Aubree Felderhoff: feeling helpless might just be the worst feeling in the entire world, aside from feeling hopeless. And so if there's anything that we can do to help ourselves to have some sort of control and some sort of plan where if an emergency happens, and guys, it's going to happen at some point in our life, if an emergency happens, we know what to do to the best of our ability to help ourselves, not end up in a situation like Aubree and her family. Welcome back to Mold Free Mom. If you are new, welcome. I am your host, Aubree Felderhof. My family has been through, survived, and now healed from mold, not twice, but three times, which is what we're going to talk about today. And so I'm excited that you are joining us. Let's get into today's topic. And guys, this one has needed to come out for a while, but to be completely honest with you, I have held back on sharing because number one, I'm completely embarrassed, although I've been working through that. As to this topic and how it happened to me, and I'll explain that in a second. And number two, there's a lot of emotion that is associated with me sharing this topic. So without further ado, let's dive into what in the world are you talking about, Aubree? And that is that I have not been completely honest with you guys. And if you've known me either for a short period of time or a longer period of time. You'll know that I often talk about my mold story and being through mold and getting to the other side of it twice. Well, that is not completely true. Unfortunately, my family has now been through mold three times. And I have not felt I've been able to talk much about the most recent remediation because as someone that is a professional in the mold industry and has quite a bit of experience that I never asked for, yet I have. Deep down I felt as if I should have known better on some of the things that have cause this last recent remediation. And so I want to talk to you guys today about what that is in hopes that by me finally being able to share about this story and what happened to us over the past few months, it will help you and your family or someone that you know and love to prevent some of the cost, symptoms, prolonged illness that we've dealt with in our own home. So let me dive into what I'm even talking about. And if you've been following along with my story for any amount of time, you'll know that we left our first dream home now eight years ago, moved to this second home and that was due to mold and started from scratch. We brought nothing with us and you can go back and listen to my previous episodes to kind of know how that transpired and how I finally got well and that evolved into helping other people get well. But that being said, we had been in this home for about five years and hired some contractors to come in and redo our master bathroom and kind of update things within the home. And so custom cabinets were built and the bathroom was completely cut out and a new bathroom was put in. And unfortunately, That caused mold and I won't go deep into the details of that, but that caused a lot of mold and a very fast basically felt as if I got slapped in the face with symptoms. I mean, there was no slow progression or buildup. It hit me hard. And so I knew something was going on. I wasn't quite sure because it was all brand new and it didn't make sense. But eventually we tested and yes, there was quite a bit of mold. And we ended up moving our whole family. I have three little boys. We moved our whole family of five along with our three dogs out of the home because it did require a whole home remediation. And so that story is in another podcast of us having to move from Airbnbs to hotels and all sorts of things as a family basically trying to get away from mold so that we could just heal again. But what I did not share with you guys is what happened after that. And so after we had been out of our home for multiple months, we moved back in. Everything was remediated. But of course, if you've ever been through remediation or know someone that has, remediation is not the same as a finished product. So when you move back in, it's a bit of a construction site, usually, unless you have build back included, which our remediation company did not have. There are plenty of walls, at least for us, that were missing and you now have a massive project on your hand that you have to rebuild. It's really not a fun situation to be in. So we moved back in last October, and honestly, we were so happy to finally be home and have a safe home to begin healing in. And 48 hours later, and I kid you not, guys, 48 hours later, we went to church. It was a Sunday. We went to lunch. We ran a few errands with the family. So it had been many, many hours. I think my son had a soccer game. I mean, we had been gone all day. And when we came home, we walked into four inches of water. It was coming from in our home, we have the master bedroom on one side and then the living space. And then my three boys have their bedrooms all shared along a hallway with the bathroom. And it was coming from that hallway. It had seeped out into the living room and under the couch. So at first I didn't notice it. We walked in through the garage and through the kitchen. And as we walked towards the hallway, we heard the splash. And if you've ever been there this, you know what I'm talking about. You just step in it. The lights were out. So again, we didn't see it. And my heart just about dropped to the floor. And as I continued to splash to turn on the lights, I was horrified to see that there was about four inches of water. It was coming from my youngest son's toilet. the entire bathroom was flooded. It was up four inches across all