Good Thing No Animals Live up There

Have you ever watched that Dirty Jobs episode where Mike goes around with a guy who pulls skunks, racoons or whatever other fun critters out from underneath people's houses? And did you catch that those creatures sometimes find a nice little home for themselves in the nook between the subfloor and your bathtub? Yes, that's right. You may be taking a shower next to a sleeping racoon who's crammed between your wall and your tub.

Lovely.

Makes me want to go take 7 more showers.

So when Chris asked me to insulate around our bathtub from underneath the house I was not really very excited for the job.

I creeped underneath our house and held my breath, hoping and praying I didn't encouter a hairy little creature whose slumber I disturbed. I was pleasantly excited to find that we've got some excessive subfloor around the bathtub that makes it virtually impossible for a critter to make a home

With that good news it was time to get to work. Normally I'm Chris' assistant, but for this job it was time for me to order him around :)

So I summoned him to fetch my supplies while I waited under the house

But after about 3 minutes of the role switcheroo and him making fun of me complaining and me making fun of him ordering me around, we quickly pissed each other off and went back to working on our own tasks by ourselves :)

Once I got to work (and stopped laughing at my jokes and rolling my eyes at his :) hehe) I tried to insulate as effectively as possible. When insulating it's really important not to mash things up a lot because that's actually counter-productive to how insulation works. You need to leave some room for the insulation to breath and essentially "catch" the cool or hot air.

With all the little cracks, it made that job a little difficult

I tried to get the insulation into as many of the cracks as possible without balling things up too much. It took some trial and error to figure out how big to make the pieces that were getting stashed up there.

The task didn't take too long (around 15 minutes) and with a ventilator, gloves, and glasses it wasn't too uncomfortable either. I was able to sit on my butt and reach up as this area of our crawl space is rather spacious.

Now there will be one less place for lost heat and we can be sure no skunk is finding a home next to our tub