42: Buying an older home? Here’s what I would do...

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, happy Wednesday, everyone. For today's edition of the show, I was going to talk about renovated houses. So I, I shared a post. It was a video that I took while I was feeding my daughter lunch. And we're kind of like, binge watching that show Fixer Upper on hgtv. It's funny. I really like watching these shows, especially because we just moved in a new house and it's always nice to see, like, what people do for, you know, how they're like, re setting up a house or taking out walls, are they kind of changing the floor plan, what are they doing for decor, all that stuff. I find that stuff is fun and interesting for me, but I can't help but watch the shows and be like, oh, you're just, there's mold problems here and it's obvious you're not doing anything about it. It's like this kind of tugging that I have when I watch these shows. And anyway, so we had one of those on in the background and I saw.

One of the shots that they were doing when they were showing kind of the before, like, the work was done, like, they had ripped out the wall paneling and different things or whatever, and they kind of showed what was there. And, and I talked about this in an earlier episode. But the way I watch these shows, like, part of, part of the fun of watching these shows for me is at the beginning when they're showing how crappy the house is and they're doing like the quick camera movements over all that stuff. I really pay attention to see, like, do I see water damage? Do I see mold? Like, how fast can I see it? It's almost like training. Like, it's almost like I'm at like a mold finding boot camp or something. And like, they're just flashing pictures really fast in front of my face and. And did I see what I thought was there? And then I'll, I pause it and I'll kind of go back a little bit and see if that's what I thought I was seeing.

And. And so this one, I'm feeding her and I look back and there's just this wall that's covered in mold from, like, floor to ceiling. And they had talked about when they purchased the house for the family, they're like, yeah, this is like, you know, the water damage house or whatever. I'm like, ugh. If anyone ever called the house I was buying the water damage house, I feel like I would just run away as fast as possible. But they ended up getting that house because it was like, yeah, you know, we'll just fix the roof, we'll do this. It's not a big deal. And so that's why I shared the post that I shared earlier this week on Instagram. So if you haven't seen it, you can go see it. I have, like, a picture of what that room looked like and different things. But.

It kind of spurred a series of comments and messages and different things about people who, who want to know, how do you renovate a house? Right? How would you do it in a way that it would be a safe place? I've always kind of maintained the position when I'm talking with you guys that you just shouldn't be looking at renovated houses. And the reason is.

Because if you're not dealing with the problems in the first place, you have to worry about if they're cleaned up correctly. You don't have to worry about if you found everything right. It's easier to avoid. I mean, we hear, we think about that when we're, when our doctors talk to us about what we're dealing with in terms of our exposure. Like, you have to avoid exposure, right? Well, the same thing is true for, like, if you're trying to, trying to fix problems and you're trying to do things where.

Where and avoid situations instead of going in and trying to fix a bunch of things. Wouldn't it be easier just to go in somewhere that never had the problem in the first place? Like, yeah, it'd be easier. And so that's why I've always been very, like, anti renovated houses and am pro, like, newer places. But, you know, I, I get it. We, we do inspections all over the country. There are old neighborhoods, especially when you get into the Midwest and the East Coast. Like, I live in the West Coast. Like, stuff was newer out here, it just kind of is. But when you get over to those more historic areas and the neighborhoods and stuff, you can't find a new place. Right. And so, you know, this is a lot of the questions. It's like, buying new isn't an option. How do you renovate a house and avoid all of these problems that I keep talking About. And so this is gonna be a very like, generic kind of overview. Right. I don't know what's going on in everybody's homes, obviously. So this is just gonna be kind of like the way that I would do it. So I've thought about doing this.

