Gross, Nasty, and Seriously Crazy!

I knew we had a problem I just didn't know what it was, how bad it was or where it was. I don't even really know when it started but I knew, just knew something was wrong. Then it began to get more and more obvious.

Let's start about 4 months ago. For a while I thought there was something funky smelling in the kitchen. I tried cleaning the drains with vinegar and baking soda and that seemed to help the smell go away and I thought the problem was solved. After a bit I realized that sure, one smell was gone but there were still other smells and some strange seemingly really humid air under the kitchen sink. I say seemingly humid because I really couldn't compare it to anything and wasn't sure if it was normal for the cabinet under the sink to be so humid. Then came the issue that if I left a dishcloth or bib or anything anywhere near the sink not completely spread out so that it would dry it would be moldy by morning. That didn't seem normal to me but I couldn't find any source of mold or at the time any really strong smell, at least not that anyone else could smell, anywhere. So I just kept on like normal thinking that there might be a problem but totally unsure of what to do about it or where to go from there.

Go forward a couple of months and now the smell is getting really bad but only I can smell it, Jeff just doesn't smell anything. I think that I'm crazy but I'm seriously gagging every time that I open the bottom two cabinets. We didn't have a ton of people over during this time because I was embarrassed at the state and smell of our house, even if I was the only one who seemed to smell it. And every time someone did come over I totally forgot to ask them to see if they could smell it, so I just continued to gag when I opened the cabinets and continued to think I was crazy.

Then more craziness started to happen. It started with only a few drain flies (I did a little research online to find out what kind of fly they were because I'm just like that) and I was grossed out but looking back it was nothing. They started in Jeff and the kids' bathroom (yes, that means that I get a bathroom all to myself, Jeff has just always used the second bathroom, completely by his own choice, and that's totally fine with me!) and from the research we learnt that they lived in standing water and in the sludge and slime in drains. I always had a suspicion that we had mold somewhere but again, with no way to prove it, figured that the flies were in our drains. Our drains were definitely slow moving so it was quite possible that there was a lot of sludge and slime build up that they were living in. So we poured a bunch of drain-o in all of our drains and that seemed to help, a bit. For a few days it seemed like they were going away, or at least there were no more seeming to come. But then the came back even worse. Now instead of 5-10 flies buzzing around the bathroom (and it's a pretty small bathroom) there were 15-20 at all times. I was so grossed out that I wouldn't give the kids a bath in their tub but made them take showers in mine. So we tried again with the drain-o (our pest control company said that it can sometimes take more than one application to work). And again, it seemed to work for a day or two but then they got even worse. Now I was killing 20-30 flies in Jeff and the kids' bathroom each time that I went in. It was so disgusting. I was continuing to smell mold and Jeff was continuing to not smell anything.

I tried taking everything out of all my kitchen cupboards and cleaning everything down to see if there was anything there that would tell me what I was smelling but all to no avail. There was nothing visible anywhere, just the smell and the flies. The flies were so bad that they were now flying all over the house and showing up in the kitchen and all the other rooms, mostly the kitchen and bathroom though. And I should say that we all became ninja quality in smashing flies. The kids loved when it was bath time (Jeff convinced me that if I thought of it like camping where there are bugs in the bathrooms that I could bathe the kids in the bathtub which they liked much, much better) when they got to smash bugs, me not so much as I was counting in excess of 30 flies that I would kill in the 10 minutes before letting the kids come in the room and then another 10 or so during bath time. Seriously it was beyond nasty and something needed to be done.

We tried taking out the dishwasher to see if we could see anything that would say "mold" or standing water or any other sign that there was a problem that we could do something about but there was nothing visible.

I knew something BIG was wrong, just had a feeling in my gut, but I was really, really hoping that I was wrong.

After dealing with the flies for a week or two (all this time has just run together and I really can't tell you how long it's gone on for or the exact time line) the most disgusting things start to happen, I'm mean I'm still dealing with Post Traumatic Stress about it. I was washing dishes one evening when I looked down on the floor by the toe-kick of the cabinets and saw what looked like eraser shavings (you know the little flecks after erasing something, kinda thin string things). There were maybe 15-20 of them. I thought that maybe one of the kids had spilt something and let's just say my floor was in more than a bit of need of a good cleaning. So I swept them up and took a close look at them to see if I could tell what they were. What I found was beyond nasty. They were little larva things from the drain flies. That made me completely nauseous and I knew something needed to be done but we still didn't know exactly where they were coming from. So after cleaning them up I finished washing the dishes and then pulled out the flashlight. Whether that was a good idea or bad is debatable, but at least we found out that we definitely had a problem, now it was to discover how bad it was. I noticed that there were a few more of the little guys trying to crawl out from under the cabinets so we figured there was something going on there. I also noticed that on the wall next to the cabinets there was a small gap between the tile and the baseboard and that it looked like black gunk was growing there.

