Adventures in mold removal or contractors with gas masks

My house is a disaster zone. Machines making as much noise a car assembly line and enough translucent plastic to cover a football field do not a friendly home make. All of this to get rid of some (well a lot) of moldy drywall. This sucks.

How did I get into this situation? Well I guess it all started with my obsession with HDTV. We won't go into to that because it's boring and geeky and didn't yield any interesting information. It turns out that all of my house's wonderful qualities -- it sits on a flag lot 150 feet removed from my cul-de-sac, it is surrounded by woods and yet has access to the benefits of Suburbia, and it has no grass to mow! Anyway, all of these things make for the worlds worst over the air TV reception in the history of TV reception.

Anyway, mounting a large variety of antennas on the flat part of my roof caused small holes. There were also places on the roof where puddles of water would form after rain. Melting snow and rain got into the holes, sat on the puddles and leaked into the house. Little by little mold crept along the drywall, forming a covering that looked like black lace. Then 18 months ago I got sick. I couldn't climb a single flight of stairs without being completely out of breath. More disturbingly I couldn't think. Anyway, after a lot of appointments with too many doctors I was prescribed an asthma inhaler and I could breathe again. I still constantly had the sniffles and mild cold like symptoms.

Eventually this kept bugging me, so I bought a test kit and went to collect some samples. Checking on top of some cabinets below where some of the worst water damage was, I found a small pile of what could have been dust. I picked it up and ran it through my fingers.

Ten hours later I was in bed. Ten days later, I finally felt better. I missed a friend's wedding in the interim and now knew I had a serious problem.

So two thirds of my house has been sealed off with translucent plastic from floor to ceiling. The living room and kitchen are sealed and since the guest room, guest bathroom, and laundry room are off the kitchen, they're sealed off too. There are large machines that are pulling air into or pushing air out of the house.

The first night my two cats (Rosencrantz and Gildenstern) wouldn't come out from under the bed for 2 hours and looked like they wanted to kill me or petition for a new owner. They've since adjusted some.

In case someone wants the real deal on this process, here's the scoop on how the people who are working on my house did things.

First you hire someone called a hygienist. This person does an inspection, takes air samples and writes up a plan of work. You can use this plan to do the work yourself or hire someone. I hired people.

The second group are called remediators. They're contractors who wear gas masks and white overalls on top of their clothes. First they seal off the affected area with thick plastic, tape, and staples. Then, they rip out the moldy stuff with saws and such. While they're ripping off stuff big machines are running to create "negative air pressure" (to keep the dust and mold in the room). Now they vacuum all the loose junk up and scrub the exposed wood beams.

After all this is done the air purifying machines still need to run for 3 days. That's the part they didn't tell me about. Then the hygienist comes back and does a visual inspection (to make sure they got all the mold) and takes more air samples. After the hygienist leaves (but before the results from the air samples come back) you get your house back.

So the two companies with two roles create a "checks and balances" setup. Personally I wonder if there are referral fees are some such going back and forth, but maybe I'm just being paranoid. More fun to come as the work goes on.