It's a dirty job...

...and we have to do it! At least some of it.

A crew came Thursday and Friday and removed our octopus. It's amazing how big the basement is without it and all its enormous metal arms stretching throughout the basement.



While that was going on we've been doing some demo. We had a suspicion that there might be some mold in the house, mostly because of a spot on the wall upstairs. That spot turned out to be nothing, but Moldex did find some little spots in the bathroom, bedroom, and kitchen, and also a bunch in the basement. We decided to save some money by taking care of as much of this as we could and letting them take care of the basement.

Our first stop was the kitchen. We probably cut out more than we needed to, but better safe than sorry, right?

Jeremy got me this cool bunny suit, we wore these awful ventilator masks, and we had a couple air scrubbers cleaning the air. We know the dangers of mold and we're going to kill it all dead.







So that's all washed and cleaned and dried and taken care of. That spot happened because of a bizarre flat roof detail right above there. But we'll be taking that away and putting on a better roof, so no more problems there!

We've moved our operation to the upstairs room now and are tearing out some stuff there.

The big job will be the basement. Part of our problem to start with is that it's incredibly humid down there and quite cold. I think even last week we could see our breath down there. Jeremy got a "humidistat" and it read less than 40 degrees and the humidity was off the charts (above 90%)!!

You can't run a dehumidifier in less than 60 degrees. It won't do anything. We tried. So our wonderful mold company brought in a stack of heaters and blowers and humidifiers this afternoon that they'll be running through the weekend to balance things out. Things have been getting better. Just as they were getting started I noted that the humidity was down to around 70% and the temperature had gone up to around 40. Already after a couple hours of running the equipment it looks like our humidity has dropped another 10%.

I'm praying that it will balance out and get to the proper amounts so the company can get in there and clean things out.