Vapor barrier installation in Davenport IA - a crawl space floor sealed edge to edge

Most calls start with torn plastic bunched in a corner, bare dirt, or a crawl space that smells damp every time you open the hatch. The price moves with the size of the floor, how much headroom our crew has to work in, whether the old plastic gets patched or covered, and whether you go with plain sheeting or a tougher reinforced kind. The schedule mostly turns on how easy the crawl space is to get into and how much is stored down there. If the floors above feel cold too, that's a crawl space insulation question I can look at on the same visit, and you'll get your own number on the estimate I write at your house.

I start by crawling in to see what's down there, and if there's old plastic, I'll tell you whether it's worth patching or whether a new sealed layer over it makes more sense. Clearing your stored stuff out ahead of time lets us cover the ground edge to edge instead of working around boxes. Our crew picks up the debris, rolls the sheeting across the whole floor, overlaps and tapes every seam so there's no gap at the joins, and secures the edges at the walls and piers. We lay it so the crawl space drains the way it did before, because a ground cover isn't supposed to change where water goes. When the crew's done, I check the finished job with you.

A vapor barrier deals with the ground, but drafts and a high heating bill usually start at the top of the house, so attic air sealing, closing the gaps around lights, pipes and the hatch, is often the next job I'd point you to. In an older house with thin or settled insulation, retrofit insulation adds to what's already in the walls and attic.

All of Iowa is considered high risk for radon gas in homes, and radon is one of the soil gases a well-installed ground cover helps minimize. That's one more reason the seams and edges matter, because gas and moisture find the gaps a loose sheet leaves. We're based in Davenport and work in cities on both sides of the river, in Iowa and Illinois, and we run into the same loose, torn crawl space plastic on jobs in Bettendorf and Rock Island.

Davenport works from the national building codes but adds its own changes, so a rule you read about online may not be how it works here. If your job needs a permit, we take care of it with the city and tell you about it before we start.