48: Remediation when gutting a home / What are mycotoxins?

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. Welcome to the new week. It's. Can't believe it's the middle of September already. It's crazy. So today I was, I was trying to think of what we were going to chat about and I decided we're going to go back into the question archive. So, you know, we get a lot of questions all the time. We. I get a lot of questions all the time from you guys and.

You know, I'm only able to answer so many of them. So I decided today that I'm going to go back and I'm going to pick a few out. We're going to do that. So hopefully this will be interesting for everyone. So the first one we're going to do is do you need remediation? When you've gutted a house that had mold and you gutted it down to the studs in the subfloor. And so the short answer to that is yes, you do. You actually need to do two different types of things. Things. But let's talk about kind of like why we're getting there and the thought process behind all of it. So I've had clients that have chosen to do this, right? And basically we go through the house, we find multiple things, you know, multiple rooms. If they have two floors of the house, things on both levels of the, of the house, maybe in the attic, maybe something's going on with the H vac system. Usually clients decide to do this when there's a decent, decent. A good amount of the house is impacted. And so in their mind they, they kind of do this cost benefit analysis in their mind and they're like, ah, I mean, do I want to, you know, rip out 60, 70% of the house or do I, should I just cut the whole thing and do it all over? And that way I know for sure that in these other 30 or 40% of the areas that there's nothing else there that, you know, might, might have got missed? Right. And I'm never going to be the person that says, don't remove more. Right. If you want to remove more, I'm all for it. Because the truth is we can only see what we can see. And you know, the, the water damage clues are only there until they get painted over or, you know, there's, there's so many things that go on. So if people want to remove more, I'm all for removing more. I've had clients that have actually like reached out to me after I sent them protocol, let's say I said there was a problem like in, in their kitchen or something. And so I told them that the cabinet under the sink needed to be removed because there was a problem there. And they're like, well, we just want to remove all the cabinetry because we want to make sure. I'm like, awesome, do that. Right. I try not to go too overboard on what we tell people they need to do. But at the same time I. Sometimes people think that I go a little overboard and you know, it's all about, it's all about why you're doing this in the first place. You know.

