46: My sink leaked! Mold takes no prisoners...

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. Happy Tuesday. We're back after a long weekend. Hope you guys all had a good time. My weekend was pretty cool. It started out not so cool, and then it got more cool and then it was pretty fun by the end.

So I'm gonna tell you the fun parts and I'll tell you the part that wasn't as fun. So we went on a sailboat this weekend, which was really cool.

Fun thing to do. Not a lot of people around out on the open water. You don't have to be worrying about being all up on top of people and all that business. So that was cool. So we had a good time with that.

And we went and checked out Newport beach, which is about a half hour from where we live now, and went there and had dinner out on a patio at night one night. And that part was pretty cool. So that stuff was pretty fun. Kensington, my daughter had a great time over there. She's like running around in this gigantic grass like field that was out there. It's like she's never seen a yard before. She was so excited. So all that was cool. But here is how the weekend started and why it was not so cool. So I'm just going to tell you what happened. And then we're going to go. We're going to kind of go through it and talk about things that I'm doing now that I should have been doing, things that you guys should probably be doing because it relates to you as well. So I am getting ready in the morning one day I open up my sink cabinet underneath my sink to grab something out. And I pulled. I needed to get something that was in the back. I normally open it most days and I usually keep the stuff I use most often right at the front. Right. Which I'm sure most of us do. And so this time I need to grab something from the back and I go open the back and there is water sitting on the boxes that I have in my sink, under my sink. Like, oh, my gosh, the sink is leaking. You've got to be kidding me. Like, for those of you who've been following me, I'm like a Month and a week into this, into the new house here, we already had one scare where there was some water staining that just appeared on a ceiling after I did the initial walk through. And then two weeks later, all of a sudden, there's water spotting. So we had that tested and that came back clear. So they fixed all that stuff, which was good. And then this. So I'm like, oh, my gosh, there's water under here. And so I pull out the boxes. It didn't really get the cabinetry too much. There's a little bubbling in the back of the cabinetry. I'm going to test that. I mean, there's a decent amount of bubbling, I guess. But I moisture mapped it, I did moisture readings on it. Everything was dry. Which, if you've been listening to me, doesn't necessarily mean that there's no problem there. Right? Which is why I'm still going to be testing it. But what it meant is that the water that was currently dripping like right then wasn't getting down to it. So, you know, I guess that's good, right? So I pull out the boxes that have water on them that are. And I look at them and they're really kind of like buckled and kind of kind of wavy. You know how cardboard gets kind of wavy when it gets wet? So it looked like that. I pull it out and on the back of the box is just covered in mold, right? I'm like, oh, you've got to be kidding me. Like, ugh. So.

Listen, guys, this happens to me too, right? This isn't just a thing where I talk about it all the time. Like, I've tried to make it super clear that mold doesn't care who you are, right? It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if you're an expert that knows how to find it or if you're somebody that's never even heard of it and you're not paying attention, it's gonna grow the same way. And so the fact that, that there are some things that you should be doing throughout the house is going to help kind of minimize the longer term effect of some of these things. So you could jump on stuff sooner. So here is what I did not do, which I should have been doing because I preach it to you guys, right? But even, you know, we even get caught up in our own day to day, right? So we've been here for about five weeks. So I tell my clients every month, which is every four weeks, take everything out of all your sink cabinets. Because why? Because there could be A leak. And when you have stuff under your cabinets, especially the stuff in the back, like, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Like, you don't go back there very often. And weird. The faucet connectors to your sink are kind of toward the back of your sink cabinet, and your plumbing is kind of toward the back of the sink cabinet. So if I'm just opening my sink cabinet, looking at the front every day, which is what I was doing, you. You're not actually seeing back there. And I don't even have a lot of stuff in my cabinet, right? This is another big thing. You don't want to put a lot of things in your cabinet. Why? Because you can't see anything that's going on. It's all about blocking your view and seeing all that stuff.

