Hi All,
I spent 4 Hrs in a nice damp dirt crawl space with the insulation fallin down and moldy stuff growing all around. There were some nice holes from either a rat or possum or something. Did put a big rock over it just for peace of mind. There was about 30" of clearance did the belly crawl cause there just wasn't enough room to get up on the old knee's. Whats your crawl space story?


Ob

My house is on a crawl. Hate it everytime I have to go in.

Years back...pulling alarm cabling thru a crawl space, using a flashlight, shine the light ahead as I crawl....see reflection that looks like 'eyes'; threw a hammer, no movement...long story short...a stuffed animal that some clown put down there.

I was crawling towards the kitchen and as i got closer i saw the end piece of a tail and as got closer that tail got longer and longer and i kept crawling further and further from where i needed to go. finally, that thing was a pure complete skeleton of a possum. i finally got where i was headed did my work but kept the hammer handy just in case it moved for some reason. and all that time i kept telling it if you move YOU WILL GET WACKED WITH THIS HAMMER.

Hehe.
I've been in some pretty tight crawl spaces in my time.

One thing that stands out is how plumbers always have the annoying habit of running their pipes (PVC) right past the man-hole, so getting under the floor or getting out is pretty much impossible, without sucking your chest way in.

I remember being under the floor of a house some years back and let my eyes accustom to the darkness, I shone my flashlight around to have a look around (as you do), in one corner, I saw about 16 or so pairs of small eyes looking back at me, I have never bent myself so quickly since.

One other time, I was under a floor installing a cable for a Night-Store heater, I happened to turn around and there were some green eyes looking back at me from the other end of the torch beam, the owners cat had got under the floor
and Good Lord, have you ever tried to catch a cat under a floor without knocking yourself stupid?

My worst crawlspace experience was in a brand-new house that my family bought in 1972. I was only 11 at the time and had no clue what to expect in there. We had no hot water and the plumbing contractor came over to see what was wrong. Being eager, I volunteered to go into the crawlspace since the plumber was somewhat hesitant to enter. He just wanted me to verify that the water heater was actually connected.

I went barreling in there to find that the cable had never been connected to the WH. On my way out on my hands and knees, I managed to encounter several large shavings of sheet metal from the HVAC installers. There was a field of scraps that were just barely beneath the soil.

This resulted in a trip to the emergency room: Three stitches in one knee, five in the other and and two deep slits in my left hand/wrist later, I learned to be more careful in crawlspaces. Hey, it was dark in there and long before there was a requirement for lighting in such areas.

Despite the fact that I was bleeding like a stuck pig, there was a small snake in there that I couldn't resist. If memory serves me correctly, I also had a frog in my pocket. While my bleeding was the least of my worries, I caught the snake and brought him out with me. I and asked my mom if I could keep him as a pet. Turns out that he was a copperhead and could have/should have bitten me, but he didn't. Mom still said no.

This was in North Carolina, where crawlspaces are full of black widow spiders and snakes. Not knowing any better, I used that crawlspace as my "fort" for two years. Now that I look back at it, I guess I'm lucky to be alive.

I can't say I've had very many 'bad' crawl space experiences; quite the opposite.

When I was 7, we moved to a farm that was about to explode into a decade-long frenzy of building a suburb. I grew up exploring houses and watching the trades. I spent many a happy moment watching the plumbers work in the crawl spaces.

Later, when work sent me into crawl spaces, my first 'critter' experience was the time I lay on my side, trying to make some connections, when something brushed against me - then licked my ear. The family dog had come to visit. I've also had the cat walk over me, and the dog bolt out of the crawl after seeing me down there.

As an apprentice, I was sent into the crawl while the boss did the outside work ... feeding me the cable that I had to drag the length of the house and pass out the other side. He thought he was giving me the 'rough' part .... little did he realize that the customer had avoided landfil expense by laying his old carpeting down in the crawl space (seems his kids also played there).

Now, one customer claimed to have a cat - but I never saw "fluffy." Panicked after the job, we looked all over, assuming Fluffy had slipped out during the course of the job. No joy ... we figured Fluffy would make a nice treat for some coyote. As you might guess, I got a call three days later that they had found Fluffy - well, but hungry - who had aparrently accompanied me into the crawlspace, then been closed up when I left! I still coundn't tell you if the cat was black or white ... I have yet to see her.

Raccoons in the crawl space? Hey, no problem .... I once read a book about "tunnel rats" in Vietnam. Just make REAL sure you have good hearing protection, try for a head shot - and thick gloves just in case the first shot is followed by some H2H. Don't ask me how I know this.

