DIY Crawl Space Guide: Inspecting Before Repairing Week 1

Crawl spaces are often neglected until serious problems develop, but proper inspection is the crucial first step toward creating a healthy home environment. In this opening episode of our Crawl Space Repair Challenge, Michael Church walks you through the complete process of conducting a professional-grade crawl space inspection—whether you're planning to DIY or hire a contractor.

Discover why relying on your senses alone can lead to missed problems as Michael explains how moisture, mold, and structural issues often hide in plain sight. Learn about the essential tools needed for a thorough inspection, including moisture meters that detect problems well before they become visible. The episode covers proper safety equipment, measurement techniques, and documentation methods that will give you a complete picture of your crawl space's condition.

Michael shares professional insights on what specific signs to look for during your inspection, including wood moisture levels, foundation wall dampness, mold indicators, insulation issues, and evidence of past water intrusion. You'll understand why taking accurate measurements and detailed photographs is critical for developing an effective repair strategy. The episode also introduces the Crawl Space Ninja inspection sheet—a comprehensive checklist designed to capture all the essential information needed to create your customized scope of work and materials list.

Ready to transform your crawl space into a clean, healthy space? Download our detailed inspection sheet, gather your findings, and connect with our DIY specialists who will help guide you through the entire repair process. Subscribe to follow our complete Crawl Space Repair Challenge series and gain the knowledge to tackle your project with confidence or effectively communicate with contractors.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Crawl Space Repair Challenge
• 0:48 Tools Needed for Inspection
• 4:25 Inspection Sheet and Documentation
• 6:26 What to Look For
• 8:21 Submitting Your Inspection
• 9:28 Next Steps and Wrap-Up

Transcript

Speaker 0: 0:00

Hey, this is Michael Church, crawl Space Ninja, and I am excited to bring you our Crawl Space Repair Challenge. This is week one, and what we're going to cover today is inspecting your crawl space. I am putting together a series of videos. So far, I have 13 plus videos planned out. For all of you that are looking to improve, correct repair, waterproof encapsulate your crawl space, whether you want to do it yourself or whether you want to hire a contractor, this is going to be great information. So, if you're going to do it yourself, I'm going to show you how to inspect your crawl space today and what to look for. But this might also be some great information for those of you looking to hire a contractor, so that you know what they are looking at while they are in your crawl space. So let's get started. A quick overview of what we're going to discuss today are some of the tools that you will need in order to inspect your crawl space and where to get those tools. So, if you're planning on doing this yourself, we have a lot of these available on our DIY store, or we might have some Amazon links in the description below to help you find those tools quickly. So make sure you check out the links below. We are also going to give you access to a downloadable inspection sheet that we have developed that we're going to make available at Buy Me A Coffee. This is going to be a paid download of just $5. Paid download of just five dollars. And this inspection sheet has some great questions that you should answer for our DIY specialist to help you out, as well as some things that you must look for and some readings and calculations that you should get inside the crawl space in order to make sure that you develop a great materials list and scope of work, and we're going to teach you what to look for in the crawl space. We're going to have you take that information and submit that, along with your findings, to our DIY specialist. Now, if you want to take photos, we will have a way for you to send us some photos, but normally the inspection sheet is all we will need, unless the DIY specialist would like to have some photos to understand or reference what it is they're looking at. So they'll let you know if they need more photos or not. We're going to help you develop a material list so that you can do this crawl space work yourself or, of course, if you're going to hire a contractor, that's fine too, and then we're going to help you develop a scope of work. Now, keep in mind, we're going to release more videos in this series that will help you with the scope of work, but if you have a unique situation in your crawl space that you need some additional help to make sure that we take care of every problem in the crawl space take care of every problem in the crawl space we're going to try to do everything we can to get those answers for you, even if we need to do a consultation to make that happen, with some pictures and going over everything with you personally.

Speaker 0: 2:44

Now let's talk about some of the tools you're going to need in order to do your inspection. We always recommend you get some of these great moisture meters. We have these available on our DIY store. These are to check humidity and wood moisture, as well as the foundation wall moisture. That's something that's overlooked quite a bit is people don't check the foundation wall moisture, because that's a good indication if you are taking on standing water at some point in the future.

Speaker 0: 3:09

And, of course, always dress for safety. You want to wear a Tyvek suit. Unless you have a good pair of coveralls. You want to wear a respirator we always recommend a full face respirator as well as gloves, and you might need some waterproof boots if your crawl space is flooded a good flashlight and a painter's hoodie that's a cloth hoodie that you can get to put over your head in order to protect you from getting cobwebs or different things like that. Then you would put the full respirator over that or different things like that. Then you would put the full respirator over that.

Speaker 0: 3:39

One last thing I didn't put on this list is a camera, because we want you to take pictures of everything that you're inspecting, in case the DIY specialist needs access to those pictures. So make sure you check out the links below for all that. Some other items you may want to do are a laser measurer. Now, one disadvantage of that laser pointer is that if there's obstacles in the way, it's a little difficult to properly measure the crawl space, especially if your crawl space is really short. So you may want to get one of those wheels that you walk around with I'll put links to all of this in the description as well as, possibly, a thermal imaging camera or a laser temperature reader. That's a good way to see some temperature changes in areas that would indicate moisture intrusion. So those might be a bit more of an investment for you, but if it helps you gather the correct information, you might want to think about getting those as well.