Even then, there was still something that happened down there, right? So I should have a week earlier, and who knows? If I did it a week earlier, it might have been fine, right? And then the leak could have happened a few days ago. It would have happened. So who knows, right? But, you know, maybe it was running for a week. Everything out of your sink cabinets every month, just. It's part of the month, right? Like, you take your trash out every. For me, every Monday night, the trash goes out, right? Well, what should happen is the first Saturday of every month, I should wake up and pull all the stuff out of my sinks, right? All my sink cabinets. And this is what you guys should be doing, too, okay? So if I didn't go back and look under there, who knows how long that would have been going on right? Now. Once I thought of, like, oh, yeah, there's this thing I need to get under there, I was like, oh, man, I need to pull all this stuff out. Like, it kind of all rang together. And, you know, it's one thing to know what you're supposed to do, and it's another thing to actually do it, and I fall victim to it, too. I bet you a lot of you guys know what you're supposed to be doing for a lot of stuff. Not just mold stuff, but for everything, right? Know what you're supposed to be doing. You know how you're supposed to be eating. You know how you should be working out. You know that doing it is beneficial for you, yet you don't do it, right? We don't always do it. Sometimes we do. We fall off the train, whatever. You know that doing, you know, infrared sauna sessions is good for you, but you don't go in the sauna all the time, right? Like, you can't find 20 minutes. Whatever it is. I'm literally giving you examples of my life right now. So these are all things that we got to prioritize this stuff, right? Especially if we're trying to avoid mole problems. If you're listening to me talk and ramble for all these episodes that I've been talking about, which, by the way, thank you very much.

It'S obviously a concern, right? Like, it's a concern enough for you to be binging all the episodes of getting to where we are now. So big, big thing. And I posted about this maybe last week, I don't know, or maybe I sent an email about it. I don't totally remember where it was, but I was talking about sync specifically and how people all the time devalue what is happening under your sink, right? And I'll go under the sink and part of the prep, just so you know, before we do an inspection, literally in the emails that go out, it says, empty out everything from all your s sinks because I need to be able to get in there and see what's going on. And it's just. It's just so important, you know? And so I go, I look under sink, there's some bubbling water damage under the sink. And I sit down and I show it to someone. And so many times it's like, oh, well, that's a sink. Like, sinks leak. It's normal. Why is it a big deal, right? Guys, if something is known to leak, you need to treat it more seriously, right? You don't treat it less seriously. You're not like, oh, this thing leaks all the time. So because I know it leaks all the time, I'm probably just gonna check it out like half as often as I should. Because it leaks all the time, right? So why should I have to look at. I know it's gonna leak, so what the hell? Like, I'm not gonna check it out. It's the silliest thing when you think about it, right? When you actually think about it like that. But you know, we get caught up in day to day and stuff and you just. Whatever. So.

So anyway, so here's what I did, right? So I pulled it out. I immediately threw all the stuff out. I'm gonna post pictures on Instagram of what I pulled out from under the sink. So you guys can see it.

Definitely. Like multiple molds growing on the. On the back of my boxes down there. Threw it all out. I did not test it right away. This is, this is interesting. My wife is like, okay, so we gotta Test that. So you're gonna test it? It's like, no, I'm not gonna test it right now. I want to wait at least a day. And she's like, well, why? We need to know what's going on. And so here's the deal. The way that you test a cabinet under a sink, because you're not visibly seeing mold growth on the cabinetry, which in my case, there wasn't. It was only on the boxes that was in there.