My thought was if I could find a place that's like cheaper, right. Because it's in terrible condition, and then go in there and remediate it and do everything that at the end of the day it would be maybe cheaper than buying a new house. Right. And so I've thought about this. I've looked into this and kind of thought about the process and everything. And so I figured I'd just kind of talk through that thought process today a little bit and we'll see how long this thing goes. So the first thing that I would do is the kind of the, the new home deal breaker type items. Some of these can be fixed, some of them can't. There are just some things that are. I just want to avoid at all cost. Depending on where you live, you may not be able to. Right. The first one that I want to avoid, if at all possible, is crawl spaces and basements. There's a lot of options on the west coast, on the west side of the country for that. Probably not as many on the east coast or the Midwest. So it's not. Let's not call it a full deal breaker because if you just don't have homes without that in areas that you want to be in, then it's something you're going to have to deal with. Just know that crawl spaces and basements are going to have water intrusion problems at some point it's going to happen, especially if you don't stay proactive about it. So if you're not on top of the maintenance on like the exterior grading and the drainage, and you're not on top of understanding what your groundwater situation looks like. And are you getting water pushing up from the ground beneath your house? Like, you really, really have to have like a geological survey of your area done so you understand what the water situation is around. Right. I. I've mentioned that to people before. They're like, what is that? And a geological survey is basically it's. It's somebody who comes out and tells you everything that's going on about the land that your house is on, which is really important. One of those things is water. So if you're. If you're looking to buy a place and you find out that the water table is really high.

And then you Have a crawl space or a basement that's dug down into it. I mean, you can't fix problems coming up from the ground like that super easily. Right. It's a thing that's going to be there forever because it's part of the area that you live. It's not like drainage that you can fix is literally water underneath your house. And there's no there. There's no true solution for getting rid of it other than trying to put things in place to help kind of counteract it over and over again. But that's the same concept that I talk about with like air filters and air purifiers, you know, so. So the equivalent here is putting a sump pump under the house. And that's meant to kind of pull water out from under the house. And the water is the problem. And the sump pump is like the filter, if you will. It's. It's. The mechanical device is trying to move it away. It's no different than if you have a source of a mold problem in the house and you think that an air filter is going to fix the whole thing. It's not going to. Right. Like, it's, it's not meant for, like they should be maintenance. They shouldn't be just an inherent thing that you're doing because there's this problem that you're not fixing. Right. So that's just my thought on it. So basements and crawl spaces that, you know, if you can avoid them, that's great. If not, there are things that could be done in there, but. But that would be the first thing.

Second thing is usually on my list is how old the house is. But we're getting rid of that one right now because we're going to try to talk about how do we actually deal with that if that's something we want to do. And let's say the third one is going to be flat roofs. If there's a flat roof on the house, just. It's not. There's going to have been roof leaks in the, in the past. There's probably going to be roof leaks in the future. Unless you're going to reroof your house and pitch it and do it differently. All right, so those are just a couple kind of bigger deal breaker things. So let's, let's talk about why I don't like renovated houses, which I've talked about before. But the quick cliff note version of this is a renovated house is an older house. Right. That's typically why you're renovating it. And you're renovating it because all the fixtures and the cabinetry and everything is old. And if you're talking old, it's probably 20, 30 years old at the. At the newest. It kind of seems like that's when people get sick of it and they want to fix things, right? And if you're doing it all, that's one thing. But if you're going into a house that's been pre renovated a lot of times, when they remove cabinetry and they remove things or they go in the house like, oh, you know, the water damage house, if you will, on the show, that's a renovated house now, right? It's a fixer upper. It got renovated. So before they went in, there was water damage everywhere. There was mold on walls, there's all this stuff. They took down walls, they took out ceilings, they did whatever. They covered it back up with brand new walls, brand new paint, brand new everything. You now have no footprints or clues on what's happened historically. And it turns into a renovated house. That is a complete question mark on what it's ever been exposed to. And that's the problem with renovated houses. You don't know the history when things were removed and fixed.

Nine times out of 10, probably even more than that, probably 99 times out of 100, mold remediation wasn't done. Right. If you're doing that and you're ripping out walls where there's mold and different things going on, sure you're ripping out the drywall, but the mold would have also grown on the framing and the structural pieces behind it. And if that doesn't get remediated, then it stays. And also at the same time, when you rip out walls and do all and rip out cabinetry and bathrooms and all this stuff, you're causing a huge microbiological explosion that's blowing the stuff all over the place in the air. And then eventually it gets pulled into your heating and air conditioning system. It settles in different areas in the house. And this is why you walk into a home looks brand new and awesome and you feel sick, right? That's just. That's kind of how it happens. So.