It'S true what we talk about doing in the level of execution that we talk about doing is definitely overboard if you compare it strictly on paper to maybe what some local companies are going to do. But I would argue that what the local companies doing are way underserving you, right? Because if the goal is for you to try to remove as much as the, the, you know, the impact that's going on and understand how to clean the fragmentation that's breaking off. And you know, there's multiple steps to that. And so when people see multiple steps and all these things, you know, they, they kind of like recoil a little bit. But for those of, for those that want to do more, and so in this case, they decided they wanted to basically just gut the house. And like I said, I've had clients that have done that before. You definitely have to remediate because you're usually doing it because there's a, a big enough mold problem where you think that you want to do that, right? That's usually why you're doing it. And so with that said, it kind of follows the true mold remediation protocol, right? And that's the two phase approach to getting rid of this stuff. And the first phase is removing source. So you might in your mind, and I think maybe this where the question is coming from, if we're gutting the whole house, aren't we removing the source already? And the, the answer is you're removing some of the source probably, but you're not removing all of it. Because if you think of the construction of walls and things like that and cabinets and all this stuff, you know, you remove the drywall. Well, there's still studs behind there. So if there was mold growing on the drywall, there's a pretty good chance that there's mold growing on the studs. You're not removing the studs, so you have to remediate those. Right. It would be so unfortunate if you went to the. Through the process of basically gutting an entire house in an effort to get rid of everything. But all the structural components that are left over, you didn't clean them. And then you put drywall and you put cabinetry and you put everything back on top of it and you basically just trapped a problem in there. Right. So what does that sound like? If you go through got a house, don't really remediate it, like the surfaces and everything and then you put it all back together. I've talked about this before and this type of house that I would never ever buy. And what does that sound like? It sounds like a renovated house. It sounds like a house flip. Right. And so if you go back and listen to the episode about why renovated homes are dangerous, this is why, okay. Because two things happen. So I just talked about one of them just then. The other thing that happens though, again, you're usually gutting a house because there's a lot of problems, right. And you're like, ugh, it makes more sense for me just to kind of do the whole thing all over again, start from scratch. When you're ripping out walls and cabinets and floors and things that have mold issues, you're aerosolizing all that stuff, you're disturbing it and popping it up in the air like this little nuclear like toxic explosion that's flying around. And unless you clean all of that, it's going to stay there. Right. So the other thing is, oh, we just removed all this stuff. Cool. We're going to put new things up and we're good to go. Well, not only may there be mold that's still growing on, or still present, I should say, on the framing and the two by fours and all that stuff, but now you created this little microscopic explosion and it's floating all through the house. And if you don't do the second phase of the true protocol and remediate all that stuff, then you're actually gonna have all that settling in the house. You're probably gonna be reacting worse in the house afterwards than you were before, to be honest with you. And so it's super, super important that remediation is done. Right. And that just removing things is not a substitute for remediation. Removing things is part of remediation. Okay, so I'll tell you a story. So I had a client, and she was trying to find a new house. And so we went, and, man, I think we looked at maybe like eight to ten homes for her. And, you know, she. She was looking. She was more interested in neighborhood than she was in house. And that makes it difficult because in la, a lot of the nicer neighborhoods are old. And so what happens in an old neighborhood, you get old houses. And what happens in old houses, they accumulate all the problems of however long that they've been built and their whole history. And so we were going through these houses and finding a bunch of problems. Sometimes it was a lot of water damage issues. Sometimes they were renovated or, you know, not, like, flipped. But certain things were, you know, bathrooms were done, Things were done, whatever. But then you test the heating and air conditioning system, and they have mold and toxins in them. And it was this thing where we just kept going and going, and she wasn't finding, you know, the perfect place. And I told her, I was like, listen, you're not going to find what you're looking for in these older homes like this. You're not gonna be able to come into a house and not have things that you're gonna have to work on with it. And the challenge with that is that you can't. I mean, you could try. I don't say you can't, but when you go to a seller and you tell them, oh, there's these mold problems that are going on, like, honestly, they don't care. Like, you know, why they don't care? Because most other people don't care. In their mind, they can just sell it to someone else and not have to, you know, fix these things. It almost, to them, it seems like a luxury to have that done, right? So, like, when you're. When you're buying a house and you go back to them with your list of after, you know, when the inspections are done, it's like, oh, you know, this needs to be fixed. This needs to be fixed. There are certain things that's just like, this has to be fixed, like electrical work or plumbing, you know, something, whatever. Like, kind of bigger, more known things. When you. When you say that there's a mold problem that has to be fixed, like, in their mind, it's just like, ugh. But, you know, molds everywhere. How many times have we heard this? Guys? Like, oh, molds, a normal thing. Sinks leak. This happens. Like, this isn't a necessity for us to fix. This is a luxury for this to fix. And because of that, they don't feel like that they should have to credit you or decrease the price of the house in order to make up the cost difference of remediation. Because remediation is really expensive, right? I mean, let's say that you were going to remediate something in a house. You find a problem, and let's just say it's going to cost, I don't know, 15, $20,000, let's say, to remediate whatever's going on there. Do you think the seller is going to discount the cost of that house when they have somebody else that'll just pay them for it the way that it is? I mean, no, they're not going to. Right. And so, you know, that's a big challenge when you're trying to deal with these places. And so that's, you know, that's what she was running into. So she would go into these homes and there would be problems, and she would be trying to get things covered, and they were like, yeah, no, we're not doing that. And then she. She would have to pull out of the house during her contingency period. It was happening over and over again and again. It was because she was more concerned about location than she was about the actual kind of criteria of the house. So what she ended up doing after, like eight, nine, ten houses, like, honestly, I've lost track. We did so many of them.

She decided she was going to get the crappiest house in the neighborhood that she wanted to be in. She was going to gut the whole thing. That was, that was what she was gonna do, which is cool. It's fine, right? It's as. As long as we're gutting it and remediating it, right? We're not just gutting it. And so that's actually what she did. So she had me come out and look at it before she bought it. There was a lot going on. There was trap moisture in the floors. There was a crawl space with problems in it. Kitchen had problems. Bathrooms had problems. There's, you know, there was roof leaks. There's all kinds of things that were going on this place. So we talked about, like, listen, you know, this is a big job, right? I mean, not just from remediation, but why did all this stuff happen? Like, you may need a new roof. You may need to look at your plumbing. Like, there are things that are going on. And this is what she wanted to do because again, she was Prioritizing neighborhood. She loved the neighborhood. She's like, I'll just get the worst house, I'll gut the whole thing, I'll remediate it the way I want it and then I'll move in. And so, and so that's what she did. And, and she did it well, right? So they went out.