You're not gonna be swabbing anything in there because you only swab what you think is physical mold growth. Right. That's. That's what swab testing is for. So then the other type of testing that you would do, we have two other source types of testings we do. Right. One of them is a cavity air sample. So this is putting a hole in a wall or ceiling and testing behind the wall. Well, the concern here wasn't behind the wall of the sink. The concern here was actually the cabinetry. So doing a cavity test behind the wall and the sink would have got me nothing also. So that's not the type of test to do. So the type of test that I need to be doing is what we call. It's a. You know, it's a source air test. It's not in a wall cavity. But basically, you take everything out of the cabinet, you put your air sampling pump inside the cabinet, you shut the cabinet doors, and you're sampling inside your cabinet to see if there's an elevation in the cabinetry itself. Why? Because we're trying to figure out if the floor panel, the cabinet walls, the cabinetry components, actually have mold growing on them themselves. That's what we're trying to figure out. Okay, so why did I not test this right away? Well, because there was literally physical mold growing on my stuff in the space no more than 15 minutes ago. So what happens when you move or disturb mold? It's gonna. Some of it's gonna break off, maybe some spores fall off, particles fall off, whatever. Right. You're creating a disturbance. The last thing I wanted to do was pull it out and then immediately, you know, pull out the moldy stuff immediately put an air pump in the sink, and then take an air sample. Why? Because it would probably come up elevated, but it wouldn't come up elevated because they're. And maybe it would like. I don't know yet, but I'm trying to. I'm trying to avoid getting a false positive, if that's possible. Right. So it would have, in my opinion, if I tested it right away under there. It would have come up positive. And it probably would have been because I had just pulled the moldy boxes out of there and caused a disturbance. And there was some aerosolized particle in the cabinet, and it may not have been from the actual cabinet building materials themselves. Right. What I'm trying to do is figure that out. So what I did was I let it sit in there, you know, and keep in mind it's not wet. So it's not like it's continuously growing if there's something there right now. So I did moisture map it out. It's not wet. So I let the cabinet sit for the rest of the weekend, just two days. And then this morning I went in, I put my mask on, right? And I put, you know, I put the proper, you know, my gloves on. I had the whole deal. And I went in there and I damp wiped out the cabinet.

And I wiped the walls. I wiped, you know, the, the floor, the side panels, everything. I wanted to wait a couple days so there was time for gravity to pull whatever particles are floating around down to the surfaces. And then when I opened the cabinet, I did a damp wipe, which is just spray a microfiber towel and kind of wipe the surfaces in there, because I wanted to pick any of that particle up. Okay. Now that I've waited for gravity to pull the particle down, and then I've removed the particle by damp wiping it, now I could go in and do an air test in the cabinet, and I'm going to feel more confident when the result comes back, right? Because if I tested before, like I said, it probably would have come back elevated, and it wouldn't. And then I'd be like, okay, well, the next step is I have to remove the bottom panel that has some of the bubbling on it. You know, the floor of the cabinet that has some bubbling on it. But if the result was only elevated because I just pulled out some moldy boxes, then it's kind of unnecessary to have to do that, right? And so I want to make sure that the result that I got was most, you know, was as accurate as it can be. Plus, for you renters out there, it really does suck to have to deal with a landlord and be like, hey, guys, we got to remediate something. Like, nobody wants to hear that, right? So I want to make sure that if it has to remediate, it has to get remediated. Right? We got them out to open up the ceiling for the leak that was happening from, you know, under the bathroom. Area with a couple drip stains that never got figured out, but it hasn't come back, so that's good.

