12: Can your “stuff” be cleaned? How to do it...

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.

Hey guys. So yesterday I had a results phone call with one of my clients. Basically what that means is I was out there a couple weeks ago. We did, you know, full assessment, we did some testing, I sent them the report and so, you know, you have to review that with them. So I guess the first thing real quick is if you're having someone come to your house and they're just sending you results and not actually talking you through what to do about everything, then that's a problem. Okay? So it's really important. This step is super important because everybody has different questions about what their next steps are. Some people it's more focused on the remediation. Some people it's more focused on the specifics of really what the test meant and why we're interpreting them a certain way. For other people, it's about, okay, well what do we do, you know, about our belongings that are in our house now. And so it's important to set up these times for these phone calls. So on my end, whenever I send a report, I actually send out a link where they can schedule some time to get on the phone with me. And that's how we do it. So anyway, I was talking with them and so their questions were more about their contents and belongings. So the quick background on this.

It was a mother and then her son, but her son was like an adult son basically. So she owns a couple properties and he was living in one of them. And that's kind of how all this, you know, how this whole thing got started because he is very sensitive. And so we ended up going in and we did the assessment. And so afterwards the question was what to do with, with his belongings and specifically, you know, can, can we take them to another place? Is he going to cross contaminate that place? How do we handle them? So there's a lot of that, that stuff and that's a really, really common line of questions, right? Because you know, it's, it's funny, like your house is obviously your house, but like your things, you're just so attached to your things, right? You know, you have memories you have, or you spent a lot of money for certain things. And so that's always the question. And one of the things that we talked about that I thought would be beneficial to talk about today was kind of understanding, like how you.

Determine if something is worth even attempting to clean or not. And then specifically I want to talk about pictures and photographs because we talked a bit about that yesterday too. So in Mold Masterclass, which is the training program that I created to help teach everyone about this stuff, I created this model. It's called the Content Salvation Matrix. And, and it's really the way that I explain to clients to evaluate their belongings to decide if it's worth even trying to clean or if they should just look to replace it. So there's two components to this. One of them is what the actual value of the, of the item is. Okay, so that's kind of the more common sense one. Right. If it's a really expensive item, you're going to want to try to clean it more because you don't want to pay to replace it. Right. That makes total sense. So that's on one side of the scale. Then the other side of the scale is what the item is made out of. Okay, so the general rule of thumb, and you know, there are specific, you know, differences here, but the general rule of thumb is anything that is cushioned and porous. So cushion, think like couches, mattresses, pillows, down, comforters, things like that. Anything that is, that is cushioned and porous. Porous means that it's not solid, basically. So if it's cushioned, it's inherently not porous. Those are the items that you really can't fully clean. And the reason is that what's happening when your contents get contaminated, it's not that there's mold growing all over them. I mean, sometimes that's the case. If that's the case, then they should just be discarded. But most times what's the concern is that they were in a house that had mold problems. And we understand that the toxins and the particles and fragments from the colonies, they move around the house, right? And so they're going to settle on your stuff. And so then the question is, you know, can you get it out? And with those types of items, they wedge and they kind of burrow into the cushions. And so there's really no way to get them all out. If you think about the best way you could possibly try to do that, you, you would use something called a HEPA vacuum, which is just a vacuum that could pull up smaller sized particles. But side note, they don't pull up particles nearly the size of what we're trying to get rid of. So HEPA is a standard that's made or that was made, and it basically pulls up particles that are the size of like a mold spore, essentially. But the problem is the fragmentation and the toxins and all the stuff that breaks off the colony, they're much, much smaller than that. And so just HEPA vacuuming something is not going to get all that stuff. It's only going to get the bigger things, which is fine. You want to start with that. So, but if you think about what you could do, you could, you could vacuum it, hepa, vacuum it, and then the best you could do is try to wipe it down. But that doesn't get you into the cushions at all. And so what happens is, like when you sit back down on a couch or you lay back down on a mattress, you're going to release some of that stuff back up out of the item and it's going to pop up in the air again and you're going to be exposed to it, and there's no way to get in there and get it right. So those are the things that typically, you know, unless there's not a big problem in the house. I, you know, I never try to tell my clients what to keep and what to throw out, but I tell them, you know, these are things that you're going to want to consider getting rid of, because honestly, you're never going to get them 100% clean. So if that's your goal, then that's not going to happen with these guys. So that's that. So the next you have just regular porous items. These are things like clothes and towels and linens and stuff like that. I did a separate episode a while back talking about clothing and different types of things you could do, specifically how to wash them. So I would listen back to one of those episodes. You can get a little more detail on that. But the short of it is, I had a client, he did pre and post testing on his clothing. He wanted to make sure that by him washing it, it was actually going to get rid of the mycotoxins in the mold that had been there. His doctor recommended he used a diluted solution of immunity ammonia and water. Excuse me. That's what he did. The pretest had mycotoxins on the clothes. The post test did not.

