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Mold Inspection and Clean Up Recommendations for Your Home

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Mold is a naturally occurring material that is all around you in the form of spores until the environment provides the right circumstances where it can bloom into a damaging and health-affecting problem in your home. Here are some tips to effectively test for and clean up after a mold problem in your home.

Arrange for Testing

If you suspect there is mold in your home that you are unable to visually see, you can arrange for a professional test. A professional test can come in helpful when you have found water damage in your home and suspect there is mold growth behind the wall or in a cavity of the home that you cannot easily access. 

Professional mold testing checks the air in that area for the presence of high amounts of mold spores. It also includes testing of surfaces through a surface test. Your mold professional will take air samples and swab surfaces to test at the lab for mold growth and the type of mold you are dealing with. 

Focus on Specific Areas

When you have discovered mold growth inside your home, you will need to remove the mold that is growing to protect your household from its dangerous spores. However, you don't need to go overboard and have your entire home cleaned of its surfaces when you have found mold growth inside your bathroom cabinets. As a first step you need to determine the size of the mold problem, and this can include inspections behind drywall and under flooring to find out where all the growth has expanded. A water leak behind the wall, for example, can leave mold growth on the drywall, in the insulation, and also within the ceiling cavity of any room below in the basement or lower floor.

If you have found a mold problem where there is growth on a bathroom wall and it has not expanded to any other areas, you can likely clean it up by yourself without professional assistance. If the area of mold growth does not exceed ten square feet, you can remove damaged materials and clean surrounding surfaces to restore your home. However, if you have found mold growth through an entire exterior wall of your home, this will require professional remediation.

After you have removed mold from a space in your home, it is a good idea to clean some of the surrounding surfaces for mold spores. For example, if you have removed mold from the bathroom cabinets, you should follow up by wiping down walls in the bathroom to eliminate the potential for mold spores there. Then, air out your home by opening windows or running your home's ventilation system with a good HVAC filter.

Learn more about the process by contacting mold removal companies. 


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