So. And it tested clear, so there wasn't a problem there. Right. So they came out and they did that already. We called them in the morning. They sent a plumber out right away to fix the sink. Right. The first thing you always do is you fix the water. Okay. And sometimes, you know, I get questions on this too, right? Like, what should we do? Should we have somebody come out and stop the leak first, or should we have the testing done first? You always want to stop the leak because it's just going to make it worse. So the very first thing that happened was I shot a video, took some pictures, sent it to the landlord. It's like, hey, we need somebody out here, like, ASAP to fix the sink because it's leaking. And so within an hour, the. The plumber that they had was here. End up taking him, like, four hours to fix it because he had to, like, run to Home Depot a couple of times and get some more parts or whatever. But leak fix, I. Now I know that it's not going to continue to be. To. To manifest and grow and be a problem because it's continuing to be fed moisture. So the water source is dry. That's great. A lot of people stop there. They say, oh, we stopped the water source. Cool. So now there's no more mold problem. Well, guys, when mold dries out, it becomes more brittle. It could break apart more easily and spread around more easily. That's why I'm going back in and testing this, right? Because I could have said, okay, I removed the moldy thing and I fixed the water leak. And, yeah, there's a little bubbling in the bottom of the cabinet, but whatever, it's fine. It's a sink. It's normal. Right? Classic. It's normal. It happens all the time. Sinks leak. Perfect. Awesome sink sleep, guys. That means we have to be. We have to be more careful with them. So I could have done that, left it alone, and I wouldn't know, right? And maybe it's fine, maybe it's not, you know? And as some of you know, we've been listening. I'm working on detoxing. I got three mycotoxins in my body from being in everybody's houses all the time, and I need to fix that. And the last thing I need to do is come back to my own house and have more problems happening. So.

