Vapor Barrier Installation in Mountain View, CA

Mountain View Climate

Mountain View sits mid-peninsula, warmer than San Francisco and milder than inland San Jose, with summer afternoons usually in the mid to upper 80s°F and rainfall around 14–16 inches a year. Drywood termite swarms come off in late summer and early fall, roughly August through October, and in Eichler tracts the wings usually turn up on the sill of a floor-to-ceiling window rather than in an attic nobody visits. The bay marsh at the north end keeps the air and the ground damper than the rainfall figure suggests, and morning fog reaches Shoreline far more often than it reaches the neighborhoods south of El Camino Real.

Housing Stock

Three kinds of building sit inside the same city limits and each needs a different inspection route. Old Mountain View, around Castro Street and the streets south of it, holds pre-war bungalows and a few Victorians on raised foundations, and the 1867 Rengstorff House now standing in Shoreline Park is the oldest of them. The 1950s and 1960s tracts, Monta Loma, Waverly Park, Cuernavaca, and the Sylvan Park area, are slab-on-grade, and the Eichler blocks among them are post-and-beam with exposed tongue-and-groove ceilings and radiant tubing in the concrete. Along El Camino Real and the transit corridor the stock turns to apartment and condominium buildings of every decade, which is where bed bugs and German cockroaches (Blattella germanica) actually move, unit to unit rather than in from the yard. A raised bungalow lets an inspector under the floor. An Eichler does not, and the evidence has to be read off surfaces instead.