My craziest crawl space experience, though, was in one space that was so damp that the ground was like silly putty. You couldn't even turn a screwdriver without pushing back into the earth, losing all mechanical advantage. I had to lay one of my 'attic boards' down so I could work.

I really like that stuffed toy story ... I'll have to try it some time!

My worst one was on this podunk little house way out in the sticks. The whole job was sort of... creepy. And seeing the crawlspace didn't improve how I felt about it. To get into this space I had to squeeze through a vent opening roughly the size of two cinder-blocks. I get under this house and it's not even a "crawl" space, it's a "drag yourself forward with your arms while lying flat on your stomach" space. Of course, the place I have to get to is clear on the opposite corner of the house.

So I'm pulling myself over all this ancient construction rubbish and god knows what else is down there, trying not to think about what's below me or what's living in the beams directly over me, for that matter.

I get into the corner and start working on a j-box with the glow from my little flashlight. Out of the corner of my eye I see a bunch of camel crickets, crickets with big long legs, all over the wall. Heck, they're just big crickets, no problem. Then when I'm finished, I shine the light over to the wall: Wolf spiders. Each one several inches in diameter. Dozens of them all over the wall and god knows where else.

I'm a little bit of an arachnophobe, to put it mildly, and you never did see anyone drag themselves across a crawlspace and stuff themselves back out a vent as fast as I did.

Yuck.

-John

Yacht club in Winthrop(I'm sure you know the one), We were installing "heat tape",under the building. We had to work between the tides.

As I approached the end (front)of the building!!!! Twelve (12) eyes!!! Raccoons!!! Momma and a few babies!
Damn am I fast!
These guys sneak in and are stuck for the full tide,no other way out. Needless to say.....I spend more time now 'looking'
around than I should.

It is pretty funny how we can get out of a crawlspace twice as fast at we get in!

I have been in many crawl spaces, I think everyone one that I have been in has either had many piles of poo or dead rats.
The only living things that I have seen were cats. I hope I never see anything else.

I was working construction one year where an electrician had to haul a large transformer unit through a blazingly hot attic. Just like Tumpy said about plumbers, the furnace guy's ran the duct work right through the one place the electricain needed to get through so he could get to the other side.

One thing that i like about crawl spaces is all the old stuff that one can find, Old beer cans, bottles, cups from local fast food places, old newspaper from 40s, 50s ..., I have yet to find anything that has value, like old 100 bills :):)

One time i found a pure body of a dead rat, it seemed like it was mummified, this may sound nasty but it was beautiful, i brought out to show to the customer. She got excited about it and kept it to show to her nephew.

This thread's comments bring back a rather funny fire call we had here about 5-6 years back.

A plumber and his apprentice were working in the crawl space of a house not that far from here actually, the plumber fed a length of PVC sewer line into the crawl space, via a vent in the concrete foundations of the house, which the apprentice them primed, glued and asked the plumber to push the pipe into the other end of the elbow they had previously installed.

It was about this time that the apprentice realised he was trapped between the bottom of the pipe and the ground under him, with the pipe touching the underside of the floor joists he couldn't move an inch either way.

The plumber was not willing to cut the pipe (an 8" sewer line), he rang the Fire Brigade, the guy might have wished he had just cut the pipe, as there is a couple of electricians in the brigade here.

I'll never forget what the officer in charge (an electrician) said when he looked under the floor to see an apprentice who was obviously in tears.

"Hmm, what are the means of this?"

He yelled out to us, who were near the manhole (in front of the plumber, of course).
"What is the current hourly rate for the hire of a shovel and for someone to use it?"

I said "$172 +GST, I believe"

Plumber said "I'm NOT paying that!"

The OIC said "Well we could do you a really good saw for $45/hour +GST, it's nice, we've just painted it, it's pretty"

Long story short, we dug the young fella out, much to his relief, one of our guys banged his head getting out of the man-hole, trying to avoid, you guessed it, another plumbers drain line.

BTW, no money did change hands.

Since going out on my own I have practically lived in crawl spaces, be it above the ceiling or below the floor. Just finished an attic job a few minutes ago actually though there's nothing to report on that one. (pause to scratch)

All of the usual sweat, blood, tears, and profanity ( not always in that order, but usually) apply of course.

The worst two that come to mind are under the houses.

