25: DIY Remediation / Mold sampling for renters

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 everyone, Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Whenever you're listening to this, I guess I am on my way to an appointment in San Diego right now. So I'm in the car for a bit. So if you hear a little background noise, it's because I'm in the car. Hopefully there's no honks or anything that gets too out of control, but so far traffic looks pretty good. So feel comfortable that I'm alright. Right. Okay. So a couple things I was going to talk about today. I was perusing around on YouTube this morning looking, or actually I wasn't really looking on YouTube. I was doing a search looking for like those metal.

Under sink cabinet floor panel covers that you could put under your cabinet sinks. So if there's a leak from the sink or anything, that it'll get caught on there and it won't actually penetrate into the cabinetry, which by the way, is an awesome little trick to help try to prevent mold growing in cabinets because it's a pretty common place for issues. So the reason I was looking for this is because, as some of you may know, and if you're a new listener, you may not know, but we, my wife and I and my daughter, we're moving into a new home in a couple weeks. So we're in the packing process right now. And one thing that I want to do in this new place is I want to insert those cabinet floor covers to protect it from any drips or any leaks that might happen. You know, just because sinks leak, right? It's just a thing that happens.

Just because it leaks and we know that it happens doesn't mean it's not a problem, right? So if a sink leaks and it causes water damage in your cabinetry under your sink and mold grows, it's still a problem. Just because we know that it's a higher probability of happening because there's plumbing there doesn't mean that we shouldn't care about it. It actually means that we should care more about it and try to do some prevention for that. So the reason I'm looking for these things to slide under my cabinet is because I want something to Catch any potential drips that happen. So I could stay on top of it and try to catch it before it actually causes a problem. Now some of you might be thinking like, but Brian, you're not, you didn't buy this house, right? You're renting this house. Like why are you spending money to protect the house from problems like this guys? Because I'm going to live there, right? So I know that a lot of us sometimes think if we're renting that it's not our, it's not on us and it's not our responsibility to do things to, to protect the house, you know what I mean? And, and that's true to an extent. Like if you' big investments in things of changing piping, let's say throughout a house or doing remediation or changing a roof, obviously that stuff doesn't fall on you as a renter, you know, but if you know you're going to be living somewhere and you can do something that's a minimal cost that is going to help prevent water damage and potential mold growth and one of the most common areas that it's found, which is under kitchen sinks and it's not going to cost you that much money and you know you're going to live there for a while then. Sure. Like why would you not do something like that, right? I mean, if we think that we would be willing to invest in air purifiers, which is cleaning the air in a house that we rent, then why wouldn't we do something that's pretty minimal from a cost perspective and pretty minimal from an ease of install to help protect one of the areas that get impacted the most? So that's one of the things that has been top of my list as we move into this new place. So I was looking around for some of those today and I actually don't know how to search it. I know what they are. I see them all the time when I go into people's houses. But I started doing searches in Amazon. I think I started searching like cabinet floor protector and that didn't really come up with what I wanted. And then so I started like popping around the Internet trying to figure out what this thing is actually called. Right. Have any of you ever done this? Like you know what you're trying to find, you just don't know what it's called so you don't know how to search for it. And then you end up going down this black hole of searching for things that might be close in order to find the real search term. To get to where you're going. So that's what I was doing this morning. And so it got me to a video that popped up in my search, in the Google search that was YouTube video. And it was a video that was titled something of like, do it yourself cabinet remediation or something. And I was like, oh God, I have to watch this, right? It's. It's like watching a train wreck. I just have to. Whenever I see things like this, I have to turn it on. I have to watch it to see what's going on. I mentioned a while ago on one of these episodes, I was talking about watching those HGTV renovation shows and how I make this fun game of watching, trying to see the areas where there's water damage that they gloss over with the camera and then they're just gonna gut it all out and cover it up and how it causes problems in the house. And that's a big reason why I don't like renovated houses. So anyway, so I click on this video and I put a. I actually took screenshots of the video and I posted it on my Instagram today. So old masterclass. If you haven't seen the Instagram feed, take a look at these pictures, you'll know what I'm talking about. But basically the guy has a camera set up on the cabinet. Like it's open cabinet so you can see inside of. He has a camera set up behind him so you could just see what's going on in there. And the floor is completely water damage and buckled. He actually like touches it. You could just see how it's super soft and just not in good shape. It's been very severely water damaged. He says in the video that there was a leak under there. He's like, so, you know, we're just going to go ahead and repair this because this is, you know, where, you know, molds in here. So we just got to get rid of that. And that was the start. Keep in mind there's no containments. The guy's not wearing gloves, he's not wearing a mask, he's not wearing anything. He's just apparent he's just gonna rip this cabinet out with his head right in the middle of it. And that's gonna be his plan. And I'm just watching this like this slow motion train wreck. It's like everything that he does, I'm like, oh, don't do that. Oh, you're doing that too. Oh my gosh. That's happening too. And that's how I was washing this thing.

