Home Inspection - Mold

Finding mold in a home inspection is certainly not going to make for pleasant day. Just how unpleasant your day has just become can vary from inconvenient to disastrous. There are just too many variables on what the home inspection may reveal about your mold issues. Of course the ideal situation is to not have any mold to be found when the home inspection is done.

Although it may seem otherwise mold does not just magically materialize. It can be in different colors and look powdery, slimy or furry with or without any odor. Before mold dies, it puts out little spores waiting for better times (at least as far as the mold is concerned.) These little spores can lie dormant, even in sunlight. They really like to live in dust. What the sport is waiting for is water. Add a little food and mold, along with its cousin mildew are off to the races.

A favorite food source for mold is processed wood products together with humidity and reasonable warm temperatures. Therefore, examples would include paper, the wood frame, and/or siding of the house, or even the paper coating on drywall. Since the house tends to stand up better when it has building materials, it's difficult to get rid of the wood in the home. And since the spores are part of the planet, we can't get rid of them. That leaves us with controlling water.

Outside of structural issues such as leaky roof, the first thing to check for would-be plumbing inside or outside that is leaking. Or pipe sweating The sim

le fact is no humidity or water, no mold/mildew growth. One of the simplest things you can do is use, open windows or ventilation fans in bathrooms when showering, kitchens when cooking, and have good ventilation in the laundry area.

Mold can be an issue beyond causing structural damage to the home. Serious health risks are possible on top of this and can be even fatal to your health. This is due to the fact that many fungi can produce mycotoxins. The operative letters there are, TOXIN. That's another way of saying very bad for you. This naturally leads to why mold/fungus cleanup crews are expensive. They are at risk for Organic Dust Toxic Syndrome (ODTS). Anybody is subject to acquiring Hypersensitivity Pneumonitis (HP) with repeated exposure. As HP can cause permanent lung damage, a number of government agencies have gotten a bit testy about mold issues.

For a number of years now, the state of California requires every home sold to have a mold test as part of the disclosure statement. The written report can be based on visual inspection and/or lab analysis. In most cases, a lab analysis is less costly and less accurate. Therefore, the easiest solution is to control mold/mildew/fungi in the first place, preventing any "red flags" from showing up in the home inspection.

If you happen to be one of the hapless souls, who came up "a day late and a dollar short" in discovering all the great research from Tcat and Gudrun, we would like to suggest you look at the report, titled: Guidelines on Assessment and Remediation of Fungi in Indoor Environments issued by New York City. It contains great safety guidelines without taking an alarmist approach.

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Siddique is real estate investor for over 22 years and President of ButterFlyLister. This article first appeared on http://www.butterflylister.com - a leading real estate website with a comprehensive property listings with owner financing and lease to purchase options. Now Sellers can sell their homes at full price in any market. Launched in 2007, ButterFlyLister now offers Home Listing service throughout the united States for buyers and sellers. ButterFlyLister attracts thousands of buyers, sellers and real estate investors a month. Download Free How to sell your Home for Full Price in any market.