First runner up had me learning much about the territorial habits of Black Widows and breathing a lot of bug spray.
Doing a complete re-wire of and small old house that was completely loaded with colonies of Black Widows underneath. I would nuke a colony (so as to approach, drill up and shove a wire up) only to find a competing colony in place at my next up-hole. This is right after speaking with an HVAC installer who told me about how he was bitten by a Black Widow in the face and how it took a year or so to regain natural facial expressions.

The winner is----

I was hired to re run some RG6 in a house that was being spruced up for a flip. I took a quick look in the access hole and said "no problem".
After planning my strategy for minimal in and out trips to get to and from where I needed to go, I entered the crawl space. The height of the space was such that outright crawling wasn't possible. Only the boot camp, crawl under the wire while they shoot live rounds over your head technique was possible, with the occasional drop to your belly and go under the plumbing moves thrown in of course.

This would have been routine if it were not for the ground. It was like a dried out lake bed from a National Geographic photo. Hard clay with sharp edged crevices and some embedded rocks for variety.
Shortly after entering I realized this was going to hurt. I have never tried to pull my fat arse across anything that caused me more pain that that stuff. Making matters worse was the fact that the house had been built on system of very sound footers. The kind that turn crawling to your probe more like finding the cheese in a maze. To go from one point to another (could only be 5' as the crow crawls) involved crawling all the way around these blockades.
I was experimenting with new crawling techniques like "The Sidewinder" (lying on my side and pulling myself along to give the pressure points on my knees a rest)before it was done.

This job would have taken maybe 3 hours at most, probably less, if I could have got up on my knees and boogied, but ended up taking 6 and left me totaled at the end. My knees, elbows and palms were sore to the touch and muscles groups I didn't know I had were commanding respect.

So isn't a crawl space story but it is almost as good. I had to go repair a city well water pump motor. There was a small pump house out near a swamp which fed water to about 100 houses. The pump wasn't working and the people were counting on me to get the pump running again. I get there, unlock the door open it up and look inside. It was dark, damp with 1 light bulb working. I shine my flashlight into the area and see the service panel on the opposite end of where I enter the building. Then I look at the wall. It looked weird, the wall seemed to be moving. It was covered with those cave crickets. I tried to walk slowly past them to get to the service panel, but to no luck. They all start to move and jump. They were all over me, in my shirt, down my pants, etc. I run out of the building and drop pants to get the critters out. Luckily I am out in a swamp with no one around. Now I had to get the pump working , so I try again. I spray room with bee spray, use duct tape to close up every opening you could think of, shirt sleeves, pant cuffs, waist, etc. Put on a big hat and scarf cloth ( This was summer too). I head in the building. They are jumping all around the place, bouncing off me and my equipment, etc. I finally get everything working and get the heck out of there, as soon as I could. Went home for a nice hot shower!

Went to a repeater (ham radio) site on to of a 12 story bldg in a town east of Houston TX. There were a few wasp flying around the door to the radio room that was accessed from the roof. Open the door and there were hundreds of active wasp nest inside. Left and went to the store and got 2 bug bombs. Opened the door and thru the bombs in and shut it. After less than an hour the floor of the room was almost totally covered with dead wasps. There were still quite a few outside flying around which we would spray with wasp spray. Managed to install a link radio and antenna and not one sting! Robert

Last summer I spent the better part of an entire month inside hollow wall chases. The job was for a major university in providence. they had brand new buildings built for dormitories. however all the end rooms were cold in the winter due to poor layout of the hvac system. their solution was to install electric basboards in each of the end units of the buildings. there were 4 end units in each 3 story building. needless to say they did not want to have to patch a buch of holes for these heaters to be snaked in. the solution was a chace on both ends of the building which was just a void 1 stud bay wide by about 6 feet long. my task was simple, cut an access hole large unough for myself on the 3rd flr. get inside said chase smash through 1" or so of floor leveling cement, then cut through the plywood sub floor. then i had to shimmy through this hatch and wedge myself in and slide down to the next landing and repeat. to access the bottom level. at each level someone would be on the inside of the dorm rooms drilling a hole and feeding in a 12-2 nm cable. after i had snagged 6 cables for home runs to the electric panel I would work my way back up the chase to the attic and pass the cables off to another guy who ran the the length of the attic, where in turn the would drop down the mirrored chase to the electric closet. this may not sound too terrible but It was the middle of august and rather warm, and we had to be done for the incoming students in september. after all that demo of the floor i had to go back in and re fire stop all penetrations not fun either. I got a nice that a boy for my efforts too!! as soon as the economy rebounds you can bet this job will come up at my review...