We'Re gonna try to figure out how we could best avoid that. So here's what I here was gonna be my plan, all right? My plan was going to be to find a place that was in really, really bad shape. I don't want something that's like middle of the road bad shape. I don't want something that's like, oh, it's a dated house or There's a couple things like I want something that looks like you need to knock the whole thing down with a wrecking ball. And the, the reason that I'm looking at that is because the only way that this is going to work is if you could get the house cheap enough to where you can actually go in and do all the proper removal and remediation and somehow stay in the same range of what a home would actually cost if you were just buying it. See, the problem is that most people don't think that water damage or dated homes or things like that are really that big of an issue that warrant a big price break. But what I'm going to talk to you about how I was going to approach this was there's a lot of work that I would be doing inside of a house, even in areas that there aren't anything visible because you don't know the history of the house. Right. And the amount of work that you're going to be doing is much, much more than somebody who would just come in. So let's say you're buying a house that's like in the 80s and it looks pretty good and you're like, I just want to swap out the cabinets and stuff. Like that's a, that's a no go for me, right? Like you walk in the house like, oh, this one's almost there. If we just swap out the kitchen cabinets and maybe, you know, redo a bathroom or something like this would look really cool. This would be perfect for us. See, the thing for me is that that house is built in the 80s. It's 2020 right now. That's 40 years of historical problems that could have happened and patches that the homeowner probably did and poor workmanship that was done when they were. When they maybe had a leak under the sink and they just fixed it real quick and hid some problems. All this stuff historically that you don't know. You have to assume if you're going to go into a house and you're going to try to renovate it, that the whole thing everywhere is contaminated. That's the only way that I would do it. Right. And this may not be up your guys alleys and if that's not it, that's okay. That's why I always say just avoid the older houses. Right. But the reality is if you go into a home that's 40 years old in 1980 is relatively new compared to some of the neighborhoods in the Midwest and East Coast. I mean, I did a house that was an 1800s house like a month ago, and then it was pretty crazy. But even things that are early 1900s, I mean, it's not uncommon, right? You got to think, how many years have things happened in those homes? How many times have they had a plumber come out and miss something and then there was a leak somewhere else? Or how many times was there, like the refrigerator leaked and instead of opening the wall, remediating behind it, they just put a fan on it and blew it and thought that that was going to fix the problem. Like there's all these things, like how was stuff handled, right? You don't know how it was handled. Odds are it was not handled properly. The other thing to keep in mind is that these homes that are really old, like the thought process on what was a problem back then was different, right? So let's say you have a house that was built in like the 1930s, right? Well, in the 1930s, we were just starting to figure out the cigarettes may be a problem maybe, right? That's how far, long ago it was. Let alone mold was a thing or an issue or anything we should be concerned about, or water damage was a problem. Nobody probably even knew what autoimmune diseases were at the time. Don't quote me on that. I haven't looked that up. But the amount of knowledge that we had from a health perspective, as well as how building codes were at the time, and the thought process of like contractors and what was important or what wasn't. I mean, that was a time. The older you get in time, it's more the mentality, like just kind of tough it out and it's not a big deal. Whereas we've gotten more knowledgeable about things over the years and it's like, listen, like these little things could be a problem, right? It all builds up, it causes issues. You can't just sit here and tough it out in a house that had a leak at one point, you know, and, and so if you, if you think of it in that lens and then you kind of jump in a time machine and go back in time to let's say, 1935 or something, and let's say that there was, you know, a water event that, that happened in the house, how do you think that they're gonna have handled it? They're probably just gonna have let it dried out, right? I mean, if it was really bad, maybe they'd remove some stuff. But like, they're not going to go in there with, with and do fine particle cleaning and do source removal of mold where they didn't even think that mold. They probably didn't even know what it was, to be honest. Like, like. And so the older the house that you get, the more of those things happened, the more of those things were not going to have been taken care of properly just because of the years that they happened in. And you're going to be inheriting all that. You inherit everything that goes on in a house from the time that it was built until the time that you take control of it. And then whatever you do on top of all of that, history gets pushed on to the next person whenever they take the house. So the house is just holding all this stuff over time. And the longer the history, the more potential problems have happened and the more things that potentially have gone wrong. So with all of that in mind, here was going to be my approach for going in. I was going to find the worst place that I could find. This is now backtracking to what I was talking about and got the entire, the entire thing just got the entire inside of the house. Assume that there are things that I don't know about because there will be things that I don't know that happened and rip it all down to the studs. I've actually had clients that have done this and rip the whole thing down to the studs. And when you walk in the house, all you're going to see are two by fours and it's going to look like the biggest, most open floor plan ever. And then you have a remediation company come in and they are going to literally clean and remediate the entire interior of the house. All the structural framing, all the surfaces. The whole house is going to get the full on multi phase remediation plan.

