WHAT NEXT?

If you’ve already established that there is a high probability of mold making you sick, your next move will be dependent upon the following factors:

Are you renting, or do you own the home? If you rent the home, you will unfortunately have much less control over the situation and how it it handled.

RENTING A MOLDY HOME

If you discover the home you’re renting is moldy and likely making you sick, you first need to decide if your intention is to break your lease and find a safer place to live, OR stay and get your landlord to remediate the mold, which can be extremely complicated. Since you don’t own the home, you won’t have much control or say throughout the entire inspection and remediation process, and there is no guarantee the remediation will be successful especially if your landlord chooses the lowest bid and just wants something on paper showing they addressed your concern.

Sometimes it’s just easier to leave and find a safer place to live rather than worry about whether or not your landlord is going to hire a reputable mold inspector, as well as hire a remediation company that will remediate properly. It really comes down to how compassionate your landlord is, how educated they are on handling mold the proper way, and how willing they are to spend the big bucks for a proper mold remediation. Most landlords, however, aren’t looking to hire the best of the best, because…well, doing it the right way is expensive! Many landlords think painting over mold or fogging a home to kill mold is perfectly acceptable, and it’s not! In fact, it’s irresponsible and reckless. They’re putting their tenants’ health in danger when they do this, which is why sometimes it’s just easier to leave.

If your intention is to break your lease, we highly recommend you get your ducks in order and have a new home (or somewhere you can stay) lined up before notifying your landlord of the mold issue. We’re not saying that all landlords are uncompassionate, but there are some pretty heartless ones out there and we’ve heard stories of landlords evicting their tenants when mold was brought into discussion before the tenants even had time to find a new place to stay.

You’ll also need to look at your lease to see if there any special provisions regarding mold, how it should be handled, and breaking the lease agreement. We recommend looking up your local laws as well to see what a landlord is responsible for when it comes to mold and keeping you safe. Unfortunately most laws are pretty loose when it comes to landlords and mold, but we still suggest looking into it.

As a general rule, tenants should report the mold issue (or suspected mold issue) to their landlord ASAP. If the landlord pushes back because there is no visible evidence of mold, you may want to consider providing your landlord with an ERMI report (a DIY mold dust test) to show the seriousness of the situation. This is when the landlord may give you some grace and allow you to break the lease with no penalties because they’d rather not deal with hiring a mold inspector and remediating the mold, or they may give you a really hard time and not want to do anything, or maybe they agree without any hesitation to hire a mold inspector. This is all really dependent on your landlord, your lease agreement, and your local laws.

Another important thing to note is landlords aren’t typically required to show their tenants the mold assessment report (from the mold inspector that the landlord hires or any testing done by the mold inspector). You would need to check your local laws to verify this though. If this happens to you, and the landlord tells you that mold wasn’t found during the inspection, that’s when you should put matters into your own hands and hire your OWN mold inspector because not all mold inspectors are created equally. You may even want to think about getting a mold literate lawyer involved as some point!

If your intention is to stay in the moldy home you’re renting, it is imperative that you educate yourself on proper mold inspection and mold remediation techniques, and not just sit back blindsided believing your landlord is going to handle everything the right way. Otherwise you may have a false sense of security once your home is “remediated”. There are many reasons for a failed mold remediation, which is why we created Minimizing Mold and our education portal.

OWNING A MOLDY HOME

If you’ve discovered the home you own is infested with mold and it’s making you sick, you’ll need to weigh the pros and cons of remediating your home vs. moving and attempting to find a safer place to live.

Many people are choosing to stay in their current homes and remediate due to the skyrocketing prices of homes nowadays. Others choose to stay in their homes and go through with remediation because after viewing dozens of potential homes to purchase, they cannot find that perfect “rainbow unicorn” of a home with a lower mold burden. No matter the home they look at, they find it will need some degree of mold remediation so it’s more convenient and less costly to just stay and remediate.

Some people choose to move out and sell their moldy homes because they simply cannot afford mold remediation and they found a cheaper living alternative, like staying with relatives.

