The Good News & the Bad News

Well, DH did get all suited up in the Tyvek suit and mask yesterday and headed down into the crawlspace last night. The mask lasted about two seconds, as it made him feel claustrophobic, but fortunately he discovered no signs of rodents. Hooray! No droppings, no dead rodents, no beady eyes staring at him, nada. So that is definitely good news. Also he had a cursory look at our ducts and all the insulation on them appears to be in good shape, so another hooray! We probably ought to go back down there again to look at the far reaches of the house, but so far, so good.

Then DH got to the part of the house that he thought was the bathroom. To verify that he was at the spongy floor section, he had me jump on it, which I will post for your amusement:

This particular area is mostly inaccessible due to pipes crossing directly under that section of floor, so DH could only pull back at the insulation a bit to see what the subfloor looked like. This is what he found:

Yeah, that's mold. That floor is a 1"+ thick tongue & groove hemlock or fir subfloor, my friends...so we can only imagine what the subfloor above that looks like, if it's leaking through at the seams on the underside. A positive is that it's not all over the place, making us worry about our house being condemned. It is, however, there, so we must deal with it.

The next step, therefore, is to cut the vinyl flooring in the bathroom, pull it back, repeat with the old vinyl that the installers just laid the new one over, and see what the state of the plywood subfloor is. Perhaps they used particleboard or something that is not rated for bathrooms as their subfloor, and just the normal use of the bathroom has caused this. However, we are going to give the kids a bath tonight, and if we find moisture in the subfloor tomorrow, we will know it is the bathtub. I also have to persuade my DD to use our toilet all day, because then we can really isolate any leak from the toilet from any leak from the tub. I really don't think it's the toilet, as it's brand new, it is rock solid & does not move, and it was installed by a plumber. I would be very surprised if it was a problem with the toilet (and we would be calling that plumber about it!).

I am still thinking it's the bathtub. There is no way of knowing, however, without wading in and causing damage to the floor, which we will at a minimum have to repair. Luckily we have some scraps of the vinyl to use as a patch. We will see what tomorrow brings.