of the brand new walls and baseboards that we had just had put back in from the previous remediation. It had ran down the hallway that connects to all of my boys' rooms. And so the water was going into all three boys' rooms as well as out into the living room. My husband and I, of course, immediately panicked. And so we began, we got a shot back and we began trying to suck up as much water and literal buckets, bringing buckets to pool all of the water. Of course, we turned the water off in the toilet that was still overflowing. Now, because we are in the field of going through mold so many times and now helping people and helping other families heal from mold, we felt we had a pretty good handle on how to deal with an emergency flood. Although, you know, we were still out of sorts and not even unpacked from being gone for months from our home. We had a pretty good handle. And so we began ripping out all of the drywall because in our bathroom, in our son's bathroom, there was drywall. We ripped out all of the absolute brand new baseboards that had just been put into his bathroom. We ripped out flooring, we ripped out walls, we went down to the studs. water had begun to pull at that base of the vanity. And so we ripped out that front part and began pulling water from there. It took about a full day. Of us ripping out everything that we had just basically built back in. And it looked catastrophic, honestly. But luckily, we had a tremendous amount of fans that we began running. We began running dehumidifiers. We did everything in our power. We let that sucker go for three weeks. We had those fans running in the dehumidifier and we were checking with our moisture meter and really, really on top, or so I thought. Of the entire process. Although it hurt our hearts, I felt excited that we were not about to pay a tremendous amount of money for yet another remediation. So after about, it was almost about a month when everything was completely dry. We had tested everything. We had drywall out, we had studs out. In our minds, everything was set and we were good to go. And so we began the build back process. And luckily, we were also in the middle of building back our master bathroom wall and the laundry room wall and a pantry wall because all of those areas had been remediated in the previous 48 hours before the previous professional remediation. And so we felt pretty good at this point that we had gotten it all, all of the water, everything was dry, everything was tested. We follow what I teach you guys to do and what Teach my clients to do if there's ever an emergency water event. And so we rebuilt the bathroom and the rest of the house that needed rebuilding. Now I would do every bit of that again. But let me tell you what happened next. Because a few months later, my symptoms returned again. Aubree Felderhoff | Mold Fr...: if you or someone that you love is dealing with mold illness or symptoms that look like they could be related to mold, and you're not sure where to start, you're feeling overwhelmed with even the thought of what to do next, you don't have to keep piecing this together alone. I offer a free discovery call where we can talk through where you are right now and what would actually help you get unstuck and move towards healing. Head over to moldfreemom.com and grab a free discovery call. See you there.
Aubree: And they were pretty significant. And in the beginning, I really wasn't sure because many of you know going through so much chronic illness, if this was trauma-based, if it was fear-based, if it was stress-based, you know, we were thinking we were gonna move back into the home after doing this remediation, which was no cakewalk and very stressful, and be able to heal. And instead, we were met with a flood. Immediately and having to do our own remediation and build back. And it was a lot of a lot of stress and a lot of heartache and a lot of money, as you know, if you've been through something like this. And so in the beginning with my symptoms, I just continued to really work on my nervous system regulation, making sure my detox pathways were open and following the protocol that I take so many through in the complete mold recovery. But what I noticed is that my symptoms were not dissipating and my kids and my husbands started to have some symptoms as well, And so at that point, we decided we were gonna call in our inspector. And guys, I was embarrassed. I was embarrassed to call him. And I'm sure if you've been there or something like this, you know what I'm talking about. When you just have to keep telling people this symptom is still happening, or we've had yet another event. And probably due to all the trauma of all of the doctors that have gaslit me and all of the professionals and all of the specialists. In the past, much like many of you have shared stories, there's a trauma associated. And for some of us, it can cause us to really struggle to speak up. It can cause, like myself, I found myself putting off calling the inspector because I almost gaslit myself, you know, thinking this is probably there's no way this is mold. We did it all right. It's in my head. It's just stress. It's just trauma. It's just yada yada yada. But eventually we did call our inspector. And we had him come and look at the entire area that we had remediated ourselves. And unfortunately, we missed some spots and it called for a full remediation. Now, the spots that we missed weren't spots that my husband and I addressed. so I'm hoping by talking about this today, this will help you in the event of a water damage or a flood in the future. when water leaks It's really going to follow the path of least resistance. It's going to travel downstream and it's it's