Hello everyone,
I might need some good advice now.
My problem is as follows, and here comes the story first.
When my father insulated what became the TV room, he put up studs on three of the four walls. The only one he didn't do was the load-bearing wall that went through the middle of the house.
The other walls ended up being studs, insulation, vapor barrier, and particle board. However, the ceiling was first laid with fiberboard. The ceiling ended up with the vapor barrier fastened to something resembling wooden planks, then insulation from above, and finally attic flooring.
A few years later, the fiberboard was torn down, and paneling was nailed up. However, they couldn't remove the fiberboard that extended above the studded walls, so they chose to line up the paneling with the wall.
To make matters a bit worse, a chimney was torn down 5 years later, which meant there was a hole in the ceiling panel. By this time, the attic above had been furnished and thus became heated, and the last wall was studded with particle board.
Now we come to the present, namely this past weekend. The paneling was to be replaced. This meant that we had to saw off the paneling along the last studded wall, which means there are approximately 80mm long pieces of panel left above the wall.
And this is where my concerns begin, because when we sawed off the paneling, we also went through the vapor barrier. This wall separates the utility room from the TV room.
On the other side of the room, to complicate matters even more, there's an unheated crawl space extending about 1½ meters in from the outer wall.
So what to do now?
Should I try to get out the remaining pieces of panel and then tape over the tear in the plastic, or just nail up the paneling?
Can I put a new vapor barrier on top of the existing one, or do I have to replace it too?
And how do you make the vapor barrier tight since I'm puncturing it when I put up the paneling?
It ended up being a lot of text, but it's better to try to include as much as possible.
