It can be tempting for more experienced Virginia homeowners to attempt to deal with their household issues on their own. Sometimes this can make sense, but you need to pick your battles carefully.
When your problem involves water systems, it’s usually best to leave it to the professionals. The very last thing you want is to bring a mold colony into your home.
We recently went to the home of a woman who had attempted to repair her toilet on her own. Though she fixed her toilet for only $12 in parts, she ended up temporarily flooding her bathroom in the process.
She cleaned up the mess and thought everything was fine until she noticed that the planks in her hardwood floor were buckling.
True to her nature, she pulled up the planks herself and discovered mold hiding under her floor. So, she hit YouTube to learn how to do her own mold remediation.
Lucky for her, that’s where she stopped, and she then called in a professional.
We came out, took some readings, and found that the mold counts in her bathroom and adjoining living room were around 62,000 – normal readings average around 4,600.
The cost of the needed remediation? At least $10,000. All from an attempt to save a few hundred.
Her error could have cost her more than a bunch of money. Had she followed through and attempted the remediation on her own, the ramifications could have been with her for the rest of her life.
When you are remediating a home with mold, it isn’t unusual to create mold counts within the work area that are ten times the counts that caused you to start the process in the first place.
Simply running a rag across the surface of a mold colony can cause the release of hundreds of thousands of spores. That’s why proper containment is vital to the remediation process.
Without a containment area around the worksite, those spores would travel all through your home. Even containment isn’t perfect, which is why we always induce negative air pressure in our work areas to make sure no free-floating spores escape.
Since our technicians have no choice but to work in that spore-filled environment, we provide them with the best possible personal protection systems, which aren’t available in any big-box store and are far from cheap.
Had our client decided to try it on her own, her home would have been filled with mold spores. And using the protective systems available in the stores would have done little to prevent her from becoming seriously ill from exposure to such a high concentration of mold spores.
And if the exposure goes on long enough at high enough levels, the long-term ramifications can be debilitating.
While our client may have understood the basics of her toilet’s plumbing, she lacked the experience to prevent or prepare for the flooding of her bathroom. A person experienced in the trade probably wouldn’t have had that problem.
While DIY is a noble pursuit that embodies the American spirit, you should probably make a call instead when it comes to specialties like plumbing.
There’s a reason that handymen, while familiar with most home repairs, aren’t called in for big jobs. They simply lack the knowledge specialists gain from years and years of dealing with the same household systems.
And with that knowledge comes insight into what might go wrong and how to prevent those situations from turning into debacles.
While such mistakes with most home services will simply cost you money, making those mistakes while performing mold remediation can affect your health for the rest of your days.
Don’t risk your health – if you have a mold problem in your Virginia or DC area home, contact us at Valor Mold Removal for a free estimate.
We remove mold the right way… and it would be an honor to hear from you.
Your home is in the best hands—our chemical-free remediation has the highest success rate in the industry.
You get the answers you need—our special mold testing provides 99% accurate results on the spot.
You can trust our process—we’ve performed over 300 successful projects since we opened in 2006.
Fill out this form to contact us. We’ll follow up with 24 business hours.
Valor Mold Removal is a certified and experienced mold testing and remediation company. We are fully insured, fully licensed, and accredited with the Better Business Bureau. We also provide crawl space encapsulation, soda blasting, humidity control, and air quality cleaning.
