We live in a 1920s house with an unfinished crawl space about 3-5 feet high under the entire house. All except one room has a dirt floor, the last one being concrete floored.
The dirt floor is damp, salts have risen on it leaving white on the earth, there’s a variety of rubbish in there built up over the years, everything from a pram wheel to old lead plumbing and loads of old snail shells...
Of course there’s a light smell of decomposition that is detectable in the house, the floor timbers are sound, I suspect it’s just from the damp soil.
I was going to clean out, skim the top soil layer, remove everything I could find... then I started wondering is it a good idea to add a vapour barrier to the floor? Not a thoroughly sealed solution, but up to the walls and overlapped everywhere possible.. or would this make the situation worse? We have already increased air vents down there.
Seems really hard to find any info on crawl spaces that isn’t American... any experts in the U.K.?
