Mold and Water Damage In Your Home

All homeowners should do an inspection of their property for mold at one point or another, especially if you own an older home. Even newly constructed homes are not able to escape mold growth if they are not taken care of or were not built properly. There have been incidents of contractors using cheap, low quality materials and these end up causing mold to grow in your home.

Even though the materials were cheap and low quality, there is nothing that you can do as long as the building was constructed up to your local building codes. You can try to pursue a legal case against the contractor, but you are not likely to get anything if they did everything up to code.

If you suspect that there is mold in the house due to a musty smell or sudden symptoms that do not appear when you are out of the house, there are a few different places that you should start. Look around in the areas of you home that large amounts of water pass through every day, like the bathroom, laundry room, kitchen, and basement. These are areas where water is likely to be and where there are water leaks, mold will soon follow.

The bathroom is the worst offender when it comes to mold. This is usually where mold is found when it is found inside a home, since so much water goes through this area every day, especially if you have 2 or more people living with you. The floor of your bathroom should be completely water tight and if it is not, you need to do what you have to in order to get it that way. Water getting under the tile or linoleum or whatever you have on the floor in your bathroom will rot the floor joists over time.

Whether the floor is waterproofed or not, try not to leave the floor wet. Your bathroom should also have a window or an exhaust vent installed in the ceiling, since most building codes require one of the two.

Exhaust vents should also be in the kitchen, laundry room, and basement. These will help remove the excess humidity from the room and stop it from collecting on the ceiling. Ceilings will soak up a huge amount of water over time and this both discolors and weakens them. This can eventually cause the ceiling to collapse and as you might guess, this is very dangerous.

Replace any appliances that use large amounts of water if they malfunction on a regular basis. You will be better off replacing them than repairing the water damage they do to your floors later on