[socrates]

Hello,
I just wanted to get a few different opinions on how to accomplish this the "right" way. My house was built back in the 50's and I was recently sanding and working on redoing the closet in one of the bedrooms when I came across some nasty black paper which I assume was tar paper. The house has a crawl space underneath this portion. I tore out the tar paper and currently have gaps in the "sub floor" in which bugs spiders etc can crawl up from under neath. I was wondering how best to fill these gaps. Keep in mind I will be painting and primering the whole closet area and there will be 4 drawers covering this up so it's very unlikely anyone will see this unless they remove the drawers...The ideas I came up with were #1 Caulking it and painting it #2 redoing the tar paper (not a fan of this) #3. using some cheap vinyl squares underneath (still relatively expensive)

 

[TarheelTerp]

I was recently sanding and working on redoing the closet in one of the bedrooms when I came across some nasty black paper ... I tore out the tar paper and currently have gaps in the "sub floor"

I just wanted to get a few different opinions on...

OK. You need to add the missing "finished floor" layer.
(along with some new tar paper or it's modern version)

Something like this:

 

[socrates]

even though it doesn't really matter what it looks like and will most likely never be seen?

 

[TarheelTerp]

even though it doesn't really matter what it looks like and will most likely never be seen?

Yeah. You need to seal it up with a solid layer. You could do that with a simple layer of plywood or some of that crappy pergo stuff.

The cosmetics of what you use are don't matter.