108: Stay or Go?

Hey, everyone.

So in the middle of recording this.

Episode, you're about to hear my phone just turned off, so.

It just kind of cuts off abruptly. So what I'm going to do is make this episode part one, which is why it has part one in the title. And then next week when I record, I'll finish out what I was saying, which will be part two. So this episode is the first half of what you're going to hear about should you stay or should you move? Basically, it's a question that comes up all the time. And, you know, there's questions and, and things we typically think of when we try to rationalize stuff and we try to think of things almost like too in depth and we don't really just see it for what it is sometimes. And so this episode is just to help us sort of think through that process and, and make that decision on what's going on. So again, this is part one of should I stay or Go? And then next week I'll record part two for you.

Hello again, everyone, and welcome to today's show. If you're one of the 130 million people that are dealing with Sirs Lyme disease, autoimmune disease, or other conditions that are impacted by mold on a daily basis and you need to learn how to eliminate that exposure, then you're in the right place. My name is Brian Carr and you're listening to Mold Finders Radio.

Foreign.

What is going on today? To talk. I'm doing this one solo. I'm not on Clubhouse today because I. It's. I think it's going to be a little quicker. So I just wanted to make sure that I could kind of get to everything.

I've been getting, been getting a lot of questions from clients on results calls and report reviews and different things about, you know, what do we do from here? Right. What. We have all of this stuff. We found a number of problems. How bad is this? Should we be remediating this? Should we not? Should we be looking to move all of that stuff? Stuff, Right. And it's a pretty standard question and it comes up most times and initially because it's a little overwhelming a lot when you go through a house using, you know, a molefinder's method process and you go through the house, even if you did it on your own, Right. The number of things that you find, it gets overwhelming. And then immediately we start thinking, well, what do we have to do? You start thinking, worst case scenario, you know, the dollar signs start adding up and the. Basically where this, where this thought process goes is I think we should just move. That's, that's usually, that's usually where the first spot that, that you land. And it's not that easy. Okay? And I always, I have the same talk like over and over and over again. So I thought I would just record it here and then, you know, everybody.

Can hear it.

And listen. Some homes are definitely worse than other homes, right? It's not like every home is the same, you know, but there are some things you need to think about before you just get up and decide that you're going to move, you know.

