Lindsay Reeves last person standing was my husband. He traveled for work and so he wasn't there very much. And so he was doing great and he was just on the outside watching all of us disintegrate and could not figure out why his family was just falling apart. we went to all the doctors. No one ever mentioned mold. So it took us a long time to connect the dots that it was the house that was causing all of was sick. but everyone had such different symptoms, they didn't really overlap and so we couldn't connect it to one central thing. I mean we thought it was weird that everybody was so so so sick, but one's over here with gastrointestinal issues and one's neurological issues and one's breathing and skin and so we just didn't put the dots together for way too long unfortunately. Aubree Felderhoff Welcome to Mold Free Mom, where we cut the confusion