Will a Crawl Space Add Value to Your Home?
Adding space to a home will add value for investment property developers and homeowners. One way to do this is by encapsulating the crawl space. Jeff Barnett, a Texas investor, did this on a three-bedroom 1900 sq ft home in Temple, Texas. This is the first project he took on on his own. “A full gut job- down to the studs. We replace everything but the initial framing,” says Barnett. 
Barnett went as far as going down to the foundation of the home. He wanted to make the hot and humid crawl space something new. ” I really wanted to kick things up a notch in every area. The crawl space was one of those things I hadn’t messed with before, but I had seen where people had encapsulated them, ” Barnett says. Doing this himself saved thousands of dollars in labor.
Barnett had learned about the StegoCrawl Crawl Space Encapsulation System from The Build Show off of YouTube Channel. He was able to go to the website and choose the best system for his project. By purchasing the system through Stego, he had videos and online resources available to him to make sure he had suffected materials and if he didn’t, he could purchase them through Stego’s eCommerce portal.
The crawl space which was a dark, dirty, hot and humid space was turned into a dry, clean and usable space. “It wasn’t until I closed the vents that I realized that this was a conditioned space,” tells Barnett.
Doing this to a crawl space will not only give you more square footage, but will also help rid musty, mildewy smells that can seep into the rest of the home. This in turn will also help with the home’s indoor air quality. It will also reduce water vapor diffusion from the soil which in turn helps a home’s HVAC with its performance, durability and energy efficiency.
During the spring of 2021 Barnett listed the investment property for sale. In the listing, he included that the home had an encapsulated crawl space and during open houses, made sure to open the hatch inside the home that accesses the crawl space. Potential buyers were amazed at how bright and clean the space was.
“They were blown away about how it looked down there. One potential client was asking about extra closet and storage space, and we pointed out the entire bottom of the house,” exclaims Barnett.