We did some testing to get a feel for kind of what we were dealing with in there. Then they gutted the entire thing and they came in and they remediated everything. So here's the deal. If you're gonna gut a house like this, you remediate every single piece of wood in the house as if it's a problem, right? Because we didn't really dive into everywhere. We don't know where the problems were. And honestly, if you're going into a house and you're gutting it for that reason, like I want to make sure I'm getting everything, then you don't gut it, go in and then try to shortcut the remediation, right? Because then what's the frickin point, you know what I mean? So like you have to go in there and you gut it and then you fully remediate the house. Now if you don't want to do that, let's say you want to do another way, let's say you want to do the full gamut of testing up front, figure out where all the issues are, know that you're remediating those places, but still gut the whole house for investigation, basically. And then if there's anything else that comes up, then you can remediate additional areas as need be. You could go at it that way too. So what would happen is that you would do the first, you know, you would gut everything, clean all that stuff. We would come back out to do the post inspection and at the post inspection we'd be doing two things. Basically we'd be looking at the areas that we knew were a problem, where we had already written a protocol for remediation, right? We'd be looking at that, but then it's like we'd be doing a whole separate inspection on all the stuff that's opened up that we hadn't really looked, that wasn't remediated. So we'd be looking through everything again and then we can kind of pinpoint stuff. The thing though, when you think about it that way.

The second phase of the true protocol is going to cover all of that. Like the second phase is the fogging and the multi wipe downs and kind of all the Very specific things to get the fine particles and the toxins out of the house that may be there. The. That has to happen throughout the whole house, right? You don't just do that in containment areas because your airflow moves through your whole house. So if you gutted a whole house, you're not containing the house. Typically when you do that, you're just ripping everything out. And if you're doing that, then the. It's going to spread everywhere, right? And so you have to do the second phase throughout the entire house, which includes the cross, or, excuse me, includes the attic, which is going to be opened up. At that point, you're just going to see framing and studs up there. You got to get up and wipe all that. And, you know, if there's work that you had in a crawler or basement that you gutted, I mean, you got to go down. You have to do all that, right? So the whole house gets included in all that. So if you're already gonna be doing that piece of it, they're gonna be looking at every piece of building material. And so it makes more sense for them as they're going to do the. Do a sweep the first time around. Is there mold growing on any of this other stuff? Right? Is there darkness? Is there. Is there heavy water damage? Is there other things? And if there are, they should do the first phase of the true protocol and the. In the, you know, kind of abrasive removal of the growth structures to get those out of the framing materials. And then they would come back in, and then they would do the second phase, which is the. The full, you know, fine particle protocol. So that was a big, long explanation of how. Of the thought process on how to go through that. But I guess the point is.

Just because you're removing drywall and you're removing cabinetry and flooring, and you're taking it all out. That is not remediation, right? That's just one piece of the first phase of remediation. But there's other things that you have to do. And so if you're thinking that you're just going to remove everything and then put it all back together, you basically have just gutted and flipped a house and. And put yourself in one of these situations where if down the road you're reacting and then you want to have it looked at, there's no way for us to know where the problems are, because they're all covered up. They were all.

Think of it like when you're. When you're on the beach and you're walking in the sand and you have like your footprints when you're walking like right next to the water. And then the water comes up and it washes your footprints away. Right. When you renovate a house, you wash all the footprints away. Right. None of the clues are there anymore. We don't see them anymore. And so we all that we have to go on, on that point is however much of the history that you happen to know of the house, maybe what you remember seeing when you gutted it and renovated it. And that's kind of all that we have to go off of for anything that's, that's hasn't happened since then. Right. If you have new water leaks or something, we can see those signs and everything. But once, once you renovate a house and you, and you wipe it clean like that, you lose all of, all of the helpful indicators that help us find stuff. Right. And so if you're doing it with your own place, you're gonna stay there, then, you know, obviously that's not something that we want to run into either.

