Mold, Yard Work, and Being a Suburban Soldier

Just your standard ol' newsletter about basement mold and being a nutjob

This is a totally free post, but, as a bonus, you can access the audio version if you’re a paid subscriber. I also go “off script” and add lots of little things I didn’t write in the text version below.

First, I sliced the top of my finger on a long, sturdy piece of grass this morning while I was pulling weeds, so I am working at 9/10 capacity right now… which sounds like enough capacity, but it’s really messing with my typing flow…

But today I’m going to talk about what’s going on with this mold remediation situation (that you may have seen me freaking out about on instagram a few weeks ago.)

But first, I’m also going to talk about my panic over supply chain collapse, my ridiculous expectations that I’d become a homesteader in 6 months time, and how much I’ve come to love yard work. I know that sounds sarcastic, but I actually really love it. (Except when it slices my finger.)

DISCLAIMER: I’m sure that in this post, I sound like a melodramatic, paranoid lunatic when I talk about the fall-of society, and my fear over having to become a one-woman-homesteader. Just know, as you’re reading, that I’ve become pretty chill about it. Sure, I don’t know what’s coming, but I hope it’s NBD. Though… those grocery prices… lookin’ pretty rough, aren’t they?

The Suburban Soldier

As soon as I decided to move from the city to the suburbs, my friend Matt started calling me “the suburban soldier” - partially because, at the time, I was freaking out about an impending supply chain collapse, and therefore, the collapse of society as we know it, and I was telling him that I had to get out of the city ASAP, and buy land near a water source, and learn how to be a farmer. The reason I was being so intense, is because I have a friend (in a different state) who, in the last year or two, became a serious prepper. Like … serious. Like: canning, and learning to forage and make handcrafted herbal remedies, and bread baking, owning chickens, and gathering supplies to survive in the wilderness, or if water/power/gas utilities stop working… she is predicting very bad things to come. Unfortunately, she is also a little bit psychic (you can read a little about my psychic friend’s predictions in this paywalled post). To be fair, she also got on the QAnon-train during summer of 2020 (the “Trump has a plan and is the savior” train) before abandoning that and realizing that was just a group of people hoping there was a savior…

All of that to say: even real psychics can be wrong. Or read things wrong. Or, as they also say: “the timelines changed.” But at the time in summer 2021, she was saying very ominously: Caroline, get out of the city and learn to grow food.

Thankfully for me, after a year and a half of getting yelled at on the street over masks and dealing with my city’s crime rates sky rocketing, and being afraid to walk from my car to my house at night, and having to deal with my kitchen being in my basement…. I wanted to move out of the city anyway. So, I was happy to finally move, and have more space. And, my favorite change of all: to have a driveway.

But, because of my friend freaking me out, I literally first looked at some houses on 1-2 acres of land, out near farm country… until I realized… wait… what am I doing? I am … not a farmer. I do not know how to grow food. Furrrrthermore, I don’t even want to have to do this. I don’t want to live out here in the middle of nowhere, all by myself… And…if she is right, and society collapses, and all modern conveniences as we know it go away, I’m going to just be out here by myself with no electricity or gas for my car? No. No that makes no sense.

And, most importantly: I hope my prepper friend is completely completely wrong.

So, I abandoned my plans to buy myself a one-woman farm, and started looking for houses with smaller yards (my house ended up being only 1/10 of an acre…), nearer to my family. And I thought, hey, IF society is collapsing, which of course I still hope it isn’t, in the very least it’ll be good to be out of the city, and, to put some of money into a home with “some land.”

I have lived in a city for the past 15 years of my life. I lived in NYC for 10 years, and then Philly for the past 5. There was a time I thought I’d live in a city forever. Because I had been planning on becoming very rich. But, when you are not very rich, and you can’t have a 3 million dollar magical compound oasis that was built in the 1860s… city life gets harder and harder. Mostly, I wanted a driveway. But I also never ever imagined I was going to move to the suburbs single. I also never thought I’d be single at 34, but here I am. I was worried it would be isolating. And in many ways it is.

But, I am really happy that I’m out of the city. And, my other (not the prepper) friend started calling me The Suburban Soldier, probably because I started off so dramatic and panicked about the battles ahead, and also, he was the friend who watched all the Marvel movies with me, summer 2020, and saw me devolve into insanity over Sebastian Stan, aka: The Winter Soldier. So, it’s an homage to my now-ex-love, Sebby Stan, and to me battling the land in the suburbs. And then, when I inevitably ran into a million house and yard problems once I moved in, it was the perfect call-back: Ah, the suburban soldier. Another day, another battle.

