Mold

I admit it. We have a serious problem. It's mold.

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.

Weekend Report

Friday: Painted Bedroom in apartment. I also baked a couple more cakes. While I was trimming the bedroom and baking cakes, Adam put "Herculiner" in the back of the new pickup. Warning! If you ever decide to do this yourself, wear a mask! Adam was breathing out this stuff for hours. It was crazy. Every time he exhaled, it smelt exactly like the stuff. I don't have a picture yet but I'll update this post with it later so check back.

Saturday: My mom came to help clean. Clean from top to bottom right? Well, we started with the ceiling fans. There are a lot in this house. 5 to be exact. They were all DIRTY.

What in the world? They lived like this. You can tell because the hair or whatever is on them is spun back.

When we first arrived at the house there were spider webs everywhere. The yard and all the plants looked like this.

We definitely have a spider problem along with our snake problem.

We also ripped out all of the carpet. It was pretty nasty.
Mauve. Master Bedroom.


Tan. Living Room.


Dark Blue. Smaller bedroom.


Light Blue. Bedroom.


We found a few surprises. Like ants.


This is the pretty flooring that we found underneath one of them.

I bet it was very pretty in it's heyday.

Adams sister Angie came to help clean in the afternoon and after getting the top layer of dust off of everything else, the kitchen was tackled. This was more of a job than it should have been because as you can see in the bottom left corner of this pic (click on it to view the pic larger) there was mildew on the fronts of the cabinets. The basement has a leak and with all of the rain we got last week and the house being shut up we developed a problem.


I'm happy to report that the cabinets are now sparkling!

I was doing some vacuuming and went to vacuum in the bedroom between the carpet tacks and the wall and had a surprise.

That ladies and gents is a little baby snake. Yuck Yuck Yuck. As I said before we have a snake problem. The sliding door was open all day so he got himself up the steps and into the house. I think that by the end of the time we are in this house I will most definitely develop a strong fear of snakes. They're just yucky. So I obviously had to get him out. So I got a screwdriver and tried to move him. And he started to slither and curl and move. Yuck! I kinda got him flung over by the door and he couldn't get up over the stoop and before I could get him out, he snuck to a small hole by the edge of the woodwork and got into it. Oh Man. Now what? Well, this is when your sister-in-law walks in the room and says "I don't know what you are worried about. It's just in your bedroom." Uh, thanks Angie for pointing that out. So I call Adam and say "Are you still at Menards?" And he is. "Get a can of that expanding spray foam." We sprayed some in the hole after he got hom and hopefully I won't have a snake in my bedroom again. I can only assume that the hole lead to the basement and the snake is in my basement now but Adam assures me that there isn't anything for him to eat down there and he'll die. Goodness I hope so.

We got the water turned on and we knew to watch because we saw something somewhere that made us think that there was some damage to the pipes since the house sat empty in the winter. Well, there was damage. Somewhere the pipes that go to the tub have a problem. So it was leaking into the master closet. So now the bathroom has a couple major problems. We had hoped we could leave the renovation of the bathroom alone for a little while to get back to a normal lifestyle for a little while and tackle it later but it looks like it's going to be one of the first things we do. The window in the bathroom is also broken and we can't get it to close all the way. It also doesn't have a shower. Just a tub.

I guess now we'll rip out the wall in front of the tub to fix the pipe and while we're at it, install a shower. We'll also take out the window and the woodwork around it and install glass block.

Oh wait, the window does close. :) Wink. Wink. I just realized for anyone out there who would like to get into my house.

So we'll also do whatever else we want to do to the bathroom. It's a weird shape and really really skinny. I'd like to knock out the back wall and push it back a foot to make it a normal size. We'll need to tile around the tub/shower and the floor and tear all that gold flaked tile off the walls. Take the wallpaper off and paint. Get a new mirror, etc, etc, etc. All that stuff that is part of remodeling a bathroom. There is a bathroom in the basement of this house that we can use if we get it cleaned up and the mold problem under control. It's scary down there but at least we'll have a toilet while the upstairs one is torn apart.

We also got the rest of the woodwork wiped off and the walls wiped down.

Adam picked up the flooring for the master and the living room while at Menards and brought it to the house to acclimate. If you are installing hardwood flooring, it needs to acclimate to your house. Otherwise it could expand or contract after you install it and then it won't fit right anymore. The flooring we picked for those rooms is all hardwood Hickory. It's very pretty, fairly light and verigated.

Adams parents got the game and I had a bachelorette party to go to so we quit fairly early.

At the bachelorette party we ended up at the restaurant Jazz in Omaha. If you are in Omaha, NE and like Cajun I recommend this place. It was very good and the food came super super quick. I was kinda scared of cajun after eating at a place that has crawfish and alligator and the such but I'm glad we ended up here because I no longer have to fear the food.

Sunday: We went to church and when we talked to the pastor about joining, she said (that's right. SHE) that they would take anybody :o) he he. ha ha. Anyway, we're gonna go talk to her soon and join the Lutheran church in Mead. It's Evangelical Lutheran and I've always been Missouri Synod and we went to a Missouri Synod church in Lincoln but there aren't too many huge differences.

Then we went to Omaha to get the flooring for the rest of the house. We planned on getting laminate since we don't want to overspend on this house and these rooms don't butt up against any of the other rooms. BUT, we had to run to Walmart to turn in an old battery (they give you a rebate if you buy one from them and bring in your old one) and had planned on getting the laminate from Menards or Home Depot but there is a Lowes right by Walmart and we ran in just to look. There, right in front of us, was engineered oak hardwood on clearance. Less than $1 a square foot! Really? Really! This house has a lot of nice woodwork that is all oak. Engineered hardwood is probably the best type of "wood" flooring out there. It was perfect for us. We made sure to get an extra box since it is clearanced in case something happens but we're excited about it.

We had to run to a couple Lowes to get enough boxes of the flooring so we didn't get back to working on the house on Sunday until around 3. We tore up all the carpet tacks and some baseboards. Most of the woodwork in the house is very nice but the secondary bedrooms and the living room have this old outdated look.

They needed to come off anyway to install the flooring so we're just gonna put new stuff in that matches the rest of the house. We got them all swept up and I painted them with Kilz type paint. There were pet spots and the living room floor smelled like cat. We also found some mold behind the baseboard in the closet of a bedroom so Adam climbed up into the attic to see where the water was coming from and found out that the house has 2 roofs. Weird. We knew that the house had been added onto and I guess when they did that, they did something weird with the roof. I'll try and get some pictures. The water is getting in somehow and dripping of the end of "the old roof". He also climbed up on the roof to check it out and the gutters are stuffed so maybe that is part of the problem. It got dark so we didn't find a solution to that just yet.

That's that.

Here's a pic of my kitty just for fun cuz she's weird and climbed into the washer.

Scary cat eyes. Yikes!