The Dangers and Frustrations of Dealing with Mold

Mold can grow virtually anywhere. We have all seen those nasty, fuzzy little spores popping up on tomatoes and cucumbers that were forgotten about at the back of the fridge. A much more expensive problem to manage is what to do when homes and offices have mold growing in them. After all, one cannot simply throw their home into the curbside compost bin. This is why it is important to know all of your options when considering the steps to take when asking about mold remediation near me.

The precariousness of airborne spores

Suppose a basement in a temperate climate home was experiencing a series of micro-floods that were going unnoticed to a busy, distracted homeowner, in the form of saturated underlay that made the carpet feel only slightly damp when walking on it. As the recurring water deposits begin to feed the existing colony of spores, the fungi expand along the surface area of the floor, and creep closer to the baseboards, where there is a cold air intake duct. Maybe the owner suspects contamination by noticing an odor and decides to lift the carpet. Upon discovering the subterranean microbial network, the goal immediately becomes a matter of salvaging the carpet itself, which appears uncontaminated. The owner, instead of searching for mold remediation near me, on his or her smartphone, decides to save some money and attempt a DIY remediation.

Our protagonist homeowner frantically decides to peel the entire carpet back to get it exposed drying as quickly as possible. The next step is to get busy with a knife to cut out and remove all that contaminated underlay. Crouching on hands and knees, the owner – knife in hand – observes that the thickest concentration of mold is in the center of the room, where the water must be getting in. The remediation plan is now a trivially obvious one; take out as much of the central underlay as possible to locate the source of water entry and prevent further contamination. After forty-five minutes of strenuous elbow grease, the culprit reveals itself; a series of tiny cracks in the concrete, where the groundwater is seeping up and through. The cracks are letting in just enough water to keep the underlay moist so that spores can grow and there is just enough baseline humidity in the basement itself to nurture the fungi to sustenance. The owner gets to a local hardware store and picks up a small bucket of concrete filler and a caulking gun. I got this, he thinks – I don’t need to waste time and money looking through the mold remediation near me pop ups on google.

Repairs

The rest of the day is spent repairing the concrete. Now it is very late, because the owner wants to make sure that all the newly repaired cracks are given the chance to dry overnight. Besides, he will be up again in six hours, so its probably okay to let the remaining peripheral mold sit there uncovered for that time, right? The next morning, the owner gets all the old underlay removed, and is relieved to see that there are no more cracks. I am in the clear, he thinks.

Some History

The owner’s house was built during a major boom in the 1970s. The cracks in the concrete are common in his neighborhood, where the construction was hasty and sloppy. Besides the defective concrete, there is poorly installed furnace ducts. There is one spot where fragments of fiberglass insulation are poking through a defect in the duct housing. While the owner was spending all his efforts repairing the concrete and leaving sections of peripheral mold near the baseboards exposed, the filters on the intake vents caught almost all the airborne spores, except one. This single lone spore, traveling along the pathway of the duct, became stuck to the bit of stray insulation. The air in there is humid enough that a second spore appears, and then a third….

If only the owner had decided to call one of the mold remediation near me companies, instead of just leaving the page, this subsequent disaster could have been prevented easily, with the use of air tight containment units, and airborne mold detection devices. But, at least there won’t be any more mold growing under the carpet, for the next little while anyway.