I moved in the fall, so the battles started with me being like… oh SHIT these LEAVES! Can I leave them? (Not a pun.) No? MY grass will DIE. Ok. Ok, I’ll just buy a leaf blower and a tarp and compost them. Thank God I don’t have two acres omg I cannot even manage this small yard. Oh SHIT there is poison IVY raining down on me from the woods at the edge of the University on the other side of my fence… I can’t compost these poison ivy leaves. Oh SHIT my entire yard is fucking MUD and I have to bathe my dog 7 times a day, each time I let her outside. Oh SHIT my sump pump is also flooding my yard. Oh Shit, my only big beautiful tree is DYING and has to come down?!?! And my tree in the backyard is too close to my house and has to come down too!?! Those are my only two trees!! Oh SHIT I put my raised bed in the shadiest area of the lawn because, in the fall, there were no leaves on the trees to block the sun!??!! Oh SHIT this grass is so tall now that the rain made it so heavy, that it fell over and is killing the grass underneath it!?!?! My grass is committing suicide?!?! WTF? Ok, I will buy a motorless 1950s-style pushmower. Oh shit it doesn’t work on long, flat, wet grass that is committing suicide? Ok GREAT.

I should have known, but the idyllic thought I had of, “ah, I’ll have a little plot of land in the country suburbs-right-next-to-the-city, and I’ll plant some strawberries and some lavender, and everything will be la dee da,” was, of course, not quite how it went.

A lot of these problems have been solved by me hiring my dad’s “tree guy” and my dad’s “leaf and grass mowing guy,” and hiring a landscaper to woodchip the muddiest area of the yard, so I can let my dog out without 7 baths a day.

But anyway, this suburban soldier has had nonstop battles in her first 7 months. Leaves, poison ivy, mud, kamikazi grass, a raised bed in the shadiest area of my yard, and later… a serious mold situation in my basement!?!? Because it turns out, I live in a wet, marshy, miserable swamp. More on the mold and the remediation, further down in this post.

Anyway, if I had texted my friend Matt about my sliced-finger-on-a-blade-of-grass*, he would have probably made some reference to the suburban soldier. (*To be honest, I don’t know what sliced my finger, I thought I was pulling a vine and tall grasses from next to my fence but… I dunno. There was a slice and some blood, and so after I quickly looked for wtf sliced me, and finding nothing, I dramatically ran inside with my hand above my head so I didn’t bleed out.)

Yard Work.

(This section might be boring? Not sure? Do you want to hear me talk about how much I love yard work? Who would? You can skip to the mold part if you want. I won’t be offended.)

A few months ago, after I’d spent all winter putting ridiculous pressure on myself to have a working farm and a potable water source and a greenhouse and an orchard and whatever other impossible expectations based on things I was being told to do by my psychic-prepper-friend, I realized: I am not going to be able to feed myself at all with my gardening. Not for years. And probably never in this yard if I don’t have chickens for eggs and a goat to milk, which I am not zoned for anyway. And again, most importantly, if I don’t have to, I don’t want to. I do not want to be a farmer. I want to befriend my local farmers. But, I want to be a lazy bitch, who spends a ridiculous amount of money on farm-to-table food, who has a very pretty yard. And all of this pressure, is making this whole thing miserable. When it feels so dire, my brain totally freezes up. It becomes joyless and overwhelming. So, I took all pressure to be a homestead-of-one off of my to-do list, and decided to just learn to grow food for fun, and even more importantly…. I’m going to try to grow food because I think vegetable gardens look beautiful and lush and exciting. I think raised beds look beautiful in a yard, and will brighten up my boring little square, marshy plot of land. So, I’m now doing it for superficial reasons.

Do I think society is going to come crashing down? Will I be starving by winter- time? I’m erring on the side of: Uuuuh, no? It’ll probably be slow, like it’s been? But everrryyythhhinng is going to get even more expensive. What I do know, is that if everything is falling apart, what good is more stress and misery going to do me now?

Now that it’s summer, and my … 6 vegetable starts that I bought from the health food store are planted, and I started waking up early to go out and clear out all of the weird ugly little bushes and “trees” and vines upon vines upon vines… I’ve realized… I love it. I love it I love it I love it. My yard has been a series of unexpected battles up until this point, but now that I’m pulling vines? I am at peace. I do NOT know what I am doing, and I don’t care. I go outside in my barefeet, like the neighborhood kook, and I put on my gardening gloves (usually…) and I clip and chop and pull, and after an hour, I see measurable difference. I feel like I’m doing something, even though I’m just pulling vines from behind my shed, or thinning out my crazy invasive honeysuckle, and pulling the virginia creeper out of it. I also spent one afternoon using the app “picture this” to figure out what every single vine, bush, weed, ground cover, tree, and flower is. It was heaven. Nothing I am doing is imperative, it’s just… joyful. And, while I’m pulling the vines and chopping the strange saplings that are trying to grow from under my deck, I envision the kind of garden I eventually want to plant in my yard. And that alone is soothing to me. Will it ever happen? I don’t know. I have had ONLY a brown thumb until now. In the city, I kept buying full sun plants for my FULL SHADE patio, even though I knew it was fully shade, and so, everything died. Will I turn this brown thumb ship around? Only time will tell.