So I encourage you guys, check out the Instagram feed, take a look at the picture. I made some comments in the caption, but here's the gist of it, guys, do it yourself. Remediation, don't do it. You know, I know that we want to try to do that. I know that there's obviously a cost and expense. Now with this guy, it's a little different. This guy doesn't even understand it. Right? He doesn't even think that it's an issue. It's not a problem. So for him, he's just doing a little home repair. I think all of us, all the mold finders listening to this today, we know a little more than that. Right? You know, we understand that there's a health concern here, so hopefully that keeps you from doing something like this.

But, yeah, DIY remediation.

It shouldn't even be a thing. You should never be doing remediation on your own because there's so many components that go into it, from engineering controls to proper cleaning protocols to how you move things in and out of a system space to avoid cross contamination. And then once you get things removed, did you remove enough? In this picture, one of the pictures I show you in this, you could see that there's still mold on the back and side cabinet panels, very visible that he's clearly not replacing. So he went through this process to, quote, remove a mold problem, and he's leaving very visible, obvious mold problems still in the wall and back, wall and side walls of the cabinets, which isn't going to solve anything. Right? And unfortunately, this is how a lot of, like, contractors and handymen and people who come in and say that they do remediation. This is how they do it. You know, they're like, oh, this is the place with the visible water damage. So we're just going to remove this piece and put it back together, and everything's going to be fine. And, you know, it's just. It's just not true. So here's what this guy did. So he rips everything out, all right? And like I said, no containments, no protection, nothing like that. So what he does is he essentially creates a microscopic explosion of mold and whatever else is down there, potentially mycotoxins, potentially bacteria and those toxins. Who knows what's down there? And he pops it all up in the air and it creates this explosion. And his face is sitting right in the middle of it, right? So would you ever stick your face, like, if somebody was blowing dust right at your face, would you Ever just stick your face right in it? No. The answer is no. What this guy is doing is way worse than that because the particles are so small that they could actually bypass in our body's natural filtration process and get into our lungs much more easier than dust particles can. So what he's doing is even worse than that. And then it's spreading throughout the house and it's just like this big thing, you know. So I just caution everybody, please, you know, be careful on who is going to be doing the remediation in your home. You got to interview them, you got to understand, like their processes.

A couple questions to ask them. Are they actually using abrasive surface cleaning in the impacted areas? So what do I mean by abrasive? Well, a lot of remediation companies, let's get past this guy. Let's assume a remediation company is actually doing this. A lot of remediation companies, they'll take out the water damaged materials, but they won't actually clean the building components. Instead, what they're gonna do is like spray everything with some sort of mold killing spray that they say kills everything. And let me just tell you now, it doesn't. I've done enough post testing on jobs where a remediation company has come in and just sprayed around and I come back in and the mold counts are just insanely high. That's because it doesn't actually get rid of anything. So abrasive cleaning means sanding or wire brushing, forcefully removing the growth from the wood, framing, any of the building materials that are left there. Mold grows kind of like a tree or a plant. It has roots, it grows into this stuff. So you have to get it out. And you can't just spray the top of it and think it's going to get rid of everything, because it doesn't.