going to go in a path of least resistance. And so when we had the flood from the toilet, water came out of the toilet, and of course it saturated all of the walls and all of the bathroom and moved down into the hallway. But what it also did that we could not address is that it went underneath the bathroom vanity it was slightly slanted down and something that we had no idea, went all the way under the bathroom vanity on top of the concrete into the very back corner of the vanity. And it pulled there. There must have been a slight downward slope. And unfortunately, it sat there. And so pulling out all of the sheetrock and the drywall and the baseboards and even the front of the vanity and blowing air and testing it later with a moisture meter that read dry did not address the far back area of that vanity that sat up against sheetrock and drywall. And unfortunately, the water sat there and it grew and it fed on that wall and developed mold. Again, it's nothing we could have addressed. We did everything we could. We just didn't have the right tools to look further and we weren't able to pull the vanity out. We also had water that went under our LVP, which now knowing what I know, I probably wouldn't do LVP again because what we were told is It's completely waterproof if you spill on luxury vinyl plank Or luxury vinyl tile, it will just pull on top because it's completely waterproof. But what we didn't realize, that we now realize, and hopefully I'm sharing with you, is that it also doesn't breathe. And so water gets under it and it sits there, it has no ability to breathe and release moisture, and it can in fact grow mold. And that's what happened with us. Unfortunately, it appeared that the tile To the luxury vinyl planking that was in the hallway was sealed. And so when we tested it, we didn't rip out any of that new LVP. But underneath our cabinetry and our linen closet that was a part of the kids' bathroom, underneath that we had tile and sheetrock that then backed up to the LVP that was in the hallway. That was not sealed. And so water, when it went and it flooded, it flooded underneath into That entire linen closet and it went through that drywall and under the LVP. And we had no idea. We couldn't have ripped up that flooring on our own. And so, conclusion to the story, guys, we ended up having to have a third remediation 48 hours after the second one that was in the only really untouched area from the previous remediation. Now, I'm telling you this really long story because I'm hoping that by me telling you this, number one, I let you off the hook. If you're feeling guilty, if you're feeling stressed, if you're feeling traumatized, if you're feeling like I did, for instance, in my first home when we had to leave and lose all of our belongings, it was traumatic. It was terrible. There's no way around it. with little kids having to throw away all of their possessions and their artwork, and it was awful. I wouldn't wish it on anybody. So I tell you this really long story because I'm hoping that today's episode will help you if you find yourself in an event, and we all do at some point, where we have a flood, we have a pipe that burst, we have some sort of water emergency, right? And if you're someone in the category like myself and my family who has already dealt with so much when it comes to water and mold and biotoxins or lime or other chronic illnesses, You want to feel that you're in control. You want to feel that you have a plan and that you can help yourself because I can tell you, and I know so many of you can understand and relate to this, that feeling helpless might just be the worst feeling in the entire world, aside from feeling hopeless. Okay. And I've been in all of those camps, and I know many of you have too. And so if there's anything that we can do to help ourselves to have some sort of control and some sort of plan where if an emergency happens, and guys, it's going to happen at some point in our life, if an emergency happens, we know what to do to the best of our ability to help ourselves, not end up in a situation like Aubree and her family. So let's talk about what that looks like. there's three questions that I want to give you if you come home. Let's say you're like me and my family and we came home from church to four inches of water. Or if you're in the home when something like this happens, let's talk about what we can do. And the first question that I want you to ask yourself is how much water is it? And how long has it been sitting? Okay, because we know that mold can take as little as 24 to 48 hours to grow. And so if you have been out town. And you come home two, three, four days later, and this happened to one of my friends and the home is flooded, a pipe burst and it's been going for days and days and days. That is not a situation that I would recommend trying to handle this yourself. Okay. If you are home, and I'll give you guys this story, over Labor Day, we had a bathtub that just started flooding. Craziest thing because nobody was using the bath. It's still 105 out here in Texas. And so nobody was in this bathtub. It was in the middle of the day. It was Labor Day, very hot. Thank goodness we were home. And my husband walked outside into the garage and saw water underneath our bathroom wall that shares the garage wall. Pulling out of the garage and down our sidewalk. Thank goodness. We were able to catch that. We were able to turn off emergency shut off the water, figure out what was happening and where it was leaking from. We then, due to this story that I've told you today, knew a better understanding of what to do. And so we ended up ripping out all of the sheetrock that is in the garage. Using a moisture