A Year of Resilience, Part 5
So there we were, after several months of chronic illness for our 4yo son Theo (Part 1), which led us down a whole new holistic healing path (Part 2), only to discover that the true source of the problem was mold in our home (Part 3). We moved out the same day and within 2 weeks, the kids started detoxing and finally getting better (Part 4) — for the first time in almost a year.
We were spending a bittersweet summer moving back and forth between my parents’ house (just 10 minutes down the road from our own) and my in-laws’ place at the shore.
Each was wonderful and challenging in different ways.
When we stayed at my parents’ we could catch up on doctor appointments and feel a bit more normal being in our town, but with the double-edged sword of being so close to home without actually being able to go there. Many days, the kids and I would literally drive past our neighborhood and I’d have to explain to Theo all over again why we couldn’t go home.
I had only been back once to grab a few things we needed, and there were still crayons out on the kids’ table. It was like we’d just run out to do some errands and would be back any minute. But that couldn’t be farther from the truth. I lost it completely, packed our things amidst sobs and just kept repeating to myself that everything was okay (even though it really really didn’t feel like it).
Meanwhile, being at the shore gave us distance, clarity, and the ability to pretend like we were just on vacation for a while. Except whenever we needed to do something for the house (like choose new flooring and measure how much we needed) or Sam had to go into the office (and leave at 4am to get there), we were reminded just how far from home we were.
Meanwhile, resolving things at home was anything but straightforward.
The Nightmare of Mold Continues
My husband Sam had this burning suspicion that the source of our mold problem was our upstairs bathroom, which was right next to Theo’s room. He’d bought a moisture meter to test around the house and was getting a super high reading in one spot on our living room ceiling, directly below the bathroom where the toilet would be. He marked it with blue painter’s tape, and we decided that was the first place we should investigate.
A few days after the kids and I moved out in May, the mold inspector came to test our house. He ended up finding some mold in our attic sheathing and HVAC system’s return, but he brushed off the high moisture reading from our living room ceiling, saying it was probably just a metal flange or something. He thought the bathroom seemed okay and didn’t feel the need to do any further investigating.
We figured that maybe Theo’s ceiling fan wasn’t properly sealed and was pulling mold spores down from the attic into his room, along with mold and spores being pumped through our vents. It didn’t seem like that much, but we weren’t sure how sensitive Theo was and figured it was plausible. After all, the mold inspector was supposed to be the expert, so we went with it.
The attic had an air circulation problem from our two different types of vents fighting each other for air flow. The moisture stayed stuck, and mold grew as a result. Meanwhile, our HVAC was 19-years-old (on a 15-year life expectancy) and our roof wasn’t new either.
We didn’t think it made sense to pay for remediation when our HVAC was overdue to be replaced anyway. The roof should have had another 5 years, but we weren’t messing around. So we took the money we’d been saving for a home addition and we decided to replace our entire roof (fixing the ventilation issue in the process) and HVAC (with an LED air purifying system), plus have all our air ducts cleaned.
We figured all of the contaminated attic debris could just be tossed off the roof so it wouldn’t go through the house, the roof would get replaced, we’d have the air ducts cleaned, and then our pristine new HVAC system would clean up the rest. Sam scheduled all this on back-to-back days at the end of June and planned to be home to oversee it all.
No, these were not exciting transformative upgrades for our home, and once they were done our house looked basically the same as it did before. But we knew they’d need to happen eventually, and if this could make our home safe again, it was worth it.
Meanwhile, we’d read about the horrors of mold spores, how they spread so easily, and how nothing porous was safe. Our carpets upstairs were awful (thin with barely any padding and all of us stepping on random staples) and we’d been meaning to replace them for years. Well, we definitely didn’t trust them now.
So at the end of June, we moved back to my parents’ house again and Sam got to work at our house, moving literally all our upstairs furniture, decor, and belongings downstairs into our living room and ripping all the carpets out himself.
At this point, our living room is like one big Tetris game made of our belongings, and as Sam’s lugging all this furniture around and tearing out carpets, he keeps seeing those blue tape marks on the living room ceiling. For some reason deep down, he still doesn’t trust the bathroom.
We’re not living there anyway so, as the air ducts are being cleaned, Sam decides he’s going to do his own investigation. He removes the toilet and finds all this gross gunk underneath, including stuff that looks an awful lot like mold. And as he strips away the tile to the subfloor underneath, mold. He removes a patch of subfloor where the toilet had been — more mold. Much more than the mold inspector had found in our attic or HVAC.
Sam’s suspicions were confirmed.
Our upstairs bathroom was the real problem. The same bathroom that’s right next to Theo’s room. With a water access panel in his bedroom wall. Right next to where Theo’s bed had always been.
It all lined up, literally.
Here was the source of what was making our son so ill — a slow leak from a failed wax seal under a toilet — directly above those blue tape marks on the living room ceiling.
Worse yet, apparently drywall is porous like a piece of bread, so mold, its spores, and the toxins that result can pass right through it. This means that not only are the bathroom and Theo’s room contaminated, but — with mold growing in the subfloor underneath our bathroom — so is our living room below. The same living room where our family spent most of our time together, and where all of our furniture and possessions are now stacked up almost to the ceiling.
There was no other option. After dropping tens of thousands of dollars on a new roof and HVAC system, we prepared to spend thousands more to deal with the true source of the problem.
