Tarkblog

We think that some of the celebjed related problems we’ve been having stems from bedroom mold.

On a whim, I bought a mold test kit a few weeks ago and we tested the house. This consisted of 3 petri dishes placed around the house in various rooms, and 1 placed outside as a “control” sample. You leave them open for about 30 minutes, then cap them off and put them in a dry dark place.

You wait 2 days and look. No mold? Wait another day.

No mold? Wait another day.

No mold? You’re healthy.

If you see mold, then you can either say “yes, we have mold” or send the kit off for lab analysis, which is what we did.

$39 later we got a report that our bedroom had 9 colonies of Penicillium. 9 doesn’t really mean anything, but you can only compare it to the other samples. Outside had a total of “2″ colonies of Penicillium. We took this to mean there might be some mold in the bedroom.

Now, there’s not really a good “source” of mold, per se. Our bedroom is on the 2st floor, and everything is dry. There isn’t much of an explanation of where itw ould be coming from. Still, the bathroom is nearby and we thought it might be a good place as a source since it has water in it. So we have scoured the bathroom multiple times with the bleaches in order to help with that.

But the wife was still having some migraine issues, and we decided maybe we should kick it up a notch. So, we started ripping out the carpet in the bedroom.

The whole process was a bit of a pain, though not very difficult. The only thing that made it tricky was that I did it without removing any furniture from the room. I basically moved stuff, cut of a strip of carpet and removed it from the room, then relocated items onto the new bare floor and did the same thing. Eventually we had removed a perimeter of carpet from the whole room with just an “area rug” looking carpet right in the middle. Sliding the bed around a bit and lifting, we yanked it out. The only hard part was removing the tack strip and all of the staples used to fasten the padding to the floor.

Underneath is surprisingly good hardwood. It’s not in tip top shape. It will definitely need to be refinished. The previous owners also painted the room without any protection (probably just before they put the carpet in) so there are paint stains on the floor.

As well, there is one area by the door that shows sign of a water stain at some point. There looks to be some mold residue on the floor on that spot. We cleaned it up a bit.

Also, near the window, the tack strip was definitely moldy, and the floor shows signs of having mold on it there too. The wood in that area sounds hollow. I don’t know if the wood floor itself is hollow or the subfloor has damage to it. Time will tell.

But at least now that carpet is gone and the hopeful source of mold has been removed. We’re going to continue our carpet removal process throughout the rest of the upstairs as time permits.

Of course the initial downside is that the creaky parts of the floor are much more creaky, and you can hear someone walking upstairs on the floor when you are downstairs much more loudly. But it’s something we’ll live with if it fixes our ailments and symptoms.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007 at 6:08 pm and is filed under Random Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.