The power to the house was turned on yesterday and when I could finally see the extent of the mold, it was a little scary and I thought "how in the world am I and my little spray bottle of vinegar going to win this war?" Well, the answer is we're not and I'll explain more later.
All I can say is that it's a very good thing that we got into the house early. If this had been left alone for a whole other week with the house locked up it would have been bad. As it was, it had made its way up into the kitchen and latched onto the cabinets already. When I went to the house on Thursday I noticed something on the fronts of the cabinets but I just thought it was something that had dripped down when someone was doing something at the sink. By the time I went back on Saturday it was on most of the fronts of the bottom cabinets. And you can see how it did it.
When you go down to the basement and look straight ahead at the walls you can see how it crawled up from the basement floors to the basement walls and then around up to these walls and then up and into the kitchen.
Like this.
Here is what these walls look like close up
The basement walls, well, they're a totally different beast.
I attacked them with my spray bottle and vinegar just to try and get a start, we set up 2 dehumidifiers and 4 fans to try and dry it out a little, and I encountered a huge scary spider. Yikes. Anyway, we know my vinegar isn't going to do the trick so Adam took today off and is renting a fogger from Home Depot to attack it in a major way. We are going to fog today and then tomorrow we will tear out the effected drywall and fog again.
Here are a couple pics of the basement for a greater understanding.
There is a bathroom down there that at the moment is very scary.
Also because it's so wet down there, paint is coming off the walls and floor. The right kind of paint was obviously not used and so we have to deal with this scene also.
We also found some mold upstairs in the closet on Sunday.
This is after being sprayed a couple of times
This mold however, didn't come from the basement. It came from a leak in the roof. We didn't know exactly where on the roof though so one of us had to go up on the roof with a hose and one up in the attic to find the leak. I chose roof. No idea why. Anyone ever gotten on a roof and not known how to get down? That would be me. It was pretty steep where the ladder was and it had also gotten wet in the process and I was scared I was going to slip trying to get to the ladder. Heart attack time. Needless to say my hubby came to the rescue and I made it to work today. The leak? Oh yeah, back to the leak.
Here's where the water is coming in. The house was added onto and there is an old chimney type thing that water is getting in around. Here is a shot from in the attic.
Like I said the house was added onto so there are sort of 2 roofs on the house.
Interesting.
And we have a couple other places where there is water getting in. This is under a window.
Around the patio door
From the pipe leak behind the tub.
That leaves only one bedroom without any water damage and its of course the smallest one. This one.
It's ready and waiting. I think since we are doing hardwood flooring throughout, this room at this point is the only one we can lay flooring in. This may be our bedroom for a while. Even with this as our bedroom, the dining room as our living room and a full kitchen and bath, it's more space than we're living in now. We'll be just fine :) The awkwardness of living in a renovation in progress house...it's give and take. The house gives you a bedroom w/o water damage? You sleep in it.
Here's the pics of the newly lined pickup.
Ohhh. Ahhhh.
And I leave you with some more mold.
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