We have a ~1700sf manufactured home with a crawl space and three access points.
The house was "installed" in 1986. When we bought this house six years ago, we guessed that the crawl space had never been cleaned or the insulation/vapor barrier replaced.
We want to close up two of the access points in 2019 so this was a good time to have the crawl space "redone."
We contacted three companies. In all cases, the main bid was to clean out the crawl space, remove existing insulation and vapor barrier, sanitize the crawl space, and replace the insulation and vapor barrier.
The first company has offices in three Western Washington counties and its bid was $9,722.33. Because we hadn't decided whether to replace all of the existing insulation, they included an option to replace only damaged insulation but the deduction was on the same page as the complete insulation and not easy to understand. They also wanted to use spray foam on all rigid ducting. We didn't like that as we thought it would be difficult to spot a water leak in the future.
The second company has offices in Seattle, Spokane, and Portland so they serve a much larger area. We really liked the guy who came out to give us the bid. He was very professional and even took eight photos under the house. He gave us two separate bids. The bid to do everything was $10,421.92. The second bid to remove everything but not replace the insulation was $3,789.98.
Independent Pest Solutions has only one office (on Meridian in Puyallup). Their bid for the complete cleanout/reinstallation was $5,875.31. It took two and a half days over a two-week period to complete the work. I think this is due to them being so busy this time of year, their crews are spread pretty thin.
Found out something interesting: it took one full day to remove the insulation, vapor barrier, and carcasses (rats, possums, one cat, and a snake). The access points were closed up with snap-traps inside but the crew couldn't get back for a week. During that week (April 4-11), my feet were freezing and we were really glad we didn't try to save money by not insulating under the floor.
We're glad we went with Independent Pest Solutions and think they did a great job. We didn't get under the house ourselves to check but, next year after re-siding the house, we're going to have our original inspector come back to do an entirely new inspection. read more