But, so far, I’ve (actually, the landscaper) planted two small plum trees, two small peach trees, a redbud tree. And I’ve planted 3 of 7 blueberry bushes (I realized I should hold off planting the rest because they are right next to my deck and I want to powerwash and restain the deck first, because if I don’t soon, it’ll start to rot.) I planted a raspberry bush… and two little fig trees in pots on my deck. And one raised bed filled with strawberry bushes (that’s the one in the shade but they are living, though all the strawberries are being eaten by baby slugs!) And another with tomatoes, basil, peppers, cucumbers, squash, and POTATOES from MY KITCHEN that started SPROUTING.

It’s fun, ok. Will they all die? Is this just a maniacal exuberance that will fade in time, the more fingers I slice up? Maybe. But for now, I’m having fun. And it’s a nice shift from the suburban soldier battles I was facing before.

Ok. Now let’s get to the bad part. The mold part. Except, it’s not nearly as bad as I thought.

My Mold

Ohhhh where do I start.

Five-ish years ago I started working with a naturopath who expanded my views on the kinds of thing that can cause disease and chronic illness. According to what I learned through her, our health is a combination of “interferences,” meaning, lots of different things that can “interfere” with our body’s innate ability to heal itself. This includes: genetics and epigenetics, stress/ trauma/ energetic/ spiritual factors (I’d put this one in the category of “the social determinants of health”), nutrition (not like, “drink celery juice,” but more like: are you nourishing your body with enough fat, protein, carbs, and minerals so it can properly function and heal?), supporting our detox and drainage pathways and ability to naturally detox toxins and environmental stressors, and then, any combination of environmental factors and toxic overload that the body may or may not be in a position to effectively detox, including but not limited to: heavy metals, pesticides/herbicides, parasites, chronic infections like Lyme or Epstein Barr, and…. toxic mold exposure.

So, five years ago, when I was working with her, and very chronically ill (nonstop low grade fevers, liver pain, migraines, exhaustion), I moved into my little old house in the city, and I noticed some mold and water damage… and panicked. Oh no, I’m already sick and now my house is killing me even more. So my naturopath had me do something called an ERMI test, Environmental Relative Moldiness Index. Sounds like a joke. Moldiness Index? But, that’s what it’s called. You pay $300 to get a swiffer and wipe down the dust in your house, then a lab tells you what levels and what kinds of mold spores have settled in your house, which tends to give a general picture of what mold you have growing in your house.

When my test came back, she looked at it and said: “Oh, Caroline. This is fine. You have no mold issues in your house.” Really? Wow. Even though my roof is leaking into my bedroom and my bricks are filled with efflorescence and my basement has puffy water damage? Amazing.

There was mold listed on the ERMI test, but it was low, and it was kinds that weren’t too toxic. Because here is the thing: every house has mold. Mold is everywhere. Just like… every body has viruses and bacteria. It just is. The question becomes… how out of balance is it?

I didn’t think about mold again in my old house after that.

Then, before I moved into this house in the suburbs, the inspector “found mold in the attic” and so I “got a remediation” done with the guy my realtor recommended. Cheap. Quick. No testing before or after… (stupid). I replaced the roof, because it was old and most likely the cause of the attic mold, and I moved in.

The day I closed on the house, I went down into the basement and panicked at how musty it smelled…. it did not smell like this during the house tour or the inspection!?!? It was because they moved out two weeks before, and took the dehumidifier with them.

As soon as I put in a dehumidifier, the smell improved. I struggled with my dehumidifier because I wanted to set it up so it automatically drained, so I didn’t have to remember to go down and empty it every day, but the hose hookup that’s supposed to allow it to automatically drain keeps leaking into the basin, so I have to keep emptying the basin anyway. It fills up slower, but it still fills up and automatically shuts off. But then winter came, and the dehumidifiers barely filled up because the winter is much dry-er (or more frozen).

