My mother's 50 year old house recently developed a bad mould problem. There is black mould in both upstairs bedrooms from floor to ceiling in the corner of the room on the outside wall and under the windows (the windows are at least 30 years old). The attic door develops a whitish mould and is hard to open from swelling. You can smell the mould when you walk in her house. My question is who do I call to inspect and tell us everything that needs to be done to fix this problem.
Thanks.
Answer:
During the time your mother's house was built, insulation bats in walls and ceilings carried their own vapour barriers. This was a sheet of brown paper over the insulation and it was soaked with an oil-based product which made it a very effective VB but the bats came in four-foot lengths and the seams where two of them met would have to be taped in order to be continuous. Never have I picked apart a house and found that this had been done. This meant that warm came in direect contact with cold and condensation formed at the seams. The sun warmed one side of the wall and the furnace the other so more condensation was encouraged to form. The moisture that was there from last night, for example, froze and when it peeled from both sides of the wall, dragged the insulation downward. As the years went by of course, more and more insulation was dragged down, eventually tearing the VB and dragging it, along with insulation, to the bottom of the cavities between wall studs. Those walls eventually ended up not being either insulated or vapour barrierd so more condensation formed and soaked the wallboard which then developed a variety of molds. If the VB in the attic was, for whatever reason damaged or the hatch was not weather tripped, moisture had the same effect as it did in the walls. Mother Nature will always have her way! Rectification entails removing the wallboard, discrading wallboard, old insulation and old VB, drying things out completely, and replacing all.
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