And so that's the summary. So, you know, anything that you could fit into a washing machine and you can do like that, you know, I've Seen success with it. So it's cool. Cool. Now you know everyone's different, right? Your level of sensitivity is different. So it may not work for you. That might not be enough. Right. Or by using that type of solution, you might be chemical sensitive. So that might not work for you either. So these are things you have to consider. But I have seen that process and you know, the thing about washing stuff, in my opinion, and I don't have a whole lot of testing behind it because it's just not one of those things that people test a lot. But it's not so much the solution that you're using as much as it is the process of the water pushing and forcing its way through all the fibers of the clothing or the items that are in there. That's what you cannot do with couches and mattresses. There's no way to get through all the cushion. But when you wash something in a washing machine, you're getting this forceful agitation of everything throughout the fibers and it's releasing the particles and stuff that's in there. So.

So for porous items, that's something that you could try to do on those things that could go into the washing machine. Things that can't go in the washing machine is going to be pretty difficult to clean because again, you have to try to get that stuff out of those fibers and it's a little more difficult. Then you have semi porous items. Think wood. That's a big semi porous item. So if you have wood dressers or anything like that, those are semi porous and then poor and then non porous. If you. Excuse me, are, are your. More like like glass and metal and. And you know, tile and dishes and ceramics and things like that. So those are your porous items. I think at the beginning I said cushion non porous items, which makes absolutely no sense. So if that's what I said, I'm sorry, I'm trying to go through this real quick. So. So cushioned items are inherently porous because everything could get into them. Anyways, back to non porous stuff. So semi porous, non porous stuff that's more solid. You could wipe this stuff down, right? You can wipe them down. There's a process that we use for the wipes. I can't go super into detail with it, but basically there's two main pieces. One, you want to use microfiber towels and two, you don't want to use the same towel for more than one item, which I know sounds like a big thing, right. But if you think about it if you're wiping and cleaning mold and toxins off of an item, and then you take that same towel and then you go wipe another item, and then you take that same towel and you go wipe another item, the towel isn't disintegrating this stuff, it's collecting it. Right. So you're basically just spreading it all over the place if you're using the same towels over and over again. So you have to literally like one item, replace the towel, one item, replace the towel. Okay. Otherwise it's not going to be super effective. So.

So that's kind of the general rule. And then you start thinking about the cost of the item, right? So then the next question is, well, how much does this item cost? It may be semi porous, right? Meaning that it might not be super expensive to replace, but just because of that doesn't mean that you necessarily want to. Right.

The, the thing that we have to think about with this stuff is like, if we're super sensitive, then.