And listen, for some people it might make, it might make sense to move. And sometimes the reason to move has nothing to do with what it's going to take to fix the house, but it's just because of your feeling of the house. You don't feel like it'll ever be to the point where you want it to be. You have like this internal sort of, I don't know, you've kind of like had this separation from your house internally and it's like it's turned into this thing that's hurting you. And even if you fixed it and remediated it and did whatever you needed to do, you still always would have like that scar from it and maybe not ever fully trust it. It. Right? If that is the case and that is you, then you should, you should look for something else, right? Because you could invest a lot of time, a lot of money, a lot of just inconvenience, which is a nice way to put it, to get it all done. And you could do it totally right, you know, you could do it completely right, and you'll come back in and maybe when you go to sleep at night, it's like creeping in the back of your mind, right? Like you're never fully comfortable. If you're that type of person, right. Then maybe it does make sense to think maybe I should look somewhere else. Okay? If you're not that type of person, if you're somebody who could say, listen, I understand there's a problem here. I understand there's a process for it to be fixed. We've started the process. I know where it's coming from. I know how it's moving through the house. I have a blueprint in front of me of how to get it handled. I feel good about the team that's around me and who's know, help to this point and how we're going to move forward. If you could think of it that way and be okay with it then sure, it's definitely worth trying to explore getting it fixed. The thing is, is when people talk to me, they don't have their remediation bids yet. They haven't started talking to a real estate agent yet. They haven't done a lot of the things you need to do to truly be able to make that decision. So when they ask me like, should I stay or should I go? It's really not a fair question because your situation is very different than every other person's situation, right? Where do you live? What's real estate look like? How fast is this going? Is there markups for stuff? Do people not care if they're buying things? Are houses selling in three days over ask just because of demand? Are, you know what, what's the deal with the timelines for a remediation? Where would you live while remediation is happening? Like all of these things that you need to figure out before you get to that point. So the, the setup here is that we can't just get the inspection back. You can't just go through your house, you know, let's say using Wolfinder's method, even on your own, go through your house, see all this stuff, and immediately be like, I'm going to go. Okay, so there's a few things here to keep in mind. First thing, let's just talk about homes in general. Every home has a problem. Every single one. I've been doing this for almost 10 years or so. Something around there. I keep forgetting what year it is, but it's been a long time. And I literally can count on one hand the number of times I walked into a house and didn't find anything. Okay? Every house has something. So it's not that your house is the random house that has a mold problem. It might be maybe a little more than another place, right? You might have more things going on in your place, in a different place. But every place has something. Even new homes, every place has something going on. Okay? So that's the first thing we got to wipe out of our mind. First thing we got to wipe out is that it's only my house. If I leave my house and go somewhere else, everything's going to be better. It's not. And if that's the thought process that you have, then you're going to go into your new house and you're still probably going to be feeling somewhat similar to how you're feeling, right? You may feel a little better if there's less stuff going on in that house, but there's still things happening there, right? So it's not as easy as just get up, go somewhere else. Okay? So that's the first thing. Now the second thing, let's say that you were gonna just. Let's say that you did want to do that, okay? The thing that you have going for you, where you live right now, depending on how long you've been there, and even if it's a shorter term period, it doesn't matter. You have a history. You know what's gone on in your house for the time that you live there. You know that. That three years ago, this sink had a. The garbage disposal leaked a little bit under the sink, and you fixed it. You know that, you know that the washing machine leaked and it got onto the floor and you, you know, you dried it up, but maybe there was a little stain on the ceiling and then you, you painted it or something, right? You know every single thing that happened and the time period that you've been there. Which means that when you do, one of the most crucial parts of this whole process is understanding home history. You have some of that, right? I say it all the time. If there was a water event and mold grew as a result of that water issue.

And then the water went away, the mold doesn't go away, too. The mold isn't like a traveling tribe that follows the river so they can live and thrive. That's not what the mold is. The mold's like a plant. You water it, it grows. You take the water away, it stays there, it gets dry, it gets brittle, it dies, it stays there. And it will still impact the living space when that happens, because when it dries out, it becomes very brittle, like I said, and it can break apart very easily and it can move into the space a lot easier. So these historical things are really important to know, right? So the first thing that you lose, the first thing that's against you when you go to a new home is that you lose history. Now you might be saying, brian, well, there's disclosures. We're going to know. No, you're not. They're not going to disclose everything, right? And not because they're hiding it, because they don't think it's something to disclose. And there's no record of it anywhere to be disclosed. Think about it. If you had.

I don't know, let's just say your dishwasher leaked, you know, and it leaked out, and you dried it up, but you didn't have anything removed, right? You didn't, you didn't have any remediation you even call a company out to do anything, you thought maybe, oh, it leaked. I'll dry it up over here. Maybe I'll put a fan down here for a couple days. We're all good. Who's disclosing that? Nobody. They don't even think it's something that needs to be disclosed. It's not even that they're like hiding it from you. They just literally don't even think that it's a problem. Right. We know that that is a problem. But if you go in and let's say that they had a damaged floorboard there and they just replaced the floorboard because you know, it's their house, they could do whatever they want. Right. And they did that. That's not getting recorded anywhere. That's not anywhere in public record where you could find out if there's been massive problems like that doesn't exist. The idea of that ever happening doesn't even exist. So why would it get disclosed? And even if they thought about disclosing things, that wouldn't even come up as something that they want to think about. Right. So that's a big thing. You lose that. And now let's take a step further. If you're looking to buy a new house.

