Matt Kelly explains that a water stain under a sink isn't automatically a dealbreaker, but watch for swelling at seams where moisture can get trapped in chipboard and grow mold like Chaetomium or Aspergillus. A cavity test with a spore-trap can tell you if hidden mold is already there.
Drill a ~1/4" hole in the cabinet and use a cavity spore-trap (cavity test) to sample the air inside.
A lot of people have sent me pictures under cabinets, and it's usually when they're looking to buy or rent or lease, and they're. They're checking the place out themselves, which I love. Always take your flashlight. Know what to look for. But they. They get to the sinks in the bathrooms, and they're looking and they see stains. And under the sinks in the cabinets. Is this a. Is this an automatic? No. All right, let's talk about that. So that's one of the things we look for when we're doing a visual inspection in a place that we're looking to buy, lease, or rent. We're looking for staining. We're looking for bubbling, peeling, cracking. All these signs that show water damage was likely here in the past. When you get a water stain under a sink in a cabinet, you know that there's been water. Best case scenario, that water stain is just in the middle of the cabinet. Things go south in a hurry when that water that dripped usually starts in the middle or a little bit back of center when it hits the seam. When water hits the seam where the bottom of that cabinet hits the back or the sides, when water hits that seam and hits the edge of that chipboard or MDF or whatever wood it is and goes down, that just absorbs it like a sponge. That's when you're setting yourself up for mold, because you just stuck moisture. Well, you didn't. Moisture just got stuck in that soft wood that's already filled with glues and sawdust and things like mold. Food is what I'm trying to get at here. And it's in the dark and it's a tight place. Everything mold loves. Okay? So if water went down that seam at the back or on the sides, that's when things get really iffy. Because even if it went all the way down and dripped under the cabinet, that's when under cabinets just get black with mold underneath. That's when you can have stacky. That's when you can have ketomium or Aspergillus penicillium, whatever. But when you have water that gets down under there, where it's dark and damp, you're just. It's just going to grow like crazy. So that's my first concern. When someone sends me a stain, I say, does it look like it reached the seam? It's not. A lot of times when it reaches the seam, it puffs up, right? So you see, here's the cabinet. Then all of a sudden, there's a high spot, right. That shows that enough water went there that the wood started to swell, but we don't know how much went down. Now the good news is if you have an inspector that can come out and drill a quarter inch hole or so in that cabinet, can put the wand in and you can suck that air out into a spore trap to do a cavity test that could come back clear. It could come back with, you know, 20,000 spores of ketomium or something and you're like, wow, I'm glad I tested, because big problems can hide under there. So that's what you're looking for. You're looking to see if it hit the seam, do you see any swelling? And if you want to really know what's happening, you're going to have a cavity test done under that cabinet and that will give you the best idea if there's something brewing under there or not. Hope that helps.
Do you have questions about mold in your home or body? Book a consultation with Matt, AKA the Mold man, to guide your home and body to the next level of heal.