If something is really cheap to replace and we don't have to worry about, did we wipe all the mycotoxins off? Did we get all the mold off? Do we not? I would always lean towards replacing it if you can. Right. Like the best thing is source removal. I talk about source removal all the time. A lot of times I'm talking about it when it comes in terms of where the mold is growing in the house. But the concept of source removal is consistent across the board, Right. So if your contents have become a, what I call a secondary source, which is something that's been cross contaminated, but now is emitting that stuff out as just part of being around, then ideally getting rid of that source is going to then stop the spread and the cross contamination. Right. So, you know, if something is really cheap, you know, little knickknacks, or maybe you could replace all your dishes for, you know, 50 bucks or something, if that's doable for you, then I would try to do that. If it's not doable for you, then you try to clean it. Right? So what you do is you look at the type of belonging and essentially the, you know, the chances of successful cleaning, which goes from thick porous to porous to semi porous to non porous. And then you put that on a scale and compare it with the value which you have. Basically cheap, expensive and sentimental value. Right? Sentimental is you can't replace it. So those are things that people are going to really, really want to try to clean. And that's okay. You can really try to clean that stuff. It's just, you just have to understand that if you're dealing with an item that might not be super easy to clean, it might not work for you. Right? And so that's the first thing when it comes to the overview of the kind of content cleaning philosophy and what to try to work on and what maybe to consider not getting or not working on.

I just want to take a quick minute to remind you guys that I am doing a live Mold Q and A this Thursday. We've had a good amount of registrations for the event since I announced it yesterday. There's still seats available though. So if you're interested, you could go to expert moldadvice.com that's expertmold advice.com all you gotta do is give is put your email address in there and. And then I'm going to send you details with the zoom link for the meeting and everything. So there's still some room. So if you're interested in getting in, you could do that. You could literally ask me anything. So this is. I have so many people that message me and DM me and ask me to pay me hundreds of dollars to consult with me to ask them about their things. This guys, this is a way to do it for free. So if you have questions, I really encourage you to get on here and do this because these types of things is probably not something I'm doing all the time just because of the time. So again, expertmold advice.com, go ahead, register, reserve receipt, and then go ahead and submit your questions and we'll get on there and we'll answer them for you. All right?

Okay. So next I wanted to specifically talk about photographs because that was a big question that my client had when I was talking with them and yesterday. So the cool thing that we can do with photographs, right, is. Well, let me, before we do that, the. The process of cleaning something. So we've kind of talked about it very basically, but it's. It's HEPA vacuuming it and it's wiping it down. And those are kind of the limitations that we have for cleaning stuff. So the wipe is really important, though. HEPA vacuuming isn't going to get everything because like I said earlier, it's not getting the really small particles. So you have to be doing some sort of damp wipe in order to get that, in order to get the residual that's left over. So the problem is with photos, you don't want to damp wipe them because you could damage them. Right. So the Cool thing with photos is that we can scan them and we could then reprint them even if we wanted to on photo paper. And it's just as if we have the real photo again. So, I mean, that's what I recommended to her. Right. That's what I would do if it was a. My situation. The ability to be able to duplicate your item, your belonging, your content, your photo. Right. To be able to literally duplicate it and print it out and have it on the same type of paper and be able to frame it and do all that stuff. Like, that's amazing. And so for me, when we start thinking about, I was talking through the different considerations on what to clean and stuff, it's just easier. You're now removing that item that's contaminated or. Right. So again, it's source removal of that content. You're removing it and you're replacing it with literally the exact same thing, which for me is a win win. So, and, and you know, recently I was. My wedding anniversary just came up in May, at the end of May. And so one thing that I did is I like to mess around in Photoshop. I. I got a. I got like a nice camera when my daughter was born, and so I took some pictures with her and I kind of figured out how to use that thing, and that was pretty fun. And so I had some really nice pictures of like my wife and my baby and stuff when they were younger. So for our anniversary, I went into Photoshop, I cleaned them up a little bit, and then I printed them and I printed out 4, 8 by tens. And I kind of made this series of our daughter, like, doing, you know, like kind of walking around and playing with stuff so that all the pictures, they were kind of related. It was cute. And so I printed out 8 by 10 pictures of all these. Okay. And what I did is I submitted them to. I just went to CVS online, you could print your photos to cvs. I submitted them to CVS to print four, eight by tens. It cost me like five bucks or something. Like, it was crazy, right? So it's not super expensive to print all this stuff. So if you have the ability to scan them all and, and you know, the other thing is when we're thinking about, like, pictures and more in general, the amount of items that you have in your house. Right. A lot of times what we do is that we take pictures, we get them, we get them printed out. We have them and they build up and they build up and they build up over the time. And the next thing you know, you look at like this table where you have pictures and you have like 50 pictures sitting on this table. And they're all like stacked, you know, backwards. And so you can't see any of the pictures in the back. It's kind of pointless that they're even there.