So that's one big question. Obviously you want to understand their containment protocols. Typically they'll all tell you that they're containing stuff. It's kind of a remediation 101. But then you want to tell them that for your post remediation testing. Here's the key. You tell them I'm bringing in a third party. They're going to be doing air testing and they're going to be doing surface swab testing of all the remediated surfaces in the containment space or all the exposed surfaces, I should say, in the containment space. This is to scare them, okay? This is to let them know that, man, we better clean these surfaces because they're going to have someone Come in and actually test the surfaces afterwards. And you need to make sure in the contracts you have written with them, if the tests show that the area fails, that they have to come out at no charge and continue to clean until it passes. So you need that written in the contract. Okay. You need, basically the contract has to say that your third party testing is what's going to determine whether it passes or not and that they need to be responsible for continuing to clean until it passes. You have to make sure that stuff's in there. A lot of companies are going to fall out right when you tell them that you want that, which is good because that means they're going to come in and half ass the job anyway. So that's good. And then you'll at least have coverage. And then when you have your post testing come in, which I did a whole episode on post remediation testing, so you can go back and listen to that one. But you want to make sure that that inspection company is doing air tests in the containment as well as surface swab testing of all the remediated and exposed surfaces in the containment. That's how you're going to know.

In a much better way if the area has been, you know, successfully remediated. So that's that. So along these lines, one other thing I wanted to say on this. So a lot of times I'll be in an appointment and I'll find problems and I can tell that the client is planning on remediating themselves or they, you know, their dad is a contractor or their husband is a contractor or they know, whatever, and they're like, oh yeah, I know to do this. Here's the analogy I'm going to give you guys, all right? And hopefully this makes it very, very clear on why that is not acceptable. You know, and I tell this to everybody. I'm like, this, this isn't to detract from your qualifications and your ability as a contractor, but a contractor is not a mold remediator. It is 100% different things. And to think that it's the same thing as being arrogant. Okay, think of it this way. Think of it from a medical perspective. Let's say you go to your doctor, they're your general doctor, even your functional medicine doctor, your naturopath, whoever it is, right? And they diagnose you with something that requires surgery. Okay? Your naturopath or your primary care physician is not the person that's going to do the surgery. That's like unheard of and ridiculous. That doesn't happen. There are Surgeons who do the surgeries, right, they're trained for years specifically on surgery. That's what they're trained on. So if you think about going through your house, the inspection and the assessment and the understanding of what's going on, that is basically the doctor diagnosing the problem. But you need a surgeon to come in and do the remediation. You need a specialized company, a specialized person to come in and do the specialized work. Now a contractor may argue, well, I am like that surgeon. I do do that type of work. Well, guys, there's all kinds of surgeons, right? There's orthoscopic, there's brain surgeons, there's heart surgeons, there's, you name it, there's a surgeon, there's specifically hand surgeons. I mean, there's all kinds of different types of surgeries that get done. That contractor is a specialist in one type of surgery for the house, not mold surgery. All right? Very, very different things. So please keep that in mind. I hope that really illustrates the difference between having like a contractor or a handyman come in and do some of this work in a house versus having a certified person or company come in and execute things the right way. It's incredibly different. And if you're going to rely on yourself or your husband or your friend or whoever who's done all this stuff, I'm just telling you right now, it's not going to go well. If the purpose and point of you doing this whole thing is for it to go well and to remove this problem, I guarantee you they're going to miss stuff. They're going to do things the wrong way. They're not going to, to clean things the right way. And why? Because they're not a specialist. It's like asking a brain surgeon to go in and repair a broken bone. Like they don't know how to do that. You know, they do wonders with your brain, but they have no idea how to repair a broken bone. And that is the difference between what a contractor does and what a mold remediator does. So hopefully you know that that's helpful for you guys.

