl space the way you can finish a basement; it can’t hold a rec room or an extra bedroom, and usually it isn’t even big enough to stand up in. What you can do is make it less scary, create some usable storage space, and eliminate the worry of what’s happening under your home.