And you kind of have all this extra stuff basically. And the extra items and cluttered areas that you have in your house are going to create reservoirs where dirt and dust can harbor. And dirt and dust is what carries mold and mycotoxins around. So if by going through this process, we're able to eliminate a lot of the clutter that might be in the home, as we're kind of figuring out what items we can clean, what we can't clean, what we want to throw out, what we want to try to attempt to work with. Going through your pictures saying, oh man, I've had all these pictures sitting on the back of this table forever that I haven't even looked at. I don't need to reprint them again, which means I don't need to have the frames sitting there again, which means they're not going to collect dirt and dust and create areas for all this stuff to harbor. Right? You guys getting this? You see where I'm going with this, right? So by doing that process, it helps us eliminate a lot of the collection reservoirs and it helps us basically bring back the exact same pictures that we had. So, so that's the recommendation that I gave her. The next question, she has her own scanner, so she's like, okay, well if I scan it on my own scanner, am I now contaminating my scanner? So that takes us back to a solid type of material because that's what a scanner is. It's all solid. It's like glass, right? Then you put like a, you know, you put a thing over it so that can be wiped down, right? So that's solid. So we can use the towels that I talked about and we can wipe them down. So then the next question is, okay, well, what do we use to clean this stuff? Right? Because that's such a big question I get, and I've actually, I mentioned it on a couple of these most recent episodes because it keeps coming up. But if it keeps coming up when I'm talking to people, then it's probably keep. It's probably still a thing for you guys when you're thinking through stuff. So just to reiterate, there's a product that I really like for it. It's non toxic, there's no synthetic chemicals in it. It's antifungal, antibacterial and it's a plant based solution. So basically you're using essential oils to go ahead and treat this stuff, which is awesome, right? Because as mold sensitive people, we can develop multiple chemical sensitivities. So bringing in certain types of products to clean stuff can cause us problems. So what I did is I threw a quick website up, I think last weekend or the weekend before. It's called moldcleaningproduct.com so it's mold cleaning products dot com. If you just throw your email address in there, I will send you an email with the information on the product. I'm also going to send you like some more detailed info on it. You have to do your own research on this stuff, right? So it's really important that we look at the safety data sheets and some of the other information to make sure that for us specifically, whatever your needs are, that you're not introducing something into your environment that's going to help you trigger. So I gave you some resources in there that you could use for the extra research for yourself to make sure that, that it could be suitable for you too. And then also at the very end, I include in there what you should never, ever, ever use to clean mold. Ever. Right? So. Well, I really emphasize that ever. But that's because I mean it. So I put that in there too. So moldcleaningproduct.com just give me your email address and I'll send you that email. No strings, no anything. I just want to give you guys that info so you can have that there too. So we talked about that and I kind of walked through that whole thing with her too. And so now she has a plan for her pictures and her sentimental items. Right? So yeah, that is, that is the quick what do we do about our stuff overview for the day today? So I know there's, there's so much deeper I could go into this. But you know, maybe we'll save that for some, some future episodes here. But that's all I have for you guys today. So I hope you guys have a good.

And real quick before I go, just a final reminder. The live mold Q and A, it's happening on Thursday. Again, you could go to expertmold advice.com you could register, you could grab your seat. We're only taking a hundred people, so make sure that if you're interested in doing this, you do it really quick because the seats are going to fill up. We had a lot of people come in yesterday. Like I said so there is still some room left, but it's filling up quick. So expert mold advice, go ahead, grab your seat, and then you can submit your questions, and then I'm going to get on and answer them and it's that easy. All right, so now I'm done. Have a good one, everyone.

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. Help spread the word to those who really need it the most.