I gotta know. So that's what we're doing. I'm gonna Test it. We're gonna figure out what goes on. Fingers crossed that there's nothing going on down there. And we kind of caught it fast enough. And if we didn't, then we're gonna have to have it remediated. So then what would that look like? You know, some people are like, oh, it's just a floor panel. We'll pull it out. Like, no, no. If there's mold under the floor panel of your cabinet. Yes. You could cut that one piece out and remove it. Right. But if you remove it and there's mold down there, you just created a massive explosion basically when you disturbed it and ripped it out to spread everywhere and cross contaminate everything. So if there is a mold problem down there, after the test comes back, they're going to have to contain the bathroom. So they could take out the floor panel in my cabinet. And then once they take it out, I'm going to look in there and see if it's spread anywhere else in the cabinetry. Right. So this is a big piece in Remediation protocol is what we do is we write the minimum scope of what needs to be done. So let's say I'm writing the plan for this cabinet. Let's say we test it and it comes back and it's appropriate problem. So the plan is going to talk about putting up proper containment. And then the removal is going to be removing the floor panel. You know, where your products sit on the floor, it's removing the cabinet floor. That's going to be where it starts. The next bullet point in the protocol, says the remediation contractor, which in this case I'll just go in there and look at it myself since it's in my house. But remediation contractors should look at the exposed building materials for any more water staining or suspect mold growth. And if it's there, they need to continue to remove and they'll. Until they're two feet beyond on that. Right. So what happens a lot in cabinetry is that water gets under, like below the cabinet floor where you set your products. There's a, there's like a gap down there, you know, so if you look at your cabinets, your cabinets are actually floating a little bit, it looks like. And then there's like a little vertical piece of wood, or it's called a kick plate, but there's a little vertical piece down there where if you try to kick your foot under your cabinet, you would hit this with your foot, with your toe. And so basically what's happening is that your cabinet Sits is a box that's floating and sitting on top of that bottom piece. So when they open the floor panel of the cabinet, it actually drops down another few inches. And that's the true subfloor of the space. And so if there was a water issue like there was, and it impacted the cabinet floor, which it did a little bit. If it leaked all the way down into the subfloor underneath, it could have spread horizontally on the floor and gotten under more of the cabinetry, possibly even to the wall behind the cabinet. So these are things that you can see once you open that floor panel. You could go in there, you could look, you could see, is there staining on the wall behind there? Is there staining on any of the other cabinetry? If there is, it's got to be removed. If there's not, cool, then we're good. And we, we did what we need to do. But remediation isn't just, here's this, here's what they wrote up to do. Here's what we did, right? Like, if your remediation contractor is just so, like, well, they said to do this, so we did this. And they didn't actually, like, use their eyes or common sense and be like, oh, well, there's mold like three inches away from here. Maybe I should remove that too. Or, man, this water staining is along this entire wall. But their scope didn't say to do that. So we're just not going to do it. We're going to leave it. You know, it like, it sucks because for you, as, as the consumer and the client, you don't know this stuff. You don't know. I mean, hopefully, if you're listening to my stuff, you know a little more. But not everyone knows that, like, you have to look further and if there's more water staining, you have to remove further, you know, and so you rely on the guys to come out there. And so it's an important piece of the, of the remediation process. And it's a part that gets overlooked so many times. I can't tell you how many times I go in to do post inspections and I'm seeing water damage and what looks like mole growth no more than six inches away from where they stopped removing my guys. What are you doing? Right? Even like the industry book, which is called the IICRCS 520. Even the book says you have to remove two feet beyond. And that's not for, like, hypersensitive people. That's not the plan that we developed over a couple years. And there was a bunch of money from, you know, put into it for the research and development of it. It's none of that. It's none of the hypersensitive stuff. It's literally mainstream protocol that's been out there for years and years and years. Remove two feet beyond, like, that's just a very standard thing. And there are just times where the remediation contractors, they just don't do it. And why don't they do it? Because they're trying to get in and out as fast as they can, right? They're trying to get on to the next job, and they're trying to make some money, you know, and so they're not making a whole lot of extra money if they're removing two more feet of drywall and having to clean, you know, two more studs, right? That's. So they're just trying to get in and out as fast as. As they can. And so that's kind of the difference. So I wanted to share that with you guys. Again, like I said at the top, like, even I am not immune to mold hunting me, right? Like, it's. It's a thing. You got to be on top of this stuff. And the one thing I will tell you again is make looking under your sinks a normal thing that happens. And if you want to be really on top of it, do it every two weeks, but at the very minimum, pull stuff out of your cabinets every month and look under there. Okay? Now, another thing that I actually did, and I had in a. In a shopping cart on the website when we first moved in, this was about five weeks. I went in there, looked it up, made the cart, and I never pulled. I never bought it because I just got distracted. So when we first walked the house with the. With the homeowners, I was talking to the husband about sinks. I was taught telling him all this stuff. I was like, listen, I want to get these. These things that you put under the sinks that protect them from water damage, so if there is a leak or something like that, it doesn't completely damage all the sinks and cause a need for remediation, you know? And he's like, oh, that sounds cool. He's like. He's like, how much are things like that? I'm like, you could probably find them for like, maybe 30 to 50 bucks per sink, you know, to put something under there. He's like, okay. He's like, all right, well, just. He's like, go ahead and get them. Just let me know, and then we can, like, deduct them off. Off of rent or whatever, right? He was on board. I just didn't do it right. How many times. How many times can you look back at stuff in life and be like, yeah, I. I knew it. I just. I just didn't do it, you know, like, like, I. I knew it was supposed to, but, you know, I didn't. And now I'm screwed. Right? And. And so that happened here. If I had had those. Those inserts underneath my cabinets, the cabinets wouldn't get. Wouldn't have had any moisture hit them on the floor. Because it wasn't like a huge, like, massive pipe burst or something. It was like a drip from one of the faucet head. It was the hot water faucet handle thing that was dripping whenever it was on. So it wasn't like this, you know, big pipe burst or something where, you know, gallons and gallons of water went under there. It was dripping from a faucet, you know. And so these, these things you put in there, they're kind of like weather mats. Like, think about, like, what you put in your car, like floor weather mats. Those, like, heavy duty rubber mats. Think something like that. They're like, waterproof. They're kind of meant for that. They don't soak up moisture, and they have a lip that goes around the exterior of it. So if water does get into it somehow, these particular ones that I ended up getting, they can actually hold a gallon of water before it actually impacts any of the cabinetry because of the, you know, there's kind of a lip up on the side and around the back of the kind of like the rubber tray, basically. So if I had this under there already, which I wanted to have, and I knew I was supposed to, and I had it in a shopping cart and I just didn't push by. If I had it in place, then this wouldn't have happened. So, guys, I want you to learn from my mistakes, all right? Like, I talk a lot about exactly what we should be doing because I do know a lot of what we should be doing. But just like everyone else, I get caught up in life sometimes. And we're moving in a new house. There's a lot of moving pieces. We had no furniture. There's so many things going on, and it doesn't seem like a top priority. You know, it doesn't. And it's. And it's funny because you think about all the things that you're going through to try to fix your health and get back to a point to where you're feeling like yourself again, and how much you prioritize that in different ways. And then there's all these little preventative things you could do in your house that would tremendously help that issue. And you don't prioritize them, you know? So I want you guys to kind of learn from the mistake that I just made. All right? You have to prioritize these types of things. So we're talking about sinks. Like I said, every month, pull everything out of your sinks. Look under there. Any water damage, buckling, cracking, swelling, spotting, dripping, anything like that, you need to be on top of that. All right? And second, you don't want a lot of stuff under your sinks either, Right? Because it'd be nice when you open your cabinet, you can just pop your head down and look every now and then too, Right. You don't necessarily pull everything out when you put a lot of stuff down there. It just covers it all up. You can't see anything. And if there is a moisture issue down there, it basically kind of what happened with mine, not that it was super full, but it gets, you know, into boxes and things like that, and you get mold on the contents as well as potentially the cabinet. Right. So that's a problem. And then the third thing is that look into these under sink, like waterproof mat things.