Others decide to sell because they believe their home will never be safe even after mold remediation. If you’ve joined the Toxic Mold Support Group on Facebook, you’ll see a lot of fear mongering on there, and while sometimes it may not be worth it to remediate a home for mold, typically a home CAN be made safe again as long as a proper mold remediation is done, AND the majority of the mold in the home was located and addressed the right way! You just to make sure you hire a mold inspector and mold remediation company that know what they’re doing. This is why it’s so vital that you educate yourself as much as possible about proper mold inspection and mold remediation procedures because so many things can go wrong. If you don’t know what to look out for, you will be clueless as to why you’re still not able to heal in your home post mold remediation. You can absolutely have a botched or failed mold remediation for numerous reasons. Some reasons for a failed mold remediation include: the inspector did not find all the mold so further remediation is needed, the mold remediation company used dirty equipment or failed to use containment and negative air pressure, or the mold remediation company did not remove moldy material and just sprayed or painted over the mold.

Now yes- there are exceptions where someone may be hypersensitive to mold and mycotoxins, and even if all the proper steps were done to remediate, that person may still be reacting to their home, BUT THIS IS VERY RARE. Often the real issue is something like: the HVAC wasn’t cleaned, a small particulate cleaning of the ENTIRE home wasn’t done, or the homeowners didn’t do a purge of their possessions by throwing out porous contaminated items and cleaning the remaining items.

Another less commonly discussed topic is - some mold victims suffer from PTSD and as a result, they do not feel safe in their home even if they did have a successful mold remediation. This leads the person to believe they had a failed mold remediation, but in actuality, they did not. If you stay hyper-focused on the belief that your home is not safe place, your body will begin to believe that you aren’t in a safe environment, thus you will have an exceedingly hard time healing in your home. This is where brain and limbic system retraining exercises can be helpful if your nervous system has gone haywire. There are so many programs to choose from including GUPTA and MBSR, but our personal favorites are good ol’ meditation, affirmations, and yoga.

Regardless if you’re renting or own your home, if you want to learn what a proper mold inspection looks like, what a proper mold remediation looks like, how to clean your belongings, mold prevention tips, and so much more to protect your health and your family’s health from mold, you’ll benefit greatly from our mold education portal.

If your school or your child’s school is the moldy culprit, you’ll unfortunately have even less control.

This is when you need to decide if you’re going to: bring the mold to school’s attention to hopefully remediate properly, drop out (if in college), put your child in a different school or homeschool your child (if your child is is the one being impacted).

If your plan is to bring the mold to the school’s attention, which we highly recommend for the sake of all the children and adults occupying the building, we suggest first discussing with the Principal or Vice Principal of the school. If they dismiss your concern, then we suggest taking it up with the school district or your state/region’s health department. If that still doesn’t get you anywhere, that’s when we recommend alerting other adults, parents and the local media. We also highly recommend you hire a mold literate attorney if the school still isn’t budging.

You should also educate yourself on what a proper mold inspection and mold remediation looks like because the school is likely going to want to cut corners to save money. The more educated you are, the better, and the higher chance there is of the school having a successful mold remediation.

The easiest thing to do if your workplace is moldy is obviously just quit and find a new job (especially if your employer and HR department are difficult to deal with). A moldy work environment is probably the most difficult environment to to address, which is why it would be less stressful (in our opinion) to find a new place of employment.

If you have a caring employer and your job allows it, you may want to consider asking if you can work from home for health reasons. Rather than mentioning “mold illness” (if you fear your skeptical employer may laugh in your face), you could mention “mold allergies” instead. A mold allergy seems to be more acceptable by modern society even though we all know mold illness and mold toxicity is VERY real!

If your job doesn’t allow you to work from home and you really love your job, then absolutely bring up the mold issue with your employer or the HR department to see if they’re willing to remediate the mold for the sake of everyone’s health in the building. If they’re skeptical, send them some literate on mold illness.

If your employer agrees to mold remediation, we highly suggest you educate yourself on what a proper mold inspection and mold remediation looks like and keep an eye on the project (if you are able to). Most people don’t know what a proper mold inspection and remediation entails, and they blindly trust the “experts”. Sometimes those “experts” really don’t know what they’re doing and can make a mold situation worse than it was before.

If your employer doesn’t agree to mold remediation and you need to quit your job for the sake of your health, we highly recommend you document everything as this could be VERY beneficial if you need to file for unemployment. Recommended documentation includes photos of visible mold (if applicable), a mold test report called an ERMI, medical paperwork and lab results that show you are working with a doctor who has diagnosed you with mold illness, as well as emails, texts, or voice recordings (if legal in your area) proving that you brought up the mold issue with your employer and they refused to address it.