Speaker 0: 4:25

As I mentioned before, we're going to have an inspection sheet available for you at buymeacoffeecom, and what I'd like for you to think about is while you're inspecting your crawl space. This inspection sheet is designed for you to write down different things a lot of people don't think about, like, for example, the inside perimeter and linear foot, the wall height of the foundation wall, the wood moisture level of the wood, the foundation wall moisture level, how many vents do you have, how many pillars do you have. And don't overlook potential future problems too. You can't always go by your senses. Whenever you are inspecting a crawl space and unfortunately a lot of homeowners do that They'll say things like well, I don't see any water, or it doesn't feel damp, or I don't notice any moisture. Well, that's what the meters are designed to do is to help you figure out if the wood is actually wet. A lot of times you can't feel humidity. Now, if it's, you know, super high and you see a lot of condensation in the crawl space. Well, of course, you're going to be able to notice that, but the point is, you want to make sure that you use the meters and use the inspection sheet in order to get as much accurate information as possible, along with your pictures, so that that DIY specialist we're going to assign to you is able to help you get that crawl space corrected as best as possible. Before I move on, I know what some of you are thinking why would we charge five dollars for an inspection sheet? Well, believe it or not, whenever we ask homeowners to provide certain information, it seems like they want to skip out on that information, and it really does hinder us in helping you develop the right materials list and scope of work. So we feel like, by asking you for a small five dollar donation for our inspection sheet, it will get you to understand the importance of this inspection sheet. You don't have to use ours, you can fill one out yourself. Just make sure you provide as much information as possible and all the information that we ask for, so that we can help you develop a clean, healthy and worry-free crawl space.

Speaker 0: 6:20

While you're doing the inspection, make sure you pay attention to mold in the crawl space. Now look at the image on the top left. There's a metal strap up there that's rusted. That dark color all over the wood is signs of mold, but not all mold is as noticeable on the wood. Now take a look at picture number two, where it's got the moisture meter up against the wood. Do you see the little dots under the insulation? That could also potentially be mold. Make sure that you're checking for falling insulation.

Speaker 0: 6:50

High moisture in the wood Obviously you're going to need a meter for that. High moisture in the foundation walls. Standing water around the crawl space, mud lines on the old vapor barrier If you see mud lines, perhaps the crawl space had flooded in the past. Efflorescent on the foundation wall If you've got block or concrete, you can have efflorescence pushing through the wall even though it's not actively taking on water, or you're not seeing standing water. Daylight at the sill plate and rim joists are also things that'll indicate inefficiencies of a crawl space. And then, of course, high humidity with that moisture meter. So these are some of the things that you're going to be looking for that are on the inspection sheet.

Speaker 0: 7:30

Make sure you take pictures. These are good examples of the kind of pictures we like to see, we like panoramic wide view pictures, but sometimes you need to get a little closer and give us a snapshot of that moisture meter or perhaps that falling insulation, to help us understand exactly what needs to be done and how long a drying process may take in the future. Now that moisture meter in that wood only goes to 53%, you can see there's green lights, yellow lights and red lights. If it's above 53% wet, we have no way of knowing that. So we did a job that took us six weeks to dry the wood to where we could treat the mold because of how damp the wood was. But the meters are still a great way for us to figure all that out for you and to help you do your own crawl space.

Speaker 0: 8:13

Once you have your inspection done and you've got the photos, I'd like for you to submit that information to our DIY specialist. This way it gives us the ability to go over your inspection with you and help put together that materials list and eventually that scope of work. You can do this one of two ways. You can submit your pictures and inspection sheet to customerservice at crawlspaceninjacom or you can go to the Ask a Ninja page on our Crawl Space Ninja site and submit your inspection sheet and pictures there as well. Make sure you include your name and telephone number and where you're located. If you could list your city and state, that would help us, because you might have different codes that we need to talk about. If you're up in a cold area or down in a warm area, we may have different information on how to address certain things. So make sure you send us the inspection sheet along with photos. One thing you want to make sure you keep in mind is that if you email it to us, you might have to put it on a shared drive so that we can access it, because I know email is limited to a certain amount of space, so don't try to email us 50 photos. If you've got the ability to put it on a shared drive and give us access to that in the email, that would be fantastic.

Speaker 0: 9:26

Let's recap how this process works. Once we get the inspection sheet and your photos, we're going to help you put together a scope of work for your crawl space, so that way, your crawl space looks like this whenever you're all done with doing your own crawl space. We're also going to be coming out with some future videos to help you tackle the crawl space yourself. If you decide to do this project yourself and we may actually have to recommend that you get a local contractor to come out and take a look If it's something that's real sketchy, like some foundation problems, you might want to have a local contractor, or perhaps a structural engineer or someone to assist you and guide you in this, and we will certainly do our best to catch those things if possible. That's why you need to communicate with that DIY specialist and eventually set up a video interview with them to go over the recommended scope of work Also.

Speaker 0: 10:17

I hope this information was very helpful for you. I hope you'll like and comment down below what we can do to help you in the future. And, of course, if you want to do a one-on-one consultation with me, we've got the buy me a coffee option to where you and I can do a 30 minute consultation together in order to come up with the best way to tackle your crawl spaces. That has become very popular and I so much enjoy speaking with you directly, so I'm going to put a link to that buy me a coffee down below and I look forward to helping you out. Please be on the lookout for future videos involving this crawl space challenge that we are doing. Thanks, and I hope you make it a happy and blessed day and we'll see you later.