Mold has been with us since long before our first ancestor took its first breath.
No matter how clean and dry your home may be, you are breathing in mold spores as you read this sentence.
Mold. Is. Everywhere. Always.
It usually only becomes a problem when mold spores reach a certain concentration level in our air unless you are mold sensitive.
For example, consider how much trouble you’d have breathing if you spilled a cup of flour on your counter. No biggie, right? But what if you emptied a five-pound bag of flour over your head. Suddenly, breathing becomes a problem.
Mold is the same way – if less dramatic.
Now, if you wipe at mold with a cloth, wet or dry, you release millions of spores with each swipe. The video below proves this with the help of our InstaScope system.
In order to prevent the millions upon millions of mold spores thrown loose during the remediation process from spreading throughout your home, you must create a containment system around your work area.
Containment zones take time to set up properly, and even most mold companies don’t get it right. Their work is often sloppy, with insufficient tape, too thin plastic walls, and inferior zipper openings (yes, cheap ones are available, but they aren’t meant for mold work) that do little to keep mold spores away from your family.
Few mold companies set up their negative air pressure properly, and even when they do, they fail to monitor it effectively.
Negative air pressure in the work area keeps mold spores from traveling outside the containment zone and forces them through a scrubber system instead.
Not one of the breathing masks available in your neighborhood big box store will protect you from mold spores. While we go to extremes to protect our mold technicians with the most complete Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) system available, even the system we rejected as unsafe for our workers isn’t publicly available.
If you try to remediate mold while wearing just the protection you can get locally, you will be constantly exposed to enough mold to affect your health.
Getting rid of your mold is a combination of cutting out what can’t be cleaned and cleaning what you can’t cut out. Mold infestations are only partially visible to a homeowner, with the majority of the mold organism existing deep in the grains of your home’s wooden framing.
Getting all the mold out requires the use of wire brushes, sanding, soda blasting, and the experience to know just how deep you need to go. The average Virginia or DC homeowner isn’t equipped with the necessary tools or knowledge to perform a thorough remediation.
Often the most intense part of mold remediation, cleaning the work area is an intensive process that takes several steps.
Every square inch of the containment area needs to be HEPA-vacuumed, wiped down, and then HEPA-vacuumed again.
Even though the negative air pressure in the containment area captures much of the mold, there will still be millions of spores left on every surface, including even the floor and the containment walls themselves.
Missing even a small area in the containment zone can allow mold spores to flow into the rest of your home when the containment walls come down.
As you can see, there’s a lot more to mold remediation than cutting out material and some intense cleaning. And if you do it wrong, it can cost you well over $50,000 to set things right again.
Most Virginia homeowners who want to try DIY remediation are motivated by sticker shock. That’s understandable since professional mold remediation (done properly) isn’t cheap.
But consider that the price you found unacceptable was probably for a small part of one or two rooms. These quotes are based almost solely on the square foot measurement of the affected space since every inch of that space must be scrubbed clean several times.
Now, consider how much that number will grow if, instead of a 5’ x 10’ space, you now need all 1300 sq ft of your home plus all its contents remediated. In truth, $50,000 is a low estimate.
We’ve seen $6,000 jobs balloon into over $140,000 when they try to do it themselves or use a company that offered a lower bid than ours but uses sloppy procedures.
Your family, and your bank account, deserve better treatment than that.
If you have a mold problem in your home and want it handled with care and professionalism, 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 and fully licensed. We also provide crawl space encapsulation, soda blasting, humidity control, and air quality cleaning.
