First, let me say thanks for all the help you guy’s have given me. This is a great forum.
Anyway, since my crawl space floor and the poly are in such a mess, I am going to remove and replace all the poly down there. My question is, how do I fill in some holes/valleys/ditches etc that are down there. Would I use dirt or pea gravel? These are not drainage runs, just various impressions caused by people working down there and some previous water leaks. Along some of the foundation where there are foundation vents, the water problem was bad enough that I can see under the foundation.
Please keep in mind that whatever I use, I must get it down there thru a 8 x 16 opening.
I quess that did sound kind of stupid. What I meant was that whatever I used, I was going to feed it to the crawl space by removing some vents. I can get into the crawl space easily, but since I have 8 vents, I did not want to do a duck walk all thru the crawl carrying dirt or gravel…
Hire a couple young teens and pay them to level it out… preferably with dirt or rock screening. Poly about a foot above the walls making sure that the poly is lapped at least 6 - 12 inches. A simple trick to keep the poly in place is to use the wires used to hold the insulation within the joist cavities.
Depending on the humidity in your area, you should check the band / rim boards above the crawlspace vents…in humid areas it is common to see fungi in those areas which can and often eventually leads to wood rot. I have seen this even in crawlspaces that were at high as 4 ft. off the ground with no drainage problems.
In the Ozarks, those “peanuts” are referred to as “Ghost Poop”, just in case you wanted to add that to the official NACHI “Glossary of Construction Terminology”.