All right, one more thing I wanted to chat about on my drive down to San Diego, which is going to take an hour and 45min is actually this appointment today. So what happens when we take on an appointment? There's, there's a bit of like an onboarding process similar to if you go to the doctor, they have maybe an informational packet that you have to fill out about, you know, your, your medical history, previous things that have gone on Things like that. Well, we do the same thing when we're trying to figure out what's going on with your house. The history is so, so, so, so, so important on what's going on. Anyone who comes in and doesn't ask or care about the history of your house, you should not have coming in because it can shed a whole lot of light on potential problems. Right. The same way that if you fill out that onboarding form for your doctor, it helps them understand. Oh, your family has a history of diabetes. Okay. Well, because of that, we need to think about this. Right? So there's definitely things that we can learn from history. So that's part of what happens. So what happens is the office takes a lot of that information, and then it gets put into my calendar. And then I look at the calendar, I look at all the notes in the calendar to see what's going on. I rehash all this stuff when the client. When I get there, but it's just good for me to have an idea of what's going on, you know? So I'm looking at the notes for today. So the notes were so long. All right. So they're renting a house. It's only 1200 square feet. Okay. So it's not a big place. It's actually the size of my apartment right now. This may actually be an apartment. I'm not totally sure.

So that's going on. So I start reading the history, and to be honest with you, like, I can't even remember all of the history. There was so much. Something about one big thing. There was a roof that had to get replaced, but they left it, opened, it looked like for almost a month, and then it rained, and they had, like. Like buckets in the attic to catch. Well, I don't know. It sounds nuts, but. So they essentially had no roof on a house for a month when it rains. So that's a huge problem. There's been issues that they saw on the ceiling. There's been floods that have been reported by neighbors, which required, like, the fire department to come out or something and handle it. I mean, it looks like a bunch of massive stuff going on. We also asked questions about their health condition. And the reason that we asked that is because it's really important, especially from a testing perspective, to understand health concerns. Right. One for us, so we have an understanding of what we're trying to figure out when we're at the appointment. But two for the. For the client, too. Right. It's good for them to kind of take inventory and Put it down on paper. So when we start talking about different types of testing methods and the reason why we would be looking at those types of tests and understanding how whatever water damage issues in the building could be impacting their health, it all ties to together. So it's something that we ask. Looks like there's some, there's a bit of a family in here. Can't really tell how many people. Everyone seems to be sick to some level and they're renting. And from what I could tell from the notes, it kind of appears that the doctors or excuse me, that the landlords just don't care. I saw a note in here where it said the, the landlord said something along the lines of, well, that water damage isn't our problem. So you could get a, you get a sense of what you're dealing with. Okay, so I kind of know what I'm going into. I know that I'm going into a place where people, where there's been historical water events. People are sick, landlord doesn't care. That's kind of what we're getting into. When I get there, I'll ask more, more specifics. But this is a good setup because this happens a lot. You know, when you think about landlords, a lot of them, I probably even say most of them are more concerned about their bottom line when they're renting the unit than they are of actually creating like the best living environment in their unit. You know. So when you think about like a real estate investor and what they look at from a building when they're buying a house or buying an apartment building, the way that they evaluate it, and I know this because I went through this type of training because I was considering getting into this is, is understanding how many units are in the building, what the cost is to buy the building, what the cost is going to be to renovate everything, what the profit per door. So per unit. So if you have a 10 unit apartment building, then there's 10 doors in the building, right? So what you expect to cash flow per door per month in the building, what that turns into for a year long profit and then what that return looks like on an annual return investment level. So return on investment for you and your investors, that's kind of the big equation. And so a lot of times when they, a lot of these people aren't buying these buildings themselves, they're getting investors. So they go to the investors and they're trying to pitch that they're going to get let's say a 10% return on their Money year over year. In order to do that, let's say that you bought. I don't know. Let me see if I could throw some numbers real quick. I'm pretty good at math. Let's say you bought a billion for a building, for a million bucks. Let's say there's 10 doors in it, and let's say every door you're profiting, I don't know, $200 a month. So that's 200 bucks. Times 10 is 2,000amonth times 12. So that's $24,000 a month profit that you're making. They invested a million dollars. I don't know what 24,000 into a million is, but it's not that much, right? The point of this is that it's not that much money that you, that you make on a building. So that that's a 2.5% profit per year on an apartment building, okay, of 10 units. That's a terrible, terrible return. You know, even if you up that to $500 a month profit per door, they're only making maybe five and a half to six percent profit on the year, which is also a terrible return. Now, the point of this isn't to say, like what is a good investment for an investor, but it's for you to understand how they're thinking through this. The point is buildings are expensive. Typically you don't make that much profit per unit. It's just not a normal thing. You might make a few hundred dollars to maybe $1,000 a month if you're lucky. On this example, if you're making $1,000 a month, you're basically making a 12.5% return on investment for the year, okay? So I suppose that's a good return on your investment. I guess some investors would be in for that. So let's say that's what it is. Let's say they're making.

