My name is Dylan Hovey, owner of Valley Crawlspace Repair! I’ve been in the crawlspace/foundation field for right around 15 years. I won’t say I know everything there is to know about a crawlspace, but will say I’ve seen a thing or two and fixed a thing or two! I’m going to start doing a monthly blog addressing some things that are fresh on my mind for this time of year.
This August we’re going to be talking about cupping hardwood floors. This problem is becoming worse and worse every year. This week I’ve gotten called out to two different homes with both homeowners weeping over their beautiful hardwood floors starting to look irregular. This happens when your home is holding way too much moisture. I have actually seen the hardwood stand up greater than a 45 degree angle! It’s kind of hard to understand why, so I’m going to do my best to explain. Wood, in general, is essentially a sponge. It will soak up moisture out of the air and expand. In dryer months, it will dry out and contract.
When moisture gets in your house, your hardwood floors will start to expand and push against one another. Just imagine your tightly laid hardwood floors pushing against each other with nowhere to go but up. And that’s exactly what they do, they start to stand up.
Depending on how soon we can catch it, we can sometimes get them to lay back down. If the hardwood slats ever start to stand up high enough where you trip over them, you might as well plan on replacing them. If they are just starting to raise on the edges, you typically have a week or two to do get something done before your floors are too far gone.
The remedy is simply drying out your home. If you’ve made it this far please don’t stop reading. Please, for the love of everything, do NOT go stick fans under your home. Common sense would tell you that more air flow would help dry the space out, but it couldn’t be further from the facts. When you stick a fan under your home, you are pushing your crawlspace air out and pulling hot/humid air into the space. If you’ve ever crawled under a house in June/July/August, you know that it is much cooler inside than out. Your air conditioning is running almost non-stop and your crawlspace holds a lot of that cooler air. When that humid exterior air, moves into the crawlspace and meets that cooler air, it has to make a temperature change. When that change happens, condensation occurs. Your ductwork starts to drip water onto the top of your vapor barrier, and the wood starts acting like a sponge, and then one day you trip and fall going into the kitchen for breakfast!
Hardwood floor cupping and a whole heap of other problems can be remedied with a proper encapsulation and dehumidifier. If I could give you any advice, even if you aren’t having any of these problems today, go ahead and call us today and have us evaluate your crawlspace. It is much easier to encapsulate today than to be replacing hardwoods, subfloor, joists, removing mold, and then ALSO encapsulating tomorrow.
I hope this helps explain whats going on with your floors. I could talk for days about this subject but I tried to pack as much useful info I could into short form. I would absolutely love to help you if you’re experiencing problems with your foundation or crawlspace! God Bless.
