Adventures with Moldy Carpet

Yep!  You read that right.  I'm doing a post on the mold I found on the carpet in my guest room that I mentioned here.  It's kind of gross, but I thought this might be helpful for anyone else going through this.

This is what I found when I moved the bed so I could paint over the accent wall.

I had always suspected mold.  Ever since I moved in the house, I could smell a "smell" that I could only describe as pee.  Pretty nasty, but the smell would come and go, but never really went away - even when I cleaned the carpet in there twice.  I even once found another spot in the carpet that immediately was cleaned by the wet vac, but it never came back.  So, I never knew for sure what that "smell" was, but then I found these two new spots.

I went to Home Depot and bought a mold test kit, just to test it out and be sure of what I was dealing with.

You have to pour the liquid substance into the petrie dish and then tilt the dish so that the substance completely covers the bottom of it.  Then wait for the amount of time the directions state so the liquid will turn to a gel form.

I then used the sterile swab sticks to rub the moldy spot and then lightly rub it on the gel.  And then you wait 48 hours to see your results.

Well, I'm pretty sure I rubbed the swab stick too hard on the gel because it left some gouges in the gel and nothing showed up.  So, I did it again and made sure to rub it lightly.  I forgot to take pictures of what showed up 48 hours later, but a very small spot of mold appeared.

Here it is 6 days after.

And 9 days after.

Pretty nasty, huh?  But, it confirmed that the spots in the carpet were mold.  In the meantime, I had decided not to wait for the mold to show up in the petrie dish (because I had guests that were going to be staying with me soon), so I decided to just pull up the carpet and see what the heck was going on in there.

My awesome brother came over and helped me pull up all the carpet.  Oh, did I say that he helped me?  I meant to say, he pulled up the carpet.  :)  (Thanks big bro!)  And this is what showed up underneath those spots.  And I did see a spot on the underside of the carpet where I had cleaned up that first spot I saw when I first moved in.  Warning - gross pictures coming up...

Here is what the concrete looked like underneath.  Looks like there is some kind of water/moisture damage going on.  Fortunately, there is no major leak in which tons of water is coming out and flooding the floor.   (Oooh - there is a sneak peak of the new accent wall there - I'll get to that in another post).

Since I had guests coming soon after this, I needed a quick fix until I could get down to the real issue.  So, first I sanded down as much of the glue that was on the floor as possible.  I then vacuumed it up 2 or 3 times - there were lots of crumbly bits & dust from the sanding.  Using a bleach & water solution, I mopped up the floor 3 times and then used regular cleaner to mop 2 more times.  I then let it dry out for a few days before putting everything back in the room (more on that later).

I'm not planning on putting any type of flooring any time soon.  I still need to call my homeowner's insurance to see what needs to be done about the floor, so I need for them to be able to see what it looks like "as is".   Also, I had planned to eventually replace all the flooring in the entire house, but didn't plan to do it anytime soon, so I figure that this room can wait until I'm ready to re-do all the floors.

Thanks for putting up with the gross pictures.  ;)  I'll be sharing the accent wall soon.

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