meter, using thermal imaging, we put fans, we put dehumidifiers. We know a hundred percent that it did not go under any sort of vanity, any tub, any of the flooring. It came straight out into the garage. And so we are remediating that ourselves, guys, because of what I learned through this failed remediation. So everyone has a different situation. But the first thing is to consider how long is that water there? How long has it been sitting there? And how much is it? This last time around, it wasn't very much water. And so we knew we could handle it. Number two, I want you to think about did it reach anything that you can't remove yourself? Okay. And this is where I think we really messed up, is that we were able to get all of the water out. I mean, it took towel, it took hours really to get all of this water. But unfortunately, what we didn't address was we thought by ripping off the front of the vanity, punching holes. Drying out that whole area, looking at thermal imaging, using our moisture reading or it reading dry, that that vanity was clear. We couldn't check the back of the vanity. You know, it's a three foot or two, I don't know how deep it is, but it goes all the way back to a wall. And we had no ability to check that just as homeowners. And unfortunately, that's where the water went. And so we would have no way of knowing that. So looking at did it get under anything such as that, like what I just mentioned. Or you may not be able to check the back of a shower, the back of a vanity, something like that. And that might require a professional. And then number three, can you actually verify that the area is dry inside and not just on the surface? And again, we messed up here because we verified all of the areas that we had ripped out were dry before doing a build back. We verified that the front of the vanity and the cabinetry on the front was dry, but we couldn't check the back or the inside. We couldn't check the flooring and underneath where the mold had gone. And so making sure that you can actually verify that it's dry inside and not just at the surface. And if not, looking at those three questions, I would highly recommend having a professional come out because if you do what we did, and this isn't always the case, but if you do what we did and we were 90% confident and we built back, then we ended up having to have an inspector come out. And paying for a much bigger remediation project months later, aside from the fact that we all got sick again. We all had symptoms again. Now it was nothing like the first time or the second time because both of those times were much longer. And unfortunately, we're really good at figuring out when we are dealing with symptoms from mold and they're not going away. Then we know, okay, there's probably a bigger problem. But save yourself that time and that heartache. And that money. If any of these questions are bringing up a light bulb for you, I would highly recommend looking into getting a professional IEP or even a dog to come out and look at the area. Because we did 90% right, guys. And there was 10% we couldn't reach. And it cost us more than the whole first job. All right, guys, I hope that this gives you something to think about if you're in the situation that my family was right now, or just to begin really turning the wheels on what will I do? At some point in my life, I will most likely have a water event. We can only control so much. And so getting an idea of how to handle an emergency water event now, being fully prepared, Start to develop a plan on how to handle these events in the future so that you're not just a victim in this situation Okay, I'm really excited that I was able to get through that without getting emotional because as I told you at the beginning, I didn't want to come forward and share it. It felt almost embarrassing as if I did something wrong. And technically. We did, you know, we didn't know what we didn't know, and we did the best to our ability, as so many of you have, and yet it wasn't enough. And so I've definitely learned from this. And I hope that by listening to our story of kind of a failed remediation that we tried on our own, our own DIY remediation, I hope that you've learned something too, and that I can prevent you and your family from spending extra money and extra time dealing with sickness in the future. And if you don't have a plan yet, if you don't have a plan for what happens when you have a pipe burst or you have a random bathtub leaked for no reason, like in our home, or your child uses way too much toilet paper and overflows the toilet. it's a constant thing in our house. I hope that this gets your wheels turning on, hey, at least for now when I'm not in this emergency situation and I'm frantic and there's chaos all around me, what would I do? Let's go ahead and put together a plan for you. Go ahead and think about how you would handle this and the steps that you would take to mitigate this as quick as possible. And that'll help you to feel more in control and not stuck in that helpless, hopeless feeling that never leads to anywhere good. So that's your homework for today. And I'll see you next time on Mold Free Mom. Thanks for listening to Mold Free Mom. If this episode has helped you make sense of some of your symptoms, diagnoses, or why nothing has worked in the past, please make sure to follow the show and leave a quick review so others who are struggling can find it quicker. If this episode brought someone struggling with unexplained sickness or mold to mind, please share it so they don't have to waste years of their life chasing the wrong answers like I did. Remember, you're not broken. You can get your life back. You just need to be shown how.
