My blogging is obviously diminished. I just can't get into the groove of daily or even weekly blogs. I'll try to at least do a monthly one. The big issues that has us occupied are mold and cracks. Lets start off with the biggest one.
It started last Friday. Fiona mentioned how it smells in Jadon's room. She washed his sheets and comforter and it still smelled. All the while I got into my clean phase where I was hunting down toys (especially the Leapster cartridges that the kids keep misplacing). It lead me to look in the cracks between Jadon's bed and the wall. I was not to please what I had discovered. There was mold on the bottom of his bed board, carpet, baseboard, and a little bit on the wall. The length was about 1.5 feet. We mentioned it to our neighbor (who is also the President of our HOA). He said he would call his people on Monday (as they were closed Friday evening). We didn't hear from him until yesterday (Wednesday).
We did proceed with out him by getting a couple of inspections. The first person to come out was recommended by our HOA and they said that it does look like mold and that they can clean, replace the baseboard. The cost was about $350 (without carpet cleaning). The second person came out and said that the mold was dry and that all that was required was a deep cleaning. The third person, Fiona talked to over the phone, and said that if the mold was dry that just a cleaning would suffice.
So we had a carpet cleaner come out on Wednesday morning. We spent Tuesday night moving furniture out of his room. We shelled out 160 bucks to have them clean both Jadon's room, the girls' room, part of out hallway and staircase. Shortly after that was done, our neighbor talked to Fiona and noticed that there was dirt patch on the outside wall which happened to coincide with where the mold was in Jadon's room. He called his HOA company to have them look (which was the same company that the first guy came from but this time it was another person). The dirt patch on the outside was just dirt (and not mold like he suspected). As for Jadon's room, the guy said that it does look like just dried mold but he cannot confirm that 100% unless he opened up the wall. He said if it was a bursted pipe then the damage would be a lot worse. That we should probably see it on our garage wall (Jadon's room is right about it). We asked him what he recommended and he said we should open up the wall just to verify that there is or isn't wet mold. He said the dry mold is nothing to worry about because it just means the mold is pretty much dead. The cost would have been $1200 to do not including build back (which would have cost at least another $1500 my guess). We opted not to. We recounted that some years back, Jadon had puked in that area and that the mold could have grown from that even though we thought we had cleaned it well). Hopefully it just an isolated incident. The guy ended up wire scrubbing, HEPA vacuuming, and spraying area at no cost. That was nice of him. So now we are just planning on repainting Jadon's room as well as the baseboards.
The second big issues happened last Thursday. I noticed a thin crack running up the corner wall in our living room. I followed that corner by going upstairs into our bedroom. Low and behold, it was there too. There are also cracks on the wall in our front yard as well. Great! So right now, we are in the process of getting our home builder to come out and look at it. My guess is I'll have to do some patch work and perhaps another paint project. Sigh.
That's pretty much about it for now.
