So this has been bugging me since we moved into our fixer upper, there is a room under the main roof, which has a concrete slab on all 4 sides, yet the room is raised 36ft up in the air, with a dirt floored plastic covered vented space underneath ( no access to it though ) one vent is on the passageway side in the house and 2 vents outside.
it would make the room so much easier to use and incorporate into the house space if it was not up 4 steps, do you think it is possible to open it up and put a concrete floor in there or at least lower the floor height?
the room is approx 9x10ft outside 2 vents inside and passageway to the steps into the room room steps view through vent blocks from inside the house
Yes, anything is possible. All it takes is money...
It looks like the walls bordering the raised area have their own foundation walls & hopefully proper footers underneath. That should make it easy to remove the raised floor while leaving the walls in place. Then you can remove however much dirt is needed to allow pouring concrete to match the other, adjoining rooms.
Are the ceiling joists in this room at the same elevation as the ceiling joists in the remainder of the house? A photo of how this room connects to the rest of house and roof would help.
Yes the ceiling is the same height as the rest of the whole house, the main body of the house sits on the same level as this, connected by a passage, but the one side of the house is down on the same level where this is, but this then is oddly raised.
The main body of the house has 7'6 ceilings apart form the vaulted living room. the extended part of the house where this is located has much higher ceiling, ( approx 9.5ft, i have not measured exactly) apart from this room which has a lower ceiling.
id just like to have not to go up steps to get in.
We purchased this home just a few months ago. When I initially walked in the house, I thought I smelled moth balls. Then after we bought the house, I began to think it smelled more like oil heat (like I had smelled in my grandparents home as a child). We now have found out that there is a gigantic creosote soaked beam under the living room (which is a very large room, about 28' x 28'). I cant take the smell. It's very strong in this room, and even the air blowing through the vents when the HVAC is running smells of it. My husband crawled under there today to look and in addition to beam being solid black and soaked/coated, he said it appears that the substance was sprayed on the surrounding joists as well.
How in the world can we deal with this? I have read about a product called "Enviroshield / CreoShield". Is anyone familiar with this product? If not this, can you suggest something that would work? I'm wondering if we can seal the beam/joists/ floor from the bottom and if so what to use to do that.
Also, my husband is suggesting that maybe we need to pull up the carpet in the room above this beam and put some sort of sealant on the subfloor to try to seal from the top.
And what about the HVAC duct work? Is the crawlspace air just getting into the ductwork and if we can encapsulate the source of the smell, that will stop? Or do we need to replace the ductwork completely? (we had them cleaned when we first moved in). Or do we need to seal the vents off and instead get a split unit for the room?
Any help or advice is much appreciated!!
Just noticed a bubble in ceiling drywall. It's at the bottom of the angled dormer joist bay. In the attic the unfaced side of the batt insulation bends up about 10 inches and snug to roof sheathing. Installers probably didn't want to cut it to size.
Could that warmth against cold sheathing cause condensation?
03-23-23, 12:28 PM
