"Will You Guys Cut the Vapor Barrier to Fit My Crawl Space?"

Some time ago, a customer came to us and stated that he was told that other vapor barrier suppliers cut vapor barrier material to order, and he then asked if we provided that service as well.

Reply From Owner

The short answer is NO, and the reason we do not is because we know that every crawl space is different, and installing vapor barrier in each one takes a slightly different approach in order to do it correctly and effectively. Some other suppliers would have customers believe that they must take our product into the crawl space as a full roll and somehow “manhandle” it to make it fit in the crawl space. They would have others think that our products’ sizes make them too big and bulky to efficiently work within such a tight area, making them nearly impossible to use. In a bid to lure customers their way, they insist that they will cut each piece of their product for customers so that they are working with much smaller amounts of material and insisting that doing so is making a difficult job nearly as easy as baking a pie.

I think we’ve all heard the phrase, "If it seems too good to be true, then it probably is." I mention that phrase because what those companies making those claims don’t want customers to know is that it is already a common practice for installers using any company’s products to cut the vapor barrier on the job site before it goes into the crawl space anyway. That is how it is done. I do it and so does every other professional installer in the industry. Pros cut the vapor barrier on-site while doing the job primarily because having the pieces cut by someone not actually installing it often ends up resulting in a nightmare patch job. I have personally installed vapor barrier in over 300 crawl spaces from Michigan, Ohio, and Illinois to North Carolina and Tennessee, and I have never once cut my pieces of material beforehand and then taken them to a job to be installed. Doing so would have required me to overestimate all of my measurements, resulting in a large amount of wasted material, in addition to having to do a lot of patching.

In fact, pre-cutting material would require a need for instructions in order for an installer to know where each piece was to be installed. Consider the complexity: you would require a detailed set of instructions simply to identify the correct placement for every individual piece, and that is before you’ve even figured out the best way to go about the actual installation process. Consequently, after you have managed to distinguish the floor sections from the wall pieces, you still face the challenge of determining the specific order and location for every wall segment. Then once you have the walls figured out, you have to take them in and install them. Many of these same companies promoting pre-cutting of the vapor barrier also claim there is no need for mechanical fasteners for attaching their product. That sounds easy enough, until you have to keep gluing it back up to the wall. Then there is always the possibility of the wall piece measurements being off. What happens if your measurement was off by 6”, which makes their pieces off by 6", resulting in the wall pieces being too short to reach the floor piece? There are unfortunately several scenarios that may result in problems for the installer that could occur due to pre-cutting material.

Installing vapor barrier to encapsulate a crawl space is not the same as putting together a simple entertainment center from Walmart. These installs require a plan and proper preparation, and they most certainly require that the installer cut his or her own pieces of vapor barrier in order to get it done right with minimal waste.