Just found out most Edmonton basement Reno's skip vapor barrier inspections

I was reading through some old city permit records from 2019 and saw that nearly 60% of basement finishes in Mill Woods got flagged for missing proper vapor barrier seals. Found it buried on the city's inspection stats page while looking for something else. That's wild to me because I always thought every contractor knew that was step one. Has anyone else run into this or is it just the cheap crews cutting corners?

3 comments

3 Comments

graceblack13d ago

Disagree a bit here... I've seen plenty of older homes in the city where the vapor barrier was actually done right but inspectors missed it or just didn't care. The 2019 stats might just be one bad year or a specific inspector cracking down on something that wasn't really a problem before. I've done a few basement Reno's in my own place and the poly was always there, just not flagged because nobody bothered looking too close. Not saying cheap crews don't cut corners, but those numbers sound off to me.

dixon.spencer13d ago

But does that mean the stats are wrong, or just that people want to believe their Reno was done right? I get what you're saying, @graceblack, but I've talked to like three different framing crews who all admitted they skip the vapor barrier check unless the city forces it. Those 2019 numbers might actually be generous - I bet a lot of older homes in Mill Woods were built with poor sealing from the start, and nobody ever caught it because inspectors only look for big stuff like electrical or structural. Plus, if a contractor knows the poly is there but doesn't staple it tight or tape the seams, that's still a fail even if the plastic is technically present (you know what I mean?). I just think there's a culture of "good enough" in basement work around here, and those stats reflect that more than a random hardass inspector.

the_robin13d ago

@dixon.spencer you're hitting on something real about the "good enough" culture. I've seen it too, crews that know the code says one thing but push it because homeowners don't know what to look for. But I gotta push back a bit on the stats being generous. If those numbers are from 2019, that was right when the city started cracking down on basement work after that big mold lawsuit in Strathcona. I had a buddy who got flagged on a simple vapor barrier seam tape issue that year, and his work was better than most. The inspectors were definitely on a mission then, so the failure rate might be more about the enforcement spike than actual bad workmanship. The real problem is inconsistency, some years they care, some years they don't, and that makes it hard to trust any single set of numbers.