The Day The Outdoor Mold Moved In: A True Story

There is outdoor mold, and there is indoor mold. At least, that is what most people think. You cannot actually bring garden mold inside and it will continue to grow and reproduce, right? Actually, mold is not as particular as you think. You have to remember one very important fact about mold; it is a fungus. It spreads by spores, and spores can go and grow wherever conditions are favorable. 

That said, outdoor mold can certainly grow indoors, and vice versa. It only has to be warm and humid or moist for mold spores to find a spot, hunker down, grow, and create spore copies of itself. While mold is not exactly a sentient creature, it is a living thing that works hard to remain alive. The spores will find a way to survive, even if that means coming inside your home when the weather gets too cold or too dry outside. If you make the conditions unfavorable to mold, it will not want to move indoors and hang out with you. Here are a few things you can do to discourage mold from coming inside.

Dry-Wash Carpets in Entryways 

Mold spores trek inside via your shoes, pant legs, hairy legs, and even your pets. If your entryways into the house have carpeted floors, you can bet that mold will bed right down there. You can always tell that mold is living in these carpets because the carpets themselves smell really funky. Hire a carpet cleaning service that can dry-wash the carpets and treat them for mold. 

A dry-wash involves cleaning the carpets with very little water and using a dry cleaning agent to clean the carpets instead of shampoo. A family-friendly fungicide is used over the top of that to kill any remaining and living spores and prevent the habitation of new spores for about a month to three months. It is also a good idea to treat high traffic areas in the same manner.

Check Your Bathrooms

Mold loves bathrooms! What a better place to hunker down and grow tons of cloned spores than a frequently hot, moist, and humid bathroom. The mold will hide here, so you may have to get very close to a lot of unseen cracks and spaces. Check under the sink vanity, around any exposed pipes, down along the base of the toilet and behind the toilet, and all around and in the tub/shower. If you spot any mold, consult with a residential mold removal service to see what can be done to remove it.

Peek-a-Boo Through the Kitchen

In, around, and under your kitchen sink, your refrigerator and on the back walls of your lower cabinets closest to the sink is where mold loves to lurk. It is a game of peek-a-boo to spot mold in these areas, since the lack of light can hide the mold from plain sight for a long time. If it is bad enough, you will need to remove these items and have a mold remediation contractor remove the cabinets and/or refrigerator to eliminate the mold and prevent it from growing back.

Sneaked Through the Back Door

Oh, dear! Did you come in from the garden via the back door and head into the basement for something? Mold just hitched a ride inside your home, and you dropped the spores in the one part of your house where it will grow the fastest: your basement. Because you do not go down into the basement for much, the mold spores you trekked into the basement can go everywhere, and grow rapidly because of the intense moisture. Unless you run a dehumidifier non-stop down there, the mold has a new home. The mold can spread all the way up to your roof from there.

Talk to professionals at a place like Safe-Way Waterproofing & Mold Remediation for more information. 

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