Finally, confirmation that I wasn't crazy, but just how bad it was we still didn't know. What we did know is that we needed to find out what exactly we were dealing with, but we had no idea of how to do that. So after multiple calls to my dad (thanks for all the help and advice, Dad!) we finally pulled the dishwasher out again to try and take the toe-kick off the cabinets to see just what we could see without having to take out the cabinets or anything. But this time, when we pulled out the dishwasher things were very, very different from the last time. In the back corner the was mold. Not just a little tiny fleck but a big nasty black spot. And not just a nasty black spot but a moving nasty black spot. We took a bunch of pictures and then closed it back up as quickly as we could because we were so grossed out and new that it was going to be a bigger than hoped for job. We had been hoping that there was just a bit growing under the cabinets that we could clean up quickly and be done with, but no such luck.

So after putting the dishwasher back (this was Monday evening at like 10:30) we knew something had to be done. We decide to wait a day or two because of how busy Jeff was and then we'd try taking out the cabinets and seeing what was going on.

Then came Tuesday morning. Things were escalating quickly and when I was making coffee or something I noticed more little "eraser shavings" and some brown dried water marks by the base of the cabinets. Something needed to be done and done quickly. We have a big baby play yard gate thing that we put up so the kids couldn't get close to all the nastiness and tried to deal with the inconvenience the best we could. On Tuesdays Jeff has worship practice so we knew we couldn't really do anything that evening but it also means that he has the mornings off. So while I went out to our playgroup with the kids, Jeff called the insurance company to see just what they could do and what we needed to do. Thankfully we had a really, really helpful insurance person who told us what to do and what to say to help things go in our favor.

We thought it was bad at this point but we really had no idea! So after talking to our insurance rep we decided that on Wednesday afternoon Jeff and I would get started at trying to find out what we were up against. I headed off to Home Depot on Wednesday morning to buy boxes, gloves (we had bought big fancy masks a couple of days before) and a bunch of other supplies with the kids. It was a busy day, let's call it that. After returning home I started packing up the bottom kitchen cabinets and doing what I could to help be ready for the tear out. Thankfully kids took naps that day and one of our friends from work came and helped Jeff take apart all the plumbing and take out cabinets. Man, it was SO, SO, SO, GROSS! I can't adequately describe how bad it was and I didn't even have to do to majority of it, the boys did. After an hour or more of work and a few close calls (water spraying from pipes onto electrical outlets is never a good thing) they were ready to take the cabinets out. That's when we saw it. The floor looked like it was moving. There was grout missing between some of the tiles under the cabinets and the mold had made it so that you could see right under the drywall and oh, I almost threw up. Black gunk that looked like flowing water but there was not any flowing water, just thousands and thousands of tiny drain fly larva. Just remembering it is giving me shivers and making me nauseous again. Seriously traumatising. We took a million pics (as per requested for insurance purposes) and some video and took the cabinets outside. We could tell the cabinets were done and would need to be replaced and that a large portion of the drywall was going to need to be removed. But again, we still didn't know the extent of the damage.

The boys continued working for probably 5 hours while I kept the kids in our master bedroom watching videos and then took them out for dinner to chick-fil-a.

We decided that we needed to put up a big tarp thing to keep all the mold and everything over in the kitchen and as much as possible out of the rest of the house. That meant that the back half of our house was now off limits and all we had were our bedrooms, living room and bathrooms (of which I decided I was completely done with the main bathroom and wouldn't go in there even though we hadn't actually closed it off), our kitchen, dining room and family room were effectively unusable. At first the only way to get anything from any of those rooms was to go around outside the house and use the back door but after a little thinking we made a door through the tarp that we could crawl through. That helped a lot but it was still a huge hassle to get milk or anything from the fridge. I had to don a monster of a mask just to enter the area then climb over a baby gate and slither through the opening to get what I needed.

Anyways, after removing the cabinets and cutting off some drywall we found that it was all much worse than we thought. There was huge amounts of mold and we hadn't even uncovered all of it. The boys spent a good amount of time spraying down all the mold and cleaning as much of the "moving floor" and beams and everything as they could. I finally made it back home from dinner with the kids at around 8pm and the boys were ready to stop for the night and eat some dinner themselves.