While it's open. Right. And that's the way that I would go in to do a renovated house. Also heating and air conditioning system replaced like these. These systems, they collect things over time. If you're going to go in and do this type of a project where you are going to gut and remove everything in the house, then leaving the heating and air conditioning system there, which is going to have collected all of the same issues over the years, it's going to be in the ductwork, it's, it's going to be in the system. If you're in a house that's older, it's probably an old system anyway. And so it should be replaced, you know, just because of that. But if not, that's part of it too. So H vac system gets ripped out, the entire house gets gutted. I wouldn't do testing before you do remediation at that point. Honestly, the reason, part of the reason you do testing is because you got to figure out what you're dealing with, you know, how much building material you're going to remove.

You know, prioritizing areas that you're going to, to actually focus on versus not focus on getting the right cleaning, planning, all that stuff. However, we're assuming the worst of the worst here, right? There is no prioritizing. We're gutting the whole house. There is no, you know, what level of cleaning plan are we going to do? We're going to do the top level of cleaning plans. So there's no needing to figure that out. So instead of doing testing on the front end after you rip everything out, so let's say you rip it all out and you're like, oh, it looks like there might be more different things here. Let's test that. Don't worry about testing that stuff. Have the remediation company come in, they remediate the entire house. They're literally are going to go over every stud in the whole house and then you test on the back end. So once all the remediation is done, that's when you come in and do you do your testing and you're going to do a full post remediation testing plan on the house. And there's two phases of that plan. First plan is air and surface testing. And then the second plan is actually doing your Hermes and your mycotoxins, your endotoxins, your actinomycete bacteria, all that stuff, right? So you want to make sure all that stuff clears. If it doesn't clear that, come back in and re clean it again. And then you go back and you have to retest again and make sure that it all comes back clear. Once all that's clear, then you put in your new heating and air conditioning system and then you're ready to go and you can start building the house again. Right? So I know this sounds like crazy, you know, but the thing is, is I'm. I'm not risking going into a renovated house, a fixer upper house, even a house that.

That was not renovated or.