Fast forward to spring. We had some really hot days, really early. So I turned on the AC, and the air blowing out of my AC vents was musty as f*ck. I googled. And apparently that’s usually caused by mold in the ducts or mold on the evaporator coil. So I went on a big panicked journey to try and figure out if my AC system was moldy. It was not.

But then I realized… it’s spring. It’s not dry anymore. The basement is musty again, because the dehumidifiers must be regularly emptied again (yes I have two store bought ones now because I hoped it would help me empty them less.) And the AC is pulling air from my musty basement, and blowing it all over the house.

At that exact same time, I was following someone on instagram who was going through their own mold hell. She, her husband, and her daughter had been sick nonstop for the two years they’d lived in the house, so they did an ERMI test, and found high levels of mold, did a remediation, moved back in… and all got sick again. Apparently, the remediation didn’t end up helping their health, because the spores had been blown everywhere through the HVAC, and it was all over all of their things, furniture, rugs, and they guessed they may have more mold hiding behind other walls in their house too, and so… instead of searching for it and paying god knows how much to maybe have another failed remediation, they are going to sell their house (because they did a basement remediation on the mold they found, and can prove they did.)

The things I learned about mold, is that it’s not the actual mold that’s the health stressor, it’s the spores they release and that travel around your house. Those are the things that can be toxic, depending on the mold. And once you have an HVAC… they’re everywhere. There is no containment.

So of course, I panicked. Omg. I must have mold in my house too. Omg. That’s why I got sick twice in a row in March and then April. Omg, and my fireplace is leaking, omg there might be water damage in my walls from my leaking fireplaces!!? Omg, I have allergies (it was spring allergies). Omg I’m allergic to my house. Omg. I have the wettest basement. Omg… why didn’t I think about these exposed cement basement walls? Is that mold on them? That looks like mold! Why didn’t the inspector mention it??? Of course this is happening. I live in a swamp. (Fun fact, every single person who has seen those cement basement walls has said something different. Some people say it’s definitely mold. Some people say it’s definitely not mold. Some are like: meh, but it’s cement so it’s not really able to grow much mold anyway…)

Here is the thing… people have very different views on mold. Some are like, omg mold remediations are such a scam, just stop the water leak/intrusion, throw some bleach on it, and move on with your life. And some are like no you don’t understand, mold spores are toxic, and bleach just makes the mold burrow even more into the porous surface it’s growing on, and the spores will cling to every single thing in your home and make you extremely sick over time. I now believe this is true for some kinds of mold, and some kinds of people. Some people are genetically extremely sensitive to mold. And some people have so many other “interferences” that mold is the straw that broke their body’s camel’s back, if you get my drift.

But at the time, I went to the worst case scenario. Omg. My house is killing me. I’m going to have to either spend 100K on remediations, or somehow do a small remediation and sell it before I get more bad news. Omg I just moved here. Omg where am I going to move my potential one-woman-homestead now?!?!?!

Look, besides the ridiculousness of selling a home you just bought, there was also no way I’d be able to sell it, and find another home in my price range that didn’t also need a shit ton of work, and where I’d actually end up saving money in the end. There’s just no way. It would be the definition of delusional and rash. An extremely expensive, if necessary, remediation was still probably the cheaper option. Ignoring it altogether would be the cheapest, of course, but at the time, I had musty air blowing out of my AC vents, and a panic that every breath I took was making me sick.

So, I did the ERMI test. And it came back a few weeks later with a level that said, basically, “do not live in your home.” I had elevated Aspergillus Penicillium, and mildly elevated “toxic black mold.” I was actually running errand when I got the results and was like ok great, my dog is in my house DYING from mold, and I don’t even want to have to go home. I went for a long drive, and cried, and felt sorry for myself. And was like fuck my life is so not fun right now. What am I even looking forward to? Farming? And spending money I don’t have on an epic mold remediation?! My life sucks!

However, something was telling me that my house was not nearly as toxic as the ERMI was saying. Through my panic, I also had this feeling that… it was not that bad. And, funny enough, my psychic prepper friend, who as you may have been able to tell, is not shy about freaking me the fuck out, also told me that she sensed that my mold was not actually a big problem at all. Also, yes I’d gotten sick twice in a row in the spring, but it was also when I went off ALL of the supplements I’d been on for years, because I learned that they may have been making me dependent on them, and knocking off other minerals in my body. So my body was in a state of shock.

Also, since moving into this house, I have not, generally, felt sicker, than before. In fact, I never get headaches in this house. I used to have multiple terrible headaches a week. So, things were not… that bad…

However… if there was mold that should be taken care of, I didn’t actually know where the mold was. The ERMI samples the general dust around your house, but it doesn’t indicate where the actual mold problem is. So… WAS it in my basement? Was it behind other walls? Was it just the spores leftover from my attic mold remediation!?!