1,000Amonth. So every month they're making, what is that, 10,000amonth. They're making basically $120,000 a year profit, okay? So let's say that happens. Now think about all of that, okay? So they have investors that are pressuring them, right? And make sure that they're keeping this return. This return better stay at 12% because that's why they gave them a million dollars. So now let's say something happens in the building because you know what's going to happen. A roof needs to be repaired, water, heater leaks, there's a flood, you name it. Dishwasher flood, you know, shower Leaks down into the unit below, whatever it is. Okay, let's say something like that happens in the year you have to do remediation. Remediation for a building like that, where a problem could happen. Could be. I mean, you could be looking 20, 30, $40,000, let's say. Okay, let's just say that. Let's just say it's $30,000 to remediate one problem. Let's say it's a shower that leaks down from a unit above into a unit below, and then it leaks down through that unit, impacts the floor, damages that bathroom, damages the bathroom in the original unit and maybe some adjacent rooms and hallways. This situation actually happened to.

Someone that I know. So I'm kind of like talking through this that way. Okay, so let's say that happened. Let's say that remediation cost $30,000. So now instead of profiting $120,000, they're profiting 90. They've lost 25% of their profit. So instead of making a 12% profit, now they're making somewhere in the range of, I don't know what goes into 12, 4 times 3. So they're making like 9%, maybe 8.5%, 9% profit now. They're not happy. That's only one problem that happens that year. Let's say a couple other small things happen that year in that building. Because you're responsible for that entire building, right? Maybe a dishwasher has to get replaced, it floods out, it, whatever, something happens. You know, maybe all that together costs another 10, $20,000 over the course of the year. You've now cut down your profit and your investor's profit as a landlord and a building owner from 120,000, let's say, to 70,000, 75,000. Right? So now that profit percent is more in like the 7 to 8% range. And they're not happy. So this is their thought process. Process. Okay, so when they, when they are thinking about problems that happen in houses, it's about limiting the amount of money that you have to spend to fix it. Otherwise you're screwing up your bottom line profits on the back end. Right? Is that making sense? Do you understand this? It's not about the people in the house, it's about the money. Like that's what people buy buildings and buy houses as investment properties. The key word is investment. It's not residential properties for other people, it's investment properties. Properties. That's why they buy them. Money is their primary concern. And that's everything that they look at you Know what I mean? So if that's happening and problems come up, you end up in a situation like what I just read in the description of my appointment today. This house has major problems from what they've described to me. Right. And real quickly I gave you an example on an apartment building. The good thing about an apartment building is that you have multiple other units in the building that are not damaged or still generating you profits, right? Imagine this happened for a single house, you know, and the house, you know, require you paid, I don't know, three, four hundred thousand dollars for the house. And all of a sudden what I just described in my appointment today, new roof, massive flood that's impacted the house, mold kind of sounds like everywhere and people that are sick. Your personal probably looking minimum 50. I mean that's just remediation. You're probably looking 100, $150,000 to fix all this stuff. Okay. And that could even be low. Well, you only bought the house for, you know, let's say 300,000. Half of what you spent to buy the house you're now getting stuck with to fix the house. How long is it going to take for you to pay that back? Right. As the, as the homeowner, if you own a single house, you can't as a homeowner, if you see that and you're, and this is an investment property for you, there is no way in hell you're doing that. There's no way in hell that you're taking on almost doubling or not doubling, but 50% increase over the cost of what you paid for a house. You know, I mean, if you paid $300,000, it costs $150,000 to fix something that happened into it. You know, how much that's going to increase your mortgage when you take out a loan? I mean, it's insane. They're not going to do that. And so because of all of that, because of the math, you end up in the situation that it appears that my client is going to be in today. So with all of that said, how do we deal with this? What do we do? You know, it's not their responsibility necessarily to fix everything in the house, right? So I got to find out what their goals are. Are their goals just to get out of the house? If their goals are just to get out of the house, then the type of testing and sampling we do is going to be probably a little different. It's going to still be a full inspection to see what's going on, how many areas of impact there are potentially Lots of pictures, lots of. Of things that are going on. But then maybe we only test two or three of those areas to prove that there's a mold problem in the house. Right? Once you prove that there are sources of mold in the house, it changes the whole thing for them for the landlord. Now, it's not just, oh, there's water damage. There's no problem here. You say you're sick. Well, whatever, you're nuts. Now it's, oh, man, there's mold growing in my house. Mold is like the word of death for a homeowner or a building owner. That's why every lease that you ever sign has all of this language about mold in it, specifically to try to absolve them of responsibility if there's ever a mold problem. If you ever read these lease agreements, that's what they say. So.

