Mold Removal – Be Safe
Mold removal will be needed once you begin to notice these specific signs within your home:
- Mold keeps showing up even after thorough cleaning
- You get better having been away from home for a day or more
- Itchy watery eyes, tickled throat, stuffed nose
- You get headaches on a weekly basis
- Sinus headaches
- Non-pattern hair loss
Mold removal is highly recommended if you have some of these problems. It means mold, or maybe even worse, black mold are growing and thriving within your house. Mold has a way of breaking down your immune system to a point where other threats of opportunity can get started and make you even more ill and in some instances extremely sick.
Mold removal can be as easy as wiping up the bathroom or more problematic when addressing water problems from a leak in the bathtub or roof. In general the bigger the area to clean up, the more it could negatively impact your house if you don’t follow proper precautions. For example, you see mold growing behind the toilet tank and between the toilet bowl. This is an isolated spot and there are no large mold areas in the house. Just clean this up with the normal mold cleaner or bleach.
However, if your mold removal problem is within a wall, you can’t see how much is needing to be removed. So you will have to estimate at least between the corresponding studs and all the way from floor to ceiling. That’s usually 16 inches by 8 feet and will require careful planning before you tear into it so that you don’t redistribute your mold problem all through the house.
That same wall may also be a bigger problem without you even knowing it, so that’s why being careful and planning are so important. The problem is the mold spores. All mold regenerates using spores that get airborne with the slightest of air currents or touches. The very moment you begin wiping, spraying or tearing down the wall spores will be sent all over. They are microscopic so you won’t notice them but you could have a slight reaction to their release.
Once the spores are set free because of your careless removal efforts, they will float around until they come in contact with a surface that is damp. They will land and stay there. Once they get some dust or other organic matter along with their moisture, they will thrive and build mold colonies which results in continuous mold spore releases.
You must contain the area for mold removal to avoid all the listed trouble. Containing the area using a closed door and an open window may work, you may need to use sheet plastic and duct tape to build a tent around the mold area to keep the mold spores within and then clean the inside of the tent before taking it down.
No matter how you contain it, just be sure you are keeping the mold spore risk to a minimum otherwise you have just helped it to survive and keep thriving within your home. The physical cleaning of mold should have you using a mold cleaner or a bleach solution. Give it enough kill time on the surface and wipe it up.
For the bigger jobs, you will be using similar cleaners, but you may want to allow the inner wall to air dry, then encapsulate it with a foam available at your favorite hardware store. This encapsulation will encase any left over mold cells and keep them from growing and will improve your mold removal effort. Then you just reinstall your drywall.
The primary part of mold removal is the planning and containment of the area. The physical cleaning is the easiest part of the job. Just be very cautious to avoid long term mold problems in your home.