A Crash Course in Mold Remediation
When we contacted the remediation company, they told us what we needed first was an industrial hygienist (basically an even more legit and qualified mold inspector) to come out and do baseline testing, since the original mold inspector hadn’t tested the bathroom directly and things were different now that Sam had opened it all up. We felt like we had failed. We had already invested a lot in what we thought was quality mold testing (along with so many other things), but apparently it wasn’t enough. We were frustrated to put it mildly.
Thankfully, after explaining our situation — the months of chronic illness for our kids, being displaced from our home, and already having invested a decent amount for mold inspection, plus a new roof and HVAC system — the remediation company agreed that they could use the original air quality numbers as the baseline and the industrial hygienist could just come out out after the remediation to do the post-testing.
The plan was to have them quarantine our living room and entire upstairs for a no-nonsense remediation and run air scrubbers throughout the whole house. They booked us for the first week of August, but before any remediation could happen, we needed to move all of our stuff… again. And not just the upstairs stuff that was now stacked up to the contaminated ceiling of our living room, but basically everything from downstairs too.
Now I say we, but really Sam is the one doing all of this at home by himself. I’m busy taking care of the kids, so all of the actual work of sorting through our life for what to move, what to donate, and what to throw away all fell on Sam’s shoulders.
Every week over, Sam was the one either driving back from the beach at 4am to get there in time to go into the office, make house progress, and come back a day later (or the same day) at 10pm, or working all day from our contaminated house while he tried to get things done and needing to strip down and shower as soon as he came back to my parents’ house each night to not contaminate things there.
This was an especially tough period for Sam and I, both feeling like we weren’t doing enough but not having the capacity to do any more. Sam missed us like crazy and wished he could help more with the kids. Meanwhile, I wished I could pitch in more at home so he didn’t have to do all this alone. We both felt the weight of not being able to help each other more and having to weather this part of the path separately, but we were doing what we needed to do. Dividing and conquering, or at least surviving.
Sam rented a storage unit for all our belongings, and moved anything that we thought could be saved. We knew mold spores could hide in porous surfaces, so if it couldn’t be washed or cleaned to our standards, we threw it away. Sam had already torn out all our carpets upstairs (along with all our baseboards and trim), but our mattresses, living room sofa and chair, area rugs, and most of the kids’ stuffed animals all got tossed. So many of our possessions, now just trash.
It’s easy to say “it’s just stuff” until you need to throw away all these mementos of your life together. It was truly awful, essentially throwing away our hard-earned money as we were spending so much more, breaking all sentimental ties to our belongings, and watching these bits of the home we’d built get stripped away one by one.
You’re probably thinking, I hope they have home insurance. We do, but unfortunately, home insurance only covers “sudden and accidental losses.” So even though mold had poisoned our children and displaced us from our home for months, none of it was covered. After talking to our insurance broker and multiple public adjustors, we didn’t even bother filing a claim since we could have lost our claims-free discount. Some system.
The remediation was much more expensive than we’d hoped, but we wanted to do this the right way and weren’t going to pinch pennies when it came to making our house safe again. Thankfully, we still had some money that we’d been saving for a home addition (which seemed like a twisted joke now) and we were blessed that my parents stepped in to help too.
The remediation week finally arrived.
They quarantined our entire upstairs and a good bit of our living room, cut through the bathroom subfloor and our living room ceiling to remove all the mold, and cleaned everything in the quarantine zones — along with running air scrubbers throughout the whole house.
Sam cleaned literally everything else over the course of 3 days (while working) since he wanted to do it all while the air scrubbers were there running so they’d pick up any spores that were stirred up.
I think I should clarify what I mean when I say “clean” here. The process is what they call a “HEPA sandwich,” where you first HEPA vacuum every inch of a surface (did I mention we bought a HEPA vacuum for this?), spray and wipe it down with a mold cleaning solution, let it dry, and then HEPA vacuum it all over again. While the pros did this in “containment” (the quarantined area), Sam did it in the whole rest of our house.
Luckily, Sam’s dad was there to help so he wasn’t doing it all alone and we hoped we were finally nearing the end of this mold nightmare. But when Sam’s dad returned to the beach and read Theo stories before bed that night, none of us thought to mention him changing clothes or showering. Theo had a particularly bad night terror episode and accident that night — a telltale sign of mold exposure — the first night terror he’d had in over a month. We got through it and washed all his bedding again with the mold solution, but my hopes sank as to what this meant for our home.
Worse yet, we’d been having torrential downpours at home for days and Sam ran downstairs grab something only to find water in our basement — the basement he had been trying to finish for years, building walls and putting up drywall whenever he had spare time.
When Sam found the water, he pulled back some of the drywall he’d installed and found — you guessed it — more mold.
We thought we finally had a handle on the mold problem, and had even considered the things stored in our basement to be safe. Now here was mold rearing its ugly head again. It felt like a cruel joke, like we just couldn’t win.
We knew the water was because of an issue with the slope of our driveway, a problem we had planned on fixing when we did our home addition (an impossible dream at this point). Luckily we were mid-remediation at this point, so the pros agreed to handle it, but Sam kissed any hope of finishing our basement goodbye.
And if we couldn’t do the addition and couldn’t finish our basement to give us more space, and Theo was having night terrors anytime something came back from our house, where did that leave us?
Join me for Part 6, the final part of our story, as we figure out if we can make our home safe again or if we need to say goodbye for good.