After putting the kids to bed I donned a mask and gloves and my work clothes and headed into the war zone to see what I could do. I spent another hour and a half or so spraying and cleaning up as much as I could, just to try and slowdown or stop the bugs and mold as much as possible. During that time I also discovered what I believed to be the problem, what cause all the mess. In the kitchen sink drain pipe there was a crack. This seemed to be good news as our insurance rep told us that in order for it to be covered it had to be a burst pipe or something like that, not just slow leak, so, ya, some light started to shine through, but just a small little sliver of possibility.

I told myself that we were "camping" in our home to try and help me not feel quite so confined and annoyed by the circumstances. I was washing dishes in a storage bin in our living room and using paper plates and stuff as much as possible and all sources of heating things up had to come from a coffee maker, a kettle and a toaster. Poor Luke was not too thrilled about that as he has to have his milk heated up for him to drink it but without a microwave that wasn't happening, let's just say the times it was heated up because we were out somewhere were pure joy to him.

Thankfully some good friends let us crash at their house for the afternoon Thursday while Jeff stayed home and met the insurance adjuster. We were blessed with an awesome insurance adjuster who right away felt terrible for us and our kids and did everything he could to help us out. Jeff called while I was on my way home from our friends and told me the great news, insurance was going to cover it! We still didn't know the extent of it or what exactly was going to happen but insurance was on our side, Praise God!

And to top it off, the insurance adjuster took one look at my floor grout and said that he was going to make sure that got cleaned as well. I was thrilled, I know that doesn't seem like something big but to me it was. I've been wanting to get all our grout cleaned but it just hasn't been something of priority for us and had been put off and put off. But now it was going to happen!

We also found out that insurance was going to pay for us to stay somewhere while our home was being worked on. We had the okay to go to a hotel or whatever starting Friday but we decided that since it was already pretty late Friday when we found this out that we'd just spend the night in our own home and then maybe Saturday move out. We looked into a few hotels locally but none of them were going to work for our family (they all had a max of 4 people per room and no adjoining rooms) so our insurance adjuster told us to check out some rental properties. After checking into some and calling a bunch only to not get a hold of anyone, Saturday pretty much came and went. Finally we heard back from one that we thought was going to work. It was a nice townhouse not too far from our place and going for a decent price but after a lot of issues we finally decided we'd better look and see if there wasn't another place that would work better. After a bunch more searching and a few more calls I found this condo right on a big park across the street from the beach in Jupiter. It was a little more than we were hoping to pay but well, insurance is covering it, so we decided to go for it. Late Sunday evening (10 pm or so) we finally had everything worked out and were ready to move in. I packed up the car and the kids and off we went to our new home for at least two weeks (or so we thought at the time).

The mold remediation company was supposed to come Monday morning and we needed to be out for them so off we went. So far the condo has worked really well for us. It's not huge or super fancy but that works fine for us, less stuff to worry about breaking with three young kids. There's also a really nice pool that we've been too a couple times and are heading back to shortly.

As for the mold company.... Jeff did meet them Monday morning and found out that they think it's going to take about two weeks to finish all the clean-up. But they also told us that they weren't going to be able to start until later in the week. That meant that we were going to be at the condo longer than initially anticipated. Originally we were told the mold guys would take about 5 days, but nope, it's gonna take a lot longer than that. After meeting with them yesterday (Friday) Jeff handed over the keys and found out that the initial estimate for work is $10,500! They're going to be completely taking out the kitchen, bathroom and linen closet walls to redo, cleaning all the air ducts, doing some major hepa vacuuming and a bunch more stuff. I can't believe how much and how big of a job it is. I am so thankful that insurance is covering it, there is no way that we'd be able to do all that is necessary and it's so nice to know that it's going to be done properly.

After all the mold clean up is done we'll still have a bunch of walls and stuff to put up and cabinets to install and we're still not exactly sure what our insurance is going to give us for all of that but whatever it is we're planning on adding a bit of our own money to so that we can make the kitchen and bath that we've been wanting to have but just haven't been able to do.

In the end it's going to be amazing. It's such a huge blessing but a crazy inconvenience. I just can't wait for it to all be done. Life is slowly starting to settle back down to normal but then next week Jeff is going away for a couple days and me and the kids will be busy with VBS at our church. I'm so thankful that God is taking care of us and we've had such great insurance reps and adjusters and everything helping us. You always hear about the mean and nasty people and how they do everything they can to make it so the insurance company doesn't have to pay but so far we've been blessed.

It's definitely been a little crazy around here but there's a huge beam of light shining at the end of the tunnel. Now to just see how long the tunnel is before we finally get to the end and back to our own home.