It grows on you
Don’t let dangerous black mold force you and your family into an extended stay away from home
By Joanna Dehn Beresford 06/17/2010
This week’s story is about a person I’m calling Foxy Moxy, who recently lived with her family in a couple of residential-style hotels. She’ll tell you they’re not all created equal, but her preferences might surprise you.
Foxy and her Moxy crew didn’t move into the hotels because they couldn’t live without room service. They did it because my friend’s husband, Mr. Moxy, almost died due to exposure to black mold, formally known as stachybotrys, which nastiness had stealthily invaded their bathroom and exacerbated his allergies, leading him to keel over on a golf course. At considerable cost to their finances and changes to their lifestyles, they vacated their home so a crew could move in and eradicate the plague-ish fungi. Unfortunately, black mold presents a formidable force to be reckoned within both residential and commercial buildings.
Mold is a living organism that produces spores in order to reproduce and survive, which waft through the air of a place and can cause irritation, even danger to humans who are susceptible. Asthma sufferers in particular will generally react dismally to the presence of mold spores. Others, with or without allergic predispositions, may experience a variety of symptoms in the presence of the mold spores, including nasal stuffiness, eye or skin irritation, wheezing and lung infection.
The black mold health issue is somewhat controversial, actually. These are murky, spore-infested waters that homeowners, physicians and insurance companies navigate, often in different boats, as it were. But all of them generally agree that mold poses a genuine health hazard.
“Don’t even go in there,” says Kerry Anderson, a Windermere real estate agent who’s been working in Southern California for seven years, when referring to mold-infested properties. She describes broken water pipes in a bathroom that caused mold to literally cover the walls of the room, and giant mushrooms growing on carpets in a leaky home that was abandoned for several months during a hot summer.
“Mold is definitely a toxic material that’s hazardous to our health. If there’s mold in a home you have to call in experts who specialize in treating and removing mold. It’s a serious issue,” Anderson said.
But who’s responsible for it? I mean, besides God, or the hands of fate, or poltergeists tampering with pipes and water sources, who’s to blame for mold? And who’s going to pay for its removal once it’s detected?
Foxy Moxy and her family continue to battle this conundrum. Insurance companies blame builders, who blame plumbers, who blame homeowner associations, who blame sloppy homeowners, who blame the inevitable effects of water usage.
At first, when the Moxys believed their insurance company would cover the cost of eradication, they packed up their essential belongings and moved into an expensive hotel. What they couldn’t bring with them they stuffed into boxes and stashed in a storage unit. They stayed at an Embassy Suites facility, where they enjoyed a wonderful bar and restaurants and an upscale game room for their children. The setting was fairly luxurious, but Foxy Moxy thought the staff was “hoity toity” and she wasn’t altogether devastated when they realized that they might be subsidizing their own exodus from the mold-infested home, prompting their relocation to a Homewood Suites extended-stay hotel, which offered dinners for their guests Monday through Thursday and complimentary breakfast every morning. The pool was delicious; the kids loved the experience.
Now, as attorneys continue squabbling over rights and responsibilities, i.e. money, the Moxy family has retreated to a vacation cabin in the mountains. Foxy maintains her business there and Mr. Moxy commutes to work. Meanwhile, they’re attempting to be proactive about the situation and the future of their home by consulting with experts and researching the icky unwanted molds on the Web.
Control the moisture in your home, urges Foxy. Repair leaks, clean hard surfaces with detergent and prevent condensation on exterior surfaces like windows and walls. And if you’re forced to resort to hotel living, consider the long-term, practical and economic needs of yourself and your family.
Contact Joanna Dehn Beresford at truewrite@yahoo.com.
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