Alright, so our next question is, what are mycotoxins? Can they be tested for in the house? And is all mold toxic? So mycotoxins. So mycotoxins are a toxic chemical that certain mold types can create. Right. So we'll answer the first question and the third question together. So the first question, what are mycotoxins? So it's literally this toxic chemical that molds make and they use it as a defense mechanism. So think of it this way. You have like a mold and it's sitting in its little area. And as long as no other molds or bacteria or anything else even, doesn't have to be those two things, but as long as nothing else comes over to try to infringe on its territory to take over its food source, then it has no need to protect itself. If it doesn't need to protect itself, then it doesn't create this chemical. Okay. However, if there is something that tries to come and infringe on its territory, then it has the ability to try to protect itself and preserve its territory. Not all molds have this ability, but some of them do. And for the ones that do, basically what happens, Think of the mole colony like a volcano and then think of the lava that comes out of the volcano like a mycotoxin. So basically what's happening is that the toxin covers the entire colony with the toxin and then it kind of spreads out a little bit and it creates like a toxic mote kind of and so then as intruders are coming in, they hit this kind of toxic mote on the way in and it kills them. So basically, a mycotoxin is a chemical that's meant to kill living things. That's what it is. Okay? We are living things too. We are much larger than these microbiological wars that are happening. However, they can wreak havoc on us too, okay? Because they're meant to kill living things. Now, for us, they're not going to kill us right away like they would these other tiny things, but they can definitely have problems and a lot of it is very well documented. If you're listening to this, then you are probably aware of that. But if not, and you want to get like a quick primer, you could check out the book Break the mold from Dr. Jill Christa. She does a really good explanation about talking about all the different systems in your body that could be impacted by mold and toxins and like the different reactions you could be having. So it's a good book for that.

So that's what mycotoxins are. Right. And side note, there have been studies that have been done where mycotoxins can actually get produced inside of your body too. Right. So again, mycotoxins are protecting themselves from foreign invaders, basically from people that are trying to, you know, infiltrate their area. And so if you have a mold colonization, let's say, in your sinus, for example, and it's a species that has the ability to produce a mycotoxin, let's just say it's a species of Aspergillus, let's say, or Penicillium. And your body, what does your body do when something that comes into your body shouldn't be there? It sends antibodies to come get it. Right. It's like when we get sick, antibodies come to fight off the virus. When things happen, our body has a built in protection mechanism also. Right. So you think of it this way. It's almost like the mold came in and colonized in another country's territory. And then the other country is like, whoa, what are you doing? And they're sending in their troops to now say, hey, get the hell out of here. Except the, the mold is equipped with toxic chemicals to protect itself and this entire war starts happening inside of your body. And basically you can, the molds can create mycotoxins inside of your body. And so there are times where we've done inspections and didn't really find the toxins in the house, but we found the mold types in very high levels that were in the house. And then it was later found out that those molds had colonized inside of the client, and that could have been part of what was going on in terms of their toxicity levels. So that can happen. Right. And there has been some papers that have been published on that. So.

The last part of that question was, can they be tested for? And, yeah, we can test for them. There's limitations. There's only so many toxins we can test for on the panels. Mycotoxin testing isn't as widely available in terms of the number of labs that are doing it as some of your more basic testing. And the panels that are available in terms of which toxins are on which panels, they're not the full list of all mycotoxins. Right. So it's just a kind of a. I don't want to say snapshot. It's not really like a snapshot, but it's kind of like a representative sample of them, you know, and that's why you can't just rely on a mycotoxin test. You know, the other thing is, while we're talking about mycotoxins is that because they're a defense mechanism, they're. They're not produced all the time. You know, so we have an internal study, several hundred samples, and we're seeing mycotoxins are produced 55% of the time when the homes that we go into. So, you know, we go kind of into the worst of the worst of homes, too. So, you know, just keep that in mind. Like, it's truly is like kind of a coin flip. They may be produced, they may not be produced. So if you're only running a mycotoxin test in the house and that's all that you're doing, then there's a good chance that it could come up negative. And if that's all that you did, then you would think that there are no problems in your house. And that's definitely not necessarily true, right? Definitely not necessarily. Hopefully that made sense.