I will tell you because I literally just ordered mine right before I push record on this episode. So the brand that I got is called WeatherTech. It's WeatherTechTech.com and they have. Let's see if I could pull up the email real quick without being super awkward on this thing. I want to tell you exactly what they're called. So they are called Sync Mat. That was easy. All right. Weathertech Sync Mat. That's what they are. They're 29.95.

And what I liked about these ones is that, you know, not every sink cabinets the same size. And so these ones, you could actually adjust the size of the mat that goes under there just by cutting it. Right. So they kind of have like pre cut sections in it. So, like, if it comes as too big, you could just cut off one side of it and then it'll fit. Right. And all the lips are still in place in every section so you don't lose like the lip that goes up on the side if you have to cut a side off, which is cool. So instead of me going around and measuring every sink, because I just just didn't want to do that, I got these and I can adjust them when they come in to make sure that they fit. And these are actually the cheapest version what I could find. The thing that you don't want, by the way, you don't want, like, contact paper that. That, like, sticks to the bottom of your cabinet. You don't want something that doesn't have a lip on it. Because if water, it's not just about the floor panel and the cabinet, it's about the walls and the back wall, too. So. So if water drips under there or you get some sort of little leak under there, and even if you put some sort of like, floor mat kind of thing that is flat on there and there's no lips on the side or the back, then the water can flow towards the left wall, the right wall, the back wall, and it could soak into that wall and it causes just as big of a problem. So by having these little lips around it, it's going to help protect that from happening. Now, listen, you get it if you get a, like a pipe burst under there, you know, there's only so much you could prep for, right? But. But most of the time what's happening in these sinks is that you're getting these leaks that are happening that are kind of slow. And the reason you don't know about them is because they're not massive, right? And so then they just kind of accumulate over time. And so this type of. This type of product can help with that. So, guys, this is literally what I just bought myself. Like, how long have I been recording? 20 minutes or so. 20 minutes ago, I pushed by on this. They're 30 bucks. I got a couple of them, and they're from Weathertech, and they're called the sink mat from Weathertech. So you can check those out and do that. So remember, the three things look under sequence every month. Pull everything out. Don't put a whole bunch of stuff under there in the first place. And then get one of these sync mat things. If you don't want that one, you can find another one. But put a sink mat thing under there and that'll help prevent some of the stressfulness that I dealt with on a Saturday morning. So. All right, guys, thanks for listening. We'll talk to you again later this week.

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.