What to do When You Find Mold on Your Walls?

What to do When You Find Mold on Your Walls?

How to Safely Remove Mold From Your Walls

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Why is there mold growth on my mold walls?

According to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention;

Molds are very common in buildings and homes. Mold will grow in places with a lot of moisture, such as around leaks in roofs, windows, or pipes, or where there has been flooding. Mold grows well on paper products, cardboard, ceiling tiles, and wood products. Mold can also grow in dust, paints, wallpaper, insulation, drywall, carpet, fabric, and upholstery.

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Why does this happen? In any home, there are multiple contributing factors. It could be high condensation, lack of ventilation, structural issues like inadequate insulation, or faulty plumbing. However it happened, it’s not pleasant. It leads to musky smells, unsightly stains, and ultimately a vast host of potential health risks. If you’ve found mold in the walls in your home - black mold or any other color, for that matter - it’s vital to identify the cause of its growth and resolve the issue. Getting rid of mold promptly, using the correct techniques and process, gives you the best process of restoring your living environment in your home to a healthy home.

At Pure Maintenance, we see mold day in and day out (what a joy) and have seen some very common similarities in the reasons for mold growth based on the space in the home. We’ve listed a few below for your benefit:

• Bathroom walls: mold thrives in damp and humid environments, making bathrooms a prime location for growth. Poor ventilation, steam from hot showers, and lingering water on surfaces can all contribute to mold formation on bathroom walls. If a bathroom is not fitted with an extractor fan or it’s not used after showers or baths, the moisture in the air has nowhere to go. The warm moist air condenses onto the colder bathroom walls. Over time the moist walls will become damp. This is the optimum breeding ground for mold as it “eats” both moisture and the cellulose in common building materials like wallpaper or paint.
• Bedroom walls: mold can appear on bedroom walls due to condensation from temperature differences between the indoor and outdoor environment, especially in poorly insulated rooms. High humidity levels, lack of ventilation, and damp items like wet laundry can also contribute to mold growth in bedrooms. Humans raise the humidity levels within a room - warm bodies, sweat; you name it. Another common cause of mold on bedroom walls (or any for that matter) is if it’s an external wall. That is to say, a wall on the side of the house facing the outdoors with no rooms between it and outside. The warm, moist air will condense on the much colder surface, resulting in a damp internal wall. Moving furniture away from walls can reveal mold growth. This can exacerbate mold growth as furniture pressed up against bedroom walls can hinder any ventilation.
• Kitchen walls: Kitchens are another common area for mold growth due to the moisture produced by cooking, washing dishes, washing clothes, drying clothes indoors and other daily activities. Poor ventilation, insufficient insulation, and water leaks can all lead to mold appearing on kitchen walls. Again, the majority of examples used above, which reflects what we see daily, show the strong link between condensation and mold.
• Ground-floor walls: You may also find mold growing in a seemingly random location where you wouldn’t anticipate seeing mold on walls. This can be caused by phenomena like rising damp, penetrating damp, bridging etc. Structural damage or inadequate maintenance to the environment surrounding your property can lead to the introduction of moisture and damp inside your home. This may result in a damp patch or even an entire damp wall. So whether it’s caused by condensation or damp problems, you can find mold is often found on walls.

Keep in mind, every situation is different and these by no means account for all the scenarios contributing to mold growth. The best first step for any homeowner (barring any urgent situations) is to conduct an inspection. mold cannot grow without excess moisture, so hunting down the source of moisture gives you an excellent starting point for resolution. If you aren’t confident in your sleuthing skills, bringing on a professional is highly recommended. They’ll have invested in the correct tools, and have the associated experience of hundreds of homes, to confidently identify all the variables involved.

So you’ve found the source of the mold - what next? Many unofficial internet sources would tell you to wipe it down with bleach and call it a day. That’s likely what your landlords in the past have done for you, so it must be correct, right? Wrong. Not only is bleach highly ineffective, it also introduces more harmful byproducts into your airspace. More on that later. We believe that this myth of bleach being the solution has been perpetuated by “quick-fixers”, people that just want to get the problem out of their hair as easily as possible. Bleach just bleaches mold - removes the pigment so that it isn’t dark and visible anymore. The roots are still there, growing and it will come back, sometimes with a vengeance.

More importantly, in the process of “cleaning” with bleach, you’ve aggravated the mold. Because it believes it’s under threat, it rapidly releases millions of spores into the air in an effort to recolonize somewhere else. These, along with the VOC’s in Bleach, make for a 1-2 punch of respiratory irritants. With these spores now contaminating your airspace, you’ve got a much higher likelihood of mold landing and colonizing in other areas of your home.

That’s why we highly recommend professional remediation as soon as mold becomes an issue in your home.

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Calling in the Experts: The mold Remediation Process

What should you expect when hiring a remediator? There are many companies out there, but they will all have a similar process (or should). A qualified and experienced mold remediator will be able to stop mold permanently in a safe, controlled manner. They’ll also be able to advise a unique moisture management plan for your home so you can keep things under control in the future. The typical process should follow something like below:

• Inspection: Like we mentioned above, the first and most important part of long term remediation is to assess the source of growth. The technician will come to your home and find the source of the moisture, assess the severity of the issues and recommend next steps based on the unique nature of your home.
• Air Tests (Before Treatment): Technicians will take an air sample in your property before the treatment and one outside the property as a control. This shows you how severe the problem is in the home, as well as a benchmark of what your air quality SHOULD look like in the home, based on your area and season.
• Cleaning and Remediation: The remediator will ensure that all the mold has been properly killed using a fungicidal agent. It has to be applied properly, for the correct amount of time, in order to ensure a full kill. This is extremely important because ALL mold must be treated correctly in order to ensure it doesn’t return. They will need to conduct the cleaning in such a way that spores aren’t released by the threatened mold into the house and the rest of the airspace. Environment control is key here and a huge part of the remediator’s role.
• Post-Treatment Air Tests and Report: Once the remediation is complete, they’ll take another air test in the area to compare to the before and outdoor air tests taken earlier. This is to ensure job completion and that they’ve effectively removed the mold. They should also give you a full report of their process and findings to keep on file.

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Is Pure Maintenance any different?

We’re biased here, obviously. But our process is so different, we’ve actually secured patents on it and it’s helped hundreds of thousands worldwide. The key difference is in our dry fog technology. Where other remediators would just treat a localized area, we treat the entirety of the home. This process ensures that all hidden mold is eradicated and that the house is completely reset to outdoor levels. We can do this because, unlike other remediators, we essentially “pressure-cook” the whole home with our non-toxic sterilant. This kills everything in the air and on every surface, giving a confident result, every time. If you want to know more about how we’re different, you can read our in-depth article here.

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The Road to Recovery: Restoring Your mold-Free Sanctuary

In summary, mold growth on walls is extremely common in homes across the US and is ugly, unsightly, and also potentially very unhealthy. It’s important to take action once you have mold growth in your home, because once it’s visible, you’ve likely got some underlying issues that need resolution. Bleach is not only a bad bandaid, it often does more harm than good. If you want to be sure that you’ve nailed the source of the issue, hiring a professional to inspect, or treat, or all of the above, is a great way to ensure that your problem is completely resolved.