When we finished the furnace project and the plumbing project that followed, we knew we wanted to redo the insulation under the house; most of it was installed over 50 years ago, and most of it was installed upside-down. Here’s video of what was left after the furnace work and while the drain pipes for the north end of the house were being redone.
So as always, I started researching and gathering names of possible contractors to do the work. I got quotes from several, and in the end went with Greenshield, and in November of 2018 they delivered a bunch of insulation (first pic) and came back a few days later to start work.
If you look closely in the second pic, the old insulation was not only installed upside down, but put in before the house was fully built. They put in the joists, laid chickenwire across them, then laid the floorboards. This meant the crew currently under the house had to snip away each strand of wire, pull pieces of mesh out, ball them out, pull them out, and bag up the icky old insulation. Then all of it was brought up and put into a waiting dumpster.
As you can see in the third photo, we were actually double-booked project-wise, as the tree guys were out working up along the tree line.
After several days of work, the pics below show what it looked like under the house. While not quite pristine, conditions have definitely improved. We ended up filling 1.5 dumpsters with the remains of the old insulation. The second dumpster was then filled to the brim thanks to that summer’s fencing project, the old chimneys from the furnaces, and other random stuff (last pic). I believe these were dumpsters number 18 and 19, but at this point I’ve actually lost count.
One highlight was finally getting rid of the old sewage pipe out in the northwest pasture that serviced a long-gone mobile home there. When the guys were dealing with the cypress tree that likes to fall over, they also cut the pipe into three lengths of around 12 feet each. It was then pretty easy to just scoop them up with Giggles’ forks and drive them to the dumpster.