What does the seller do to the house? What happens in all of these shows where you see that they're like flipping houses and stuff? Forget the renovation and upgrading stuff. Let's forget that. Let's just say there's like the show love it or list it. That's on one of these, like hgtv. Right. So the concept of the show is they go out and they look at new houses or they go in their current house and they just do a couple, like, cosmetic fix to make it sellable and increase the value of the house. That's typically what home sellers are doing. If they're selling their house. They're going to look through the house and find kind of the cheapest, easiest things that they can do to try to increase the perceived value of the house. What's the easiest thing you could do in a house to do that? Paint everything. Paint the walls. Easy, right? At least in specific areas where the walls, let's say, have a water stain on them. Like, oh, let's just paint this. This isn't a problem. This is. I dropped something. This must be because I dropped something over here. Oh, it's below a window. Oh, you know what? Windows condense. It's normal. My windows sweat. Sweating windows is a normal thing. I know they're staining here under the window. But I'm just going to paint it so the house looks clean. They're not hiding it because they think that sweating windows is a problem that's causing a sick house. That's not why they're hiding it. They're hiding it because sweating windows is normal, and it looks like wear and tear. And I want this house to look fresh and new for someone when they come in. So they get excited about the house. That's why they do that. Right? So now you got two things working against it. You got. You don't know the history. And then the second thing you have is a lot of the clues of the history get wiped away. They get painted over, they get fixed, they get changed. And now it's more difficult to go through the home and. And see the really easy red flags. Right. That goes away, too. So you don't really know what's happened before. Those are obviously areas you'd want to be checking. Right. Because we know that that's something of concern. And then some of the things that even maybe the homeowner didn't know about as being a problem, they may have covered up as just part of the process of making the house look pretty so they could sell it.

Okay?

So now you have your house that might have X number of problems. You've been there for so X period of time. You know everything that's gone on. You did the whole inspection. You know exactly where the problems are, because you either had us do it or you followed our method and you know what's going on, and you have a plan to fix it. You have a roadmap and. And you can plan all that out, or you go into a new house. You can still go through an inspection process and do that. You're just. There's the potential for some things to be unknown and be left behind, right? So that's one of the things to think about when it's when we just say we're gonna get up and go somewhere else. Okay. The other thing.

Is similar to this. So this is a conversation I had yesterday. It was. The house was like a late 90s house. So we're talking like 08, 18, like, 25 years old or something.

And.

The question was, you know, should we just. You know, how bad is this? This was actually even before the results came back, this was just. We went through the inspection and found a number of things, right? It was like, well, should we even do this or should we just move? I was like, all right, let's play this out. Where would you want to move to? And they're like, well, we really like the neighborhood.

You know, it's nice over here, kids like it here, they go to school here, their friends are here. Like, okay, so would you say that all the homes in your neighborhood are built around the same time? Probably because they were all, you know, built in the same neighborhood. It's like, yeah, you know. Yeah. All right, so what, what makes you think that your home is the only one of all the homes built at the same time that's going to have these things going on, but all the other homes are not going to have the same things going on? Right. Like, think about it that way, because a lot of stuff that you're finding that we find in homes, this is stuff that just happens over time, that happens in houses over time, right? Sinks leak, splashing out of the showers and the tubs, that cause mold problems in the walls back there, windows that start failing. Listen, in a 20 year old house, the windows are going to start failing and you start seeing that they're sweating, they're condensing, there's mold around the windows. You think that's going to be any different in any of the other houses in your neighborhood? No, that's all going to be the same, right?

So then we say that where would you want to go? I don't know, somewhere around here, you know, the kids, all that stuff. Like, okay, do you really think that those houses are going to be that different? The answer is no, they're probably not going to be that different. Right? So getting up and leaving your house to go to another one that was built around the same time, in the same neighborhood, exposed to the same things, you're gonna probably find similar things going on in that house. And if that's the case, why are you selling and moving out of one house into another house that's gonna have a similar number of issues, except you don't know exactly what happened in the house because you weren't there for the last 25 years. But you know what happened in your house, right? So again, back to that history piece, right? So that's one additional thing right? Now let's get, let's get beyond the, you know, every house has a problem thing and you know the history of your house, that's only one side of it, right? Let's get to the next piece of it, which is.

