Would you like a side of penicillin with your house?

Awhile back I noticed the brick around our wood burning stove appeared to be wet. As I pulled back the carpet I found rotted tack strips, moldy padding and the dubious look of dark concrete.

Fast forward a few weeks I hear Jason cursing the 'goddamn cats' from downstairs. The carpet in front of our entertainment center was wet and Brendan assumed Pixie had peed. She's our usual culprit in pet issues at the moment. It didn't take long before Jason figured out Pixie hadn't caused the damp issue. He glanced at one side of the entertainment center only to find a dark, wet line on the bottom with a slight greenish tint on top.

Over the next two weeks we started pulling things out from downstairs. Random items were tossed in the trash. The spare bedroom turned back into a storage room. Over the holiday weekend Jason started the task of demolition on the one wall and carpet removal. He quickly uncovered mold on the wall. The more paneling he removed, the more mold he found. Once he pulled the paneling off the other wall, we both realized this was a larger task than we could handle.

Servpro came out last week for mold remediation on our basement. They also finished our demolition for us, leaving a blank slate for the next project. We did confirm a moisture problem coming in at the joint on the one wall. I'd taken pictures after the mold remediation so we could see a difference. The task now is getting estimates for waterproofing.

In the meantime, the boys are still banned from the downstairs. Neither one of us have finished removing the tack strips from the stairs or the gazillion staples used for attaching the padding. There are hanging electrical boxes everywhere with the requisite holes in the concrete from where they were attached. The guy yesterday said this was normal back when the basement would have been finished.

We knew the unexpected would happen in owning a home. We didn't figure on replacing the a/c two months into homeownership or mold remediation 10mths later. At least the mold is only in the basement because I don't know what we'd have done otherwise.