If we could prove that there are, you know, two, three, four, I don't know, a few different areas of sources of mole growth in the house, that might be all they need to leverage themselves to get out of the lease. Okay, if so, if their goal is to get out of lease, they might just need to show a bunch of pictures of potential areas and then validate two, three or four of them and show there's a problem that could scare the landlord enough to let them out of their lease. But if that's not their goal, let's say their goal is they're really sick. It sounds like this is. Seems like it's been a form of negligent behavior on the landlord and they want to sue the landlord. Well, that changes everything. Now we have to test a lot, right? Because we need as much information as we can provide to their attorney in order to go after the landlord. And the way that we put that together, it's this idea of cause and effect. So cause being there's a source of mold in the house that's the cause of the person's exposure. So we find if there are sources, the effect is how the mycotoxins or mold particles or whatever have moved throughout the house as a result of the sources. So we do separate types of testing for mold toxins, for mold particles, for bacterial toxins, even bacteria, potentially. We do different testing to show how that's moved throughout the house. And then the third piece of that equation is for them to get their doctor on board and then correlate their medical results to what we found in the house. If you put all three of those things together, you're telling a very compelling story on cause and effect that is easy for a jury to understand, right? They're easy. It's easy for them to understand. Oh, there's something here. It moved this way and this person breathed it. And I know all of it because there is actual test results for each component of those three things.

That is my mindset going into today. We'll see.

How it goes, what the story is, what the goals are. But those are typically the two approaches. When I see a situation in my notes like this today, I just want to share that with you. Because not every, every inspection is the same. The process is the same, but not every testing method and testing strategy is the same. It's very dependent on your goals.

What you're trying to achieve. I always ask people, what are you trying to achieve with having me here today? Why did you call us? What are you hoping to do with the information I give you today? People sit back and they really think sometimes and sometimes it kind of changes their opinion. And then we shape our testing plan based off of those answers. Okay, so hopefully that makes sense for you guys. But you know, it's not just about going in and doing air samples in the middle of rooms everywhere. All right, that, that is not this thought out strategic testing plan. It's actually like the worst way to do things. So this is a better method to go about doing that. So thanks so much for listening today on the couple things I just wanted to talk about. I think this actually ended up being one of my longer episodes. I guess sitting in a car forever, you don't feel any constraint to get wrapped up anytime soon. So I hope you guys enjoyed today. I will chat with you guys soon. Go check out the Instagram feed so you can see the pictures of the DIY train wreck cabinet remediation disaster I was looking at. And on a side note real quick, if you guys do know what those things are that are slid under cabinets to protect the cabinet bottom from drips. I still didn't totally figure it out. I think I found some things just be so much easier if I knew the actual word to search it. So if you know that comment on the post that I put on Instagram, just comment what the name of that thing is for me. Alright guys, have a good one.

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.