The thing is, you could have. And this goes to the last piece of that question. Are all molds toxic? And, you know, the answer is no. Certain types have the ability to produce these toxins. Certain types don't. But if you're. If you and your internal system is susceptible to mold, right. Let's say you're one of the 24% of folks that have the genetic predisposition, or you have Lyme disease or some autoimmune disease, or you have mast cell activation syndrome, or, you know, your Kids might have pans or pandas or whatever it is. If you're one of the 40% of people that has an issue like this, then you're gonna be more susceptible to mold anyway. And it doesn't matter if the toxin is there or not. Right. And so to that extent, if we're just looking in Texas and testing for toxins and we know we're gonna kind of get a coin flip and it may come back and show negative and we're not doing anything else, we're not doing any investigation, you're not doing any mold testing in terms of like not even doing an ermi to get a feel for the fungal load in the house or anything like that, then there's a really good chance that you're going to get a false sense of security off of just doing that. So why do we test for toxins then? It helps us understand the level of the remediation plan that we need to put in. If we're finding that there are toxins in the house, then we basically give the kind of most comprehensive cleaning plan that we have in order to do that. And it's the one that we've built out specifically for removing biotoxins in house. So I've talked about this before, but it took a couple years and a few million dollars of our clients remediation budgets for us to really figure out how to get these biotoxins out of houses. Right. It's not just mycotoxins, it's endotoxins too. What we ended up doing is basically combining pieces of like typical fine particle cleaning protocols with chemical residue cleaning protocols. And that's how we kind of built it together. And that's where we started seeing success. So it's important for us to know if we're dealing with that. That's why we like to test for mycotoxins and endotoxins, two different toxin types. Endotoxins are not a defense mechanism. It's just part of the cellular structure of gram negative bacteria. So if, if they have grown and then you'll typically find the toxin there and they're, you know, those come up at a higher frequency level than mycotoxins do. So that's why it's important to understand the toxic load in the house. But we can't just rely on that. And if you are, you're going to be missing piece of the equation. You know, every sampling method has its strengths and its weaknesses. And what we need to do is build a comprehensive sampling plan. Think of it like you're putting a puzzle together, you know, and, like, you start with the outer pieces, and that's kind of like the frame and almost the foundation of your. Of your image that you're creating. That's the inspection. Right. That's what that piece of it is. And then as you come in, the pieces come inward to the center. That's starting kind of from the least progressive to the most progressive type of sampling. So on the very outskirts of the picture are your source air tests and your surface tests to see if there's mold growth. And then as you get closer to the picture, you're doing ermine, you're doing different things, and all the way in the middle is the toxin testing. And, yeah, could you get a pretty good idea what the picture is supposed to look like if you don't put every puzzle piece together and you leave out some stuff in the middle? I mean, yeah, you can, but are you actually seeing the full picture? No, you're not. Right. And so that's why it's super important to include all these puzzle pieces to make sure that we're getting a full look at what's going on. So. So we can give you the best plan to move forward. Right. So, yeah, hopefully that helps on mycotoxins for you. Thanks so much for that one.

Hey, one last thing, guys, before I wrap it up. So in the last few weeks to, I don't know, maybe a month or so, I've been getting a lot more inquiries from other podcast hosts who'd like to have me on the show, which is cool. But I want to ask you guys, because if you guys are listening to me, then you're probably listening to a lot of these other people, too, and their shows, too. I would love to get from you guys your opinion on what shows you think might be a good fit for me to come on and talk about all the mold things. You know what I mean? So I figured go straight to the source of those who are listening to these shows, right? And I think that you are probably listening to a good chunk of them. So if. If there are certain shows that you really like and. And you think would be really cool to have kind of a different voice on it and it's something that you're interested in, hit me up on Instagram and let me know. You could just. You could just message me or you could comment on any one of the, you know, threads of the. Of the pictures that are up or anything. I have a running list of. Of these types of these other shows. That are out there. But. And honestly, a lot of those came from you guys, so thank you for that. But if there's any other shows that are out there that you think would be a good fit for all the mold discussion that we're having and maybe to tie in a little bit more to the health side and other things that you guys are talking about, then I'd love to reach out to them and see if we can make that happen. So if there's any shows that you guys think would be a good fit for that, just again, like I said, you could just message me on Instagram and let me know. And I would appreciate that. So that's gonna be it for today. Hope you guys have a great week. We'll get back with you at least one or two more times, hopefully this week, and we'll try to wrap it up and go from there. So everyone, hope you had a good weekend. Have a great week. We'll talk to you soon.

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.