5 Steps to Take if You've Found Mold in Your Home

Finding water damage or mold in your home can be overwhelming. In my experience, finding mold in the house made it feel dirty, no matter how much or how meticulously I cleaned. On top of that, I had no idea what to do about it, and found very few helpful resources for what steps to take. After a few years of researching mold, I’ve got a better handle on things now, so take a look at these five steps below to help you get started if you suspect or have found mold in your home.

A note about finances: If you have had recent flooding or your home has withstood a natural disaster, the first step is to contact your homeowners insurance or landlord to find out the procedure for having the remediation process covered by insurance. If you suspect water damage and mold in your home without a recent event, I’m sharing the steps I followed below. Unfortunately, this can be an expensive process when the insurance company isn’t in your corner. Getting out of mold requires agency and resources, two things that mold can often take from people early on. I prefer to look at life in peaceful terms, but in my experience, you really do have to dig down into your depths to find a way out when it feels like there isn’t one, to find reliable information, to find the monetary resources to get out. Here’s some information to get you started:

1. Stop buying new things

Putting a kibosh on shopping is top of the list because, if you have toxic mold in your home, it’s recommended that you part with many of your items to get out of the mold. If you continue buying things now, you’ll just be contaminating more items that you will have to get rid of.

As someone who loves shopping, I thought it would be impossible for me to stop buying things, but my husband and I actually loved doing a gift-free Christmas. We didn’t miss the presents at all, and definitely didn’t miss the stress of shopping for the holidays. The thing about toxic mold, especially Chaetomium and Stachybotrys, is that the big sticky spores and small fragments of mycotoxins are notorious for being difficult to remove. Mold fragments get into everything. When you’ve become super sensitive to mold after long term exposure, even a small amount of exposure can impede or halt your healing, unfortunately.

What is recommended when getting out of mold, is to part with any and all objects that have porous surfaces, because it’s nearly impossible to remove mold from them. Porous items are those that have soft or exposed surfaces, like upholstered furniture, unsealed wood, woven baskets, lampshades, and pillows. All paper based items must go. Anything with a nonporous surface has the potential to be cleaned and transition with you to your next home. Things that are made of glass, hard plastic, crystal, ceramic and metal can often be salvaged. This website is a helpful resource for figuring out what to keep and what to toss.

2. Test for Mold with an ERMI

ERMI stands for Environmental Relative Moldiness Index. This is a dust collection test developed by the EPA that you can do yourself with a few swiffer cloths in about half an hour. You’ll put on gloves, and then cover the swiffer in dust throughout your home, paying particular attention to certain spots and avoiding others, based on the specifics of the test. When the cloth is full of dust, you’ll seal it in a ziplock bag and label where you tested, then mail it back to the lab for testing. The instructions are pretty straightforward when you receive the testing kit. I recommend ordering an ERMI from Environbiomics and doing an ERMI, endotoxin and actinobacteria test at a minimum.

Once you get the results, you’ll need to interpret them, or pay for a consultation to have them interpreted for you. I know I was shocked the first time I saw ERMI results and it felt overwhelming to try to read them, but since then, I’ve found it easier to understand enough to gauge whether a home would be healthy for me or not. Brian Karr developed this resource to guide people in understanding their ERMI results.

The ERMI was created by the EPA to quantify the indoor mold burden on a building. It was designed by comparing homes that were “moldy,” being those with visible mold growth or a history of water damage, and those that were “reference” homes having no visible mold growth. Scores range between -10 and 20. A score of 0 is considered to be a home of average mold burden. The test analyzes the dust present in a building for the DNA of 26 toxic mold varieties and rates the quantity of mold in the dust content within three categories:

low relative moldiness (level 1: less than or equal to -4)
moderate moldiness (from -4 to 5, which is broken into two levels. level 2: -4 to 0, and level 3: 1 to 5)
high (level 4: above 5)

It helps that the system is also color coded green, yellow, and red. A green home should be good to go, while a yellow home warrants further investigation. A red home means that the dwelling is unsafe for people to inhabit.

3. Hire an Indoor Environmentalist

Based on the results of your test, a yellow or red home will need further inspection to identify the source of moisture and devise a plan for remediation. Do not hire any old mold inspector. Here’s why: a run-of-the-mill inspector is likely to do an air test, which is limited in it’s ability to determine the level of mold present; they often remediate, too, which is a conflict of interest; and they do not have the knowledge or resources to protect the air in your home when doing remediation work, meaning that they may remove the source of mold from your home, but leave behind all the mold fragments (mycotoxins!) in the process.

Instead, hire an indoor environmentalist. Select an air quality specialist who you can expect to spend hours in your home, examining everywhere from the lowest nooks and crannies to investigating the roof, searching high and low- literally- for sources of moisture and fungal growth to test. They will wear proper gear to protect their body from mold. After their inspection, you will receive a very, very long report documenting all that they found, and their recommendations for repairing the moisture problem as well as removing the mold. And just a heads up, the average home has 5-10 sources of moisture.

4. Interview Remediators and Get Quotes

From my understanding, there is a very limited number of remediators in the country who will remove the mold and restore air quality in a home. Seek a remediator who is separate from the inspector (remember, we want to avoid that conflict of interest!) and who will remove the mold while protecting the air in the home. To do this, they will seal off the area that needs to be remediated and create negative air pressure to prevent the contaminated air from traveling outside the contained area. After removal, they will use air scrubbers to remove the toxins from the air before allowing it to recirculate in your home.

Another thing to look for is a professional who will expects independent ERMI testing to be done after the work is complete and who will continue to return and work on the area of concern until it has been fully addressed. Here is one remediation company that I know of: All American Restoration. If you know of any other high quality remediators, leave their information in the comments and we can start a master list together.

5. Decide How to Tackle the Mold

ERMIs and indoor environmentalist can be expensive, but I’ve got to warn you that those two expenses are drops in the bucket compared to the cost of remediating, and remediation does not cover any reparative costs to your home. If a section of cabinetry or drywall has to be removed, that’s a separate step and cost following remediation. The financial burden of remediating is immense in many cases, and it must be carefully weighed when choosing to proceed. Sometimes, the spots where remediation is needed can be prioritized and done in little chunks, but that way extends detoxing and healing, certainly.