The problem with the ERMI, that I’ve learned, is that it’s skewed. You just can’t tell how long those spores have been collecting, how evenly they’re distributed, and what the air quality is. Also, apparently the swiffer version of the test always reads way higher than the “vacuuming the rug” version of the test. But I didn’t know that yet.

So, when I called mold remediation companies to ask for information on their protocols (because I was doing a ton of research on the good and bad protocols, and apparently my attic was done with a bad, stupid protocol) they told me to contact a third party mold inspector who would do a visual inspection, and air sample tests, so they had a protocol to follow. ($1.5K right there, btw.)

Here is where the good news starts. The mold inspectors were like… ok, so your basement definitely had some water damage (I knew it did too, because I knew that the previous owner’s sump pump failed at one point, and so they installed a new really good one), there are water lines and the carpet is a little moldy underneath, and there is a tiny bit of mold in the closet, and a tiny bit at the bottom of that exposed drywall by the sump pump… but they said: “it’s really not very bad compared to what we are normally looking at. This probably just needs a simple “cleanup.” ”

Then the air sample tests came back. The basement is mildly elevated with Aspergillus Penicillium, and a teeny, nearly negligible level of black mold spores. Even a mold company came out after that report was like: “ok this is a pretty low reading, don’t be nervous at all.” Then they sent me a quote for $12K. Because that’s the deal with mold remediations. They follow a protocol for containment, and upcharge like woaaaaa. And, that price is just the “remediation”: ripping things out, and treating the mold (the mold that’s barely there). It doesn’t even include like… the industrial dehumidifier I need, the new basement floor I need, the re-parging of the cement walls, the duct cleaning I’ll need after…

So what am I going to do?

All I really need to do, is to un-finish the fucking basement. And get a bomb-ass dehumidifier. And call it a day. I haven’t hired the person yet, I’m waiting for one more quote to come in, but that’s what I’m going to do. And, it’s still gonna cost me… 10K. But that’s all in. (Plus new sliding door above the basement to stop water intrusion, and getting the chimneys re-masoned… which together is … 13K. So altogether 23K… maybe 25K. A lot. A lot a lot. It’s a lot. But not 100K. And not having to move.

How can I afford this? I mean I can and I can’t. I have money now from the sale of my city house, but that was meant to be money that I lived on for the next year or so, while I come up with another idea for a book.

I coullllld just ignore it all, since the levels are low, but the problem is, now that I’ve found it, I have to disclose it if I sell. So I need to remediate on some level, and re-test. Also, it’s apparently just a preventative issue. It’s not bad now, but if I let carpet stay in a musty swamp basement, it could become a bigger problem in time.

Of course, in the back of my mind I’m like… what if society does collapse, and the electricity grid does come down, even temporarily, my sump pump will fail and basement will flood! I have a water pressure backup but that won’t keep working forever! But, what’s a girl to do. Move? Again? No.

So, I’m just going to have a contractor rip out my basement, and then I’ll treat it for mold and get a duct cleaning. And re-test.

And as far as health goes? I definitely believe there are people who are super sensitive to mold, either because of their genes or because their body is at max capacity already, but I seem… to be fine. And I’ve been pretty sick before, so … I’m not gonna sweat this. I’ve also heard from some people who used to be panicked about mold, that now believe that if you support your body with good nourishment, and balancing your mineral levels, your body can more effectively handle and/or detox the mold, and mold in general is not that big of a health stressor.

A lot of people in the anti-diet world are very mainstream with their views on health. Toxins aren’t real, your body has a liver, it knows how to detox. But as someone who had liver pain, and insanely painful and life-altering detox symptoms (migraines, vertigo, etc)… I thought… ok, sure, but… some people are impaired. Like me!

And I still believe that’s true. Yes, we have a detox system, but a lot of people’s detox systems are struggling. And a lot of that is because we are undernourished.

This is a renewed belief of mine, that lines up exactly with The F*ck It Diet… and it goes like this: unless you are genetically sensitive to mold, if you nourish and support your body, your body is probably going to be able to handle it. You can become more resilient against mold, or any other toxin. It doesn’t mean that those toxins can’t stress out the body, but it’s not just about the toxin, it’s about how much we are supporting our bodies to actually function the way they are meant to.

You still don’t want mold growth in your house! But is my mold as dire as I feared it was? … No.

Is it still going to be expensive? Yes.

Yes. It is…

Putting the paywall at the bottom here, which puts the audio version behind a paywall.