Belly Wrap & Underbelly Insulation Repair in Myrtle Beach

The belly wrap is the tough black sheet stapled across the underside of your floor joists, and it is the only thing holding your insulation up and the Grand Strand’s wet air out of your floor system. When it tears, insulation falls, moisture loads into the subfloor, and animals move in. Patch repairs run $300 to $800 and a full re-wrap runs $1,200 to $4,500, quoted in writing after a free under-home inspection.

It is the most consequential square footage of material you own and the least likely thing you have ever looked at.

How to tell yours is open

You will almost never see the tear. What you see is what it causes:

• Insulation hanging down behind the skirting. If you can see pink or yellow fiberglass drooping when you pull an access panel, the wrap above it has already let go.
• Floors that feel cold, damp, or oddly cool in one room. Insulation that has fallen out of a bay leaves that section of floor with nothing under it.
• A musty smell that will not clear no matter how long the AC runs.
• Soft spots developing in the subfloor, usually near a bathroom, an exterior wall, or wherever plumbing was repaired.
• Higher humidity inside, and an AC that runs longer than it used to for the same result.
• Animals. Scratching, rustling, or a smell. They did not chew through an intact belly; they found a hole.
• A recent repair. If anyone has been under the home for plumbing, ductwork, or a relevel and did not reseal what they cut, it is open right now.

Why Horry County is unusually hard on a belly

Two conditions here work on the underbelly at once, year-round.

The ground. Much of the county sits on coastal-plain sand over a high water table, and near the marsh in Little River, along the Intracoastal in Socastee, and in the river lowlands around Conway, the ground under a home is damp far more of the year than it is dry. That moisture rises constantly. An intact belly turns it away. An open one takes it straight into the insulation.

The air. From June through September the space under a skirted home on the Grand Strand behaves like a greenhouse: warm, still, and saturated. Then the ductwork running through the belly carries 55-degree air through it. Every failed duct wrap becomes a condensation point, dripping water into the insulation from the inside. In some homes the ground was never the problem at all and the entire soaked bay came from a two-inch gap in duct insulation.

Put those together and a tear that would be a slow annoyance in a dry climate becomes a countdown to subfloor replacement here.

What it costs to leave it

This is the part worth being blunt about. Belly work is cheap. What it prevents is not.

Nobody sets out to spend the bottom row. They spend it because the top row felt optional for four years.

What the job includes

1. Free under-home inspection. We pull access panels, crawl the length of the home, and map what is actually open, which bays have lost insulation, and where any water is coming from. You get a written price from that, and it does not move afterward.
2. Remove what has failed. Torn material and any soaked or matted insulation comes out. Dry insulation still in its bay stays; there is no reason to bill you to replace something that is working.
3. Fix the source. A tear from settling means piers dropped, so we tell you if the home also needs leveling. Sweating ductwork gets resealed and re-insulated. Water arriving from the ground is a drainage problem and gets quoted separately rather than wrapped over.
4. Dry the framing. Wet joists and subfloor get time and airflow before anything is closed up. Sealing a wet frame inside new material is worse than leaving it open.
5. New insulation, correctly supported. Back in the bays at full thickness, held up so it stays there.
6. New belly material, sealed. Properly fastened to the joists with seams sealed and every penetration for plumbing and ductwork closed around, not just laid over.
7. Close it back up. Skirting access panels and vents go back, and you get a straight rundown of anything else found under there, priced, with no pressure.

Where this overlaps with the rest of the work

Belly damage rarely arrives alone, and it is worth knowing what usually comes with it.

Settling tears bellies. When a pier drops, the frame twists, and the belly material is what tears along that line. That is why a torn belly is often the first visible evidence of a leveling problem, and why the pier readings should be checked whenever one turns up. If you have not had the home shot with a water level in years, the self-check is a fast way to find out where you stand.

Wet ground and a torn belly are a compounding pair. Ground moisture only matters because the belly is open; the open belly only matters because the ground is wet. Fixing one and not the other is half a job, which is why under-home moisture and drainage and the ground vapor barrier get looked at during the same crawl.

Skirting is the front door for animals. A gap in the skirting is how something got under there to find your belly in the first place.

Get eyes under the home

The inspection is free, it takes about half an hour, and you get a written price whether or not you book anything. If the belly is intact, we will tell you that and leave, because a crew that finds a problem under every home it visits does not stay in business on the Grand Strand for long.

Ask the installer for a licence number and proof of insurance before the belly is opened. Full price tables are on the pricing page, and we cover Myrtle Beach, Conway, Little River, Socastee, and the rest of Horry County.