It'S not as easy just moving to another place. There's costs, there's expenses that go into all this stuff, right? So first off, we did Talk about how homes are going to have things. You have to assume that if you go into a new house, you're going to have a number of things that you're going to need to remediate and fix in that house. You just have to assume it. Okay, I usually say assume you have at least five store. And this is if you find a good place. I mean, what I would do is if you're looking for a new house, I would get mold Finder's method and I would take that and I would use that to go through every house. You don't have to run one single test, but it teaches you exactly what to look for and where to look for it in every single room. And you can know where the potential problems are in a house without ever having to run a single sample from doing that. And, and the nice thing about it is that you could do it in 100 houses if you wanted to. You pay for it once, you use it everywhere and you use it forever. Right? So if I was looking for a new house that's immediate, like you need to get in a Molefinder's method, you need to know how to look through a house on your own to figure out are you going to move into a place that's just as messed up as yours or not. The goal of this is if you're going to move, to move into a place that's significantly better than your situation, that's what you want to do, right? That's why you would move. Okay, but you don't know how to do that. Right? Like, even if I've inspected your house once, I had a client. This is the whole basis of where mofinder's method came from. I had a client, her name was Lynn. I went through her house in Santa Barbara area. She had two houses. I helped her in both of those. She was then moving to Hawaii and wanted to fly me out to Hawaii. I couldn't go. My wife was pregnant. There's no way she would have let me go. And so I was like, all right, well if I can't go, let me try to figure out how to like sort of help you go through a place and understand what to look for. I send her, I kind of ask her for the layout of the house, you know, and I was like, okay, so you have this number of like bedrooms, this number of bathrooms, whatever. And I, and I kind of put it all down, find out at the end of it. When I look at it, there's really only, you know, you might have a huge house that has, like a, you know, 50 rooms in it. All of them fall within one of nine types of rooms. There's only nine types of rooms in a house. Every room in your house falls into one of nine types of. So I kind of figured that out as I was going through this. And then in each of those nine types, I basically just kind of wrote out, like, where you need to look in each of those rooms where problems typically manifest. And then I then sent pictures of what those problems look like. Right? This is what these things look like. And then when I was doing that, I realized there's really only five signs. You might have seen this. There's five signs of hidden mole growth, five signs of water damage. That's it. Every type of water damage falls within one of five signs, one of five types. So if you go through a house and you're looking for five things, everywhere that you look, you're just looking for one of five things. And I give you basically a blueprint and a map of, like, where to look in every single place. Like, could you do that? Right? And that's kind of what I sent her. I was like, listen, here's what you need to look for. Here's what it looks like. Here's some pictures. It's the best I can do for you, right? Because I can't get out there. So she had found a house that she thought was, like, this amazing house, right? She was already in escrow, and she wanted me to come out and look at it while she was in escrow. Turns out that house, just by doing this and looking at the pictures and stuff that I sent her in a very unorganized email, she found that this house was going to be a disaster for her. Canceled the deal, ended up looking at three other houses using the same exact email that I sent her. So I didn't even customize it to every house. She literally just took the same email and looked at all the houses. The second house wasn't good. The third house was, like, better. But the things that were a problem were larger ticket items to fix, which is what we're going to get to in a second. And then the fourth house that she got into was minimal things. There was still, like, four or five things that they were going to have to do, but it was all localized stuff like sink cabinets and things that weren't, like, massive systemic problems in the house. And then, bam, she found a house that she can move into.

So that's it for today's show, everyone. Thanks so much for tuning in. If you enjoyed the show, please take a moment and subscribe and give a rating wherever you get your podcasts. It'll help spread the word to those who really need it the most.