Saying Goodbye to our Home

When we first started researching how to get rid of mold and what items were safe to salvage from our house and what would have to be thrown away, the results were discouraging.

We were using the website, survivingtoxicmold.com , because it a lot of great information that seemed legitimate. It had an extensive list of what is able to be cleaned, what might be ok to keep, and what needs to be tossed. It also recommended washing all clothes (less than 1/2 in. thick) with ammonia first, to kill all the mold and mycotoxins, then with a cup of baking soda, to remove the rest of the spores, and then with epsom salts to kill any other bacteria that might be hiding. They also recommend rotating between normal wash and ammonia wash for the next year, since your skin will still be detoxing for a while.

Anything metal or glass could also be washed with a solution of ammonia and distilled water. (Only distilled water, because most tap water is chlorinated, and chlorine and ammonia mixed together creates toxic fumes) Pretty much anything else would need to be taken to the dump. Some plastics and some real wood furniture (as long as it's fully sealed and poly-coated) can be kept, if there is no sickness due to mold in your family. Anything that is mixed material or porous is lost. Anything that is thicker than 1/2" would have to go, because the mold spores could be buried deep inside, dormant until it is hot or damp enough for them to come out. Appliances can only be kept if no one is sick in the house. Books and papers can not be kept because mold feeds on the materials in the paper. This is what is hitting us the most. If you don't know us, we LOVE books. We already filled up two bookcases to overflowing in our home. This also includes our Bibles and bible study books. Stephen had a full bookcase of Bible study helps, concordances, study helps, etc. His Bible has been the only Bible he's owned for YEARS. His siblings even had it rebound for him just a few years ago. We are so torn about what to do about our books. We don't want to transfer mold to any place we live, but having to leave behind Stephen's Bible, full of years of notes and cross-references, is hard. We are trying to decide whether to trust what the mold expert said, and believe that the molds aren't a huge issue, but if we go by the website we've been trusting for everything else, we need to leave it behind. Thankfully most of our kitchen utensils and equipment can be saved, along with a few home decor items.

Another hard part about having to leave most of what is in our house, is that we have put a lot of work into fixing it up. We will be posting some before and after photos of our house once we get it cleaned up and ready to list for sale. We still had some work to do, but we had made a lot of progress!

But, all of that to say, if leaving our material possessions behind is what helps all of us, especially Stephen, get our health back then I will be the first to say, let's do it!!! No matter what sentimental things we have to take to the dump and leave behind, they are just things. We still have all the memories associated with all of our stuff, and nothing is more important that being able to enjoy everyday life with my favorite person on earth.

When we talked to the mold expert, he told us that if we fixed our crawl space by placing some vents and a fan, covering everything with plastic, and then fogging our entire home with a product he recommended, it should take care of the mold problem and would clean everything in the house. We didn't feel comfortable going back to live in our house, but if we did this, we would feel comfortable selling it. Stephen's family came down one weekend and one of his brothers stayed a week with us to get the crawlspace taken care of. Families are amazing.

Now we needed to fog the whole house so that we could go in and clean everything and get ready to list it for sale. We were also going to need to replace under the kitchen sink, because we had that on our to-do list for quite a while, due to the musty smell under there.

My dad volunteered to take care of the sink, so that Stephen wouldn't have to be exposed to the mold. Once he started pulling the boards off, he found lots of visible mold. Apparently, there was water leaking here, and the previous owner/builder of our house simply put tape around the pipes under the cabinet floor, so the water just collected... So thankful he was able to get in there and remediate that for us!

Also, remember the camper we have been staying in for about a month? Well, we were only borrowing it for a month, since we had decided not to buy it, so we went ahead and listed it for sale. We figured that we could go ahead and list it, and hopefully get a few bites, and then by the time the new camper got here, we might be close to getting it off of my parent's yard. Well, we listed the camper on a Sunday on Facebook Marketplace, and just 20 minute after listing it, we had three people coming to look at it THAT DAY. Just 3 hours later, it was sold. They told us that they would be back the next day to pick it up. So now we had less than 24 hours to get all of our belongings out and now needed to figure out our sleeping arrangements for the next few weeks. The weather and work schedules are just not working in our favor for the new camper to be delivered anytime soon, so we thought about maybe just tent camping for a few nights. We hated to move back into my parent's basement, because my dad uses the basement every morning to do his stretching, exercises, and also does his billing and invoicing on his computer downstairs. But after my parents heard we were thinking about tent camping, they told us we needed to be inside, especially if we were going to get storms soon. So, we piled all of our stuff in the basement and now we're just playing the waiting game!