But a house that's just an older house where you don't know the history, right. If I'm going into an older home where I don't know the history and I don't know how things were handled, then the only way to actually take control back of that situation, of that house is to gut the whole thing and do it all yourself. That's the only way you know it's going to be done the right way. And that's why I was saying I would be looking for the worst of the worst homes. See, the problem was when I was looking into trying to do this is that if they're just a few problems, but I still know that I want to gut the whole house and I go to the, to the owner, like I would have to offer such a low offer price in order to build in the budget that I would need to gut and remediate the whole house. And so getting those homes that are not in terrible shape are going to be very, very difficult because there's going to be this disconnect between how much you're willing to pay because you're planning on doing all of these other things versus what the, what the current owner thinks the value is of the house. Because in their mind you don't have to do all those things. So why would they discount it that much? Right. However, if you're finding a home that's in really, really bad shape, then you're in a better position to get that price lower on the initial purchase. So you could gut the whole thing and do all, do all of that that you would need to do. So, you know, people have been asking me how I would renovate it. I, you know, I don't know if this is the answer that you or, or handle a renovated house or if I wanted to be in an older house, what would I do? I don't know if this is the answer you guys are looking for, but this, you know, as a mold sensitive person, you can't mess around with this stuff. You know, you can't go into these houses and not know what's there. And that's why, like I said, I opt for newer builds and newer builds you don't have to worry about there have being renovation before you walk in. Right. Because typically they still have all the original finishes, all the original stuff. So it's not like they redid a kitchen and there was water damage behind the sink and behind a fridge and it just got covered up. You should be able to just see that at that point because all of the clues and the breadcrumbs and the footprint should still be there on that stuff. So that's why newer places I prefer.

But if that's not an option for you and you're looking for something older, then this is the idea that I would take. So the other things you need to figure out are.

Preventative things too. Right. You got to get the roof looked at. You got to get an entire survey of your drainage situation at the house. Do you have downspouts off your gutter? Do you have a French drain? Is the grating pushing away from your house? What's the waterproofing situation look like everywhere? The window, you know, the windows, the door thresholds, all these areas about water. Because that all has to be addressed, too. So there's a lot that you have to do. You know, it's not. It's not an easy thing. I know some people, like, you know, really older homes. I mean, I was. It's blowing my mind how cheap some of the homes are in this show compared to where we live in Los Angeles, like the shows in Waco, Texas. And they're buying houses for like, like. And some of these. Some of these homes are exactly what I'm talking about. They are. They are disasters. And they're buying them for like. Like 50 grand, $75,000, something like that. And then, you know, the. The person's like, okay, I've got a budget of $250,000 or something, like, cool, so you just bought this house for like 50,000 bucks. You got $200,000 to renovate the whole thing. Well, you know, maybe take a chunk of that and, like, remediate it, you know, like. And so that's the kind of flexibility that you could have if you're getting a place that you're going to gut the entire thing. So just a quick story about one of my old clients and how they ended up doing this exact process so you could just kind of get a feel for the challenges and. And the thought process. So she is an interior designer, so she does a lot of work in her own houses and stuff. And, you know, she was pretty sick. She had mycotoxin issues. She had chemical sensitivities, some other things. And I first. I mean, I was working with her a good amount, like maybe three years ago. Two. Three years ago, and did her first home, found that there was mycotoxin issues.

She was kind of surprised because she even installed like a. Like an IQ Air Perfect 16 filter piece on the front of her air conditioning system. She's like, how can my air conditioning system have mycotoxins in it if I have this unit on there? And it's like a conversation for another day. But the quick answer is, you put a filter on the front end of your H vac system, it's not going to fix everything that's happened in that system beforehand. If There was stuff in there already. It's going to be in there. So it's only going to try to help prevent things coming in from the future. But still, like, things are going to get by that even as good, as small, as it filters down a particle size, things can still get through that are smaller than that. But anyways, so she decides that she's going to move. She didn't want to remediate. She wanted to move. And so I had this conversation that I have with all my clients. Like, listen, it's not like it's super easy. Every home has problems. You're gonna have to do something anywhere you go. But she's like, no, I need to move. I don't want to be in this place that has all, you know, that's making me sick. I'm like, okay. So we go on this journey over the course of a year plus, where we looked at over. I mean, we looked at over 10 houses probably for her. And every one there was problems. And there was a reason not to buy it, right? There was. There was stuff that I was finding. I was doing inspections of these houses, and there were significant issues in all of these homes. And it's because, guys, most homes have water damage, right? Most homes have mold problems because they aren't handled properly. This goes back to. Think about that now and then. Imagine you're buying a house from the 1930s. If we're finding most homes have those problems now, I guarantee you most homes had all those problems then, and you're just inheriting that and bringing that forward with you. But.

So we went through this whole process and then. And the last house we did, she decided not to move forward with, and she had, like, moved into a small, like a smaller apartment in the meantime. She was trying to, like, regroup on what she was going to do. Then she calls me one day and she's like, hey, I want you to come look at this place. I was like, okay. And I go in and it is this old, just disaster house. And I'm like. I'm like, what are you doing? What. What's the plan here? Like, you know, from all the inspections we've done that this isn't good. And she's like, no, no, I know. She's like, I'm. I'm done trying to find the house that I can move into with a little. With minimal work. She's like, I get it. Like, I'm gonna have to. I'm gonna have to gut a house, and that's what I have to do. And I said, okay, all right, so. So what's the plan? She's like, well, I just want you to like, look through this place real quick, just so you know, like what it looked like before. She's like, you know, I do want to do some testing on the front end. I want to understand what the challenges are here and whatnot. But she's like, I want to make sure that, that you've seen it and you have, you know, pinpointed at least the areas of issue that you were able to find or whatever before we start the process.

And then she wanted, you know, she's like, and I'd like to get the protocol for how to do everything. I was like, okay, cool. So I go through the house. There's definitely a bunch of stuff in the house. We did actually do a bit of testing there. I gave her the plan. Several months later, I come back, the entire house is completely gutted. I could literally see through the entire thing.

And.

They remediated all of it. And we went in and there you go. Now, basically what I did is I split the house up in sections and in each section I did a couple of surface samples. So there were ceiling framing joists, and then there were like the wall, like two by fours that are all exposed. So when I'm doing a thing like this, usually I'll separate the ceilings versus the walls. The thing is, if there's more cleaning that needs to be done, the more separating you do in the sampling, the easier it is for the remediators actually pinpoint where the problems are and to focus on those. If I just did one swab sample, let's say the whole house, and it came back and there was still mold problems there, well then what do they do? They come clean the entire house again.

We need to try to start limiting this and checking off areas that are clear and getting to the point where we're able to actually clear the whole house. So I split the house in sections. I did all the wall framing in that section as one surface sample. I did all the ceiling joists in that area as a second surface sample and then did an air test in that space. And that was the first round of testing that we did until we cleared everything. Then she went back in and they did the full on second phase of remediation, which is the fine particle cleans, the multi stage wipe downs, all that stuff. Stuff came back in, retested the house for ermi, mycotoxins, the bacterial stuff as well, and cleared the house and got to a point where she can move in. So this is. She literally just did this exact process, right? So I've. And she's not the only one that I've had that has done this. So there are definitely clients that have gone down this road and they've done it. So anyways.

I think that's it for today. I just wanted to walk you through like the process of how I feel the best way to deal with these older houses is to actually erase the history and start over. Right? You do inherit the history of a house until you erase all of it and then you start history new, right? And the way that you can wipe it all clean and get back to a clean slate is that you basically gut the house down, get it all down, remediate everything, know that everything is clean from the date that you've done it and now you have a clean slate from that date. And so.

That is, that's what I got for you today. So hopefully you guys found that information a little helpful. I know for some of you it's not an option, but you know, for some of you it is, right? I've some of these questions that came in and comments and DMs and all the stuff that came in from this video I did.

Is about, well, like how do we do that? We want to live in a place, we like older homes, we like the character, different things, whatever, how can we help maintain that stuff and live in places like that or we don't have brand new builds where we live so we're kind of out of luck. So what can we do? So this is a different approach of a way that you guys can look at it. Alright, so we'll probably do one more episode this week sometime. I spoke with Corey, just kind of an update on doing a segment with him. The feedback on Instagram was a resounding yes, we want to talk to Corey on the show. And so this week he actually is tied up. So I think we're going to start next week. We're going to try to make this like a weekly thing.

Where we talk about like some of the phone calls that have come in from.

Potential clients who are sharing their stories and what challenges they have and what they're trying to figure out and different ways you could try to help them and things like that. So I think that's going to kind of be where we go with it. And that's what I got for you guys. So we will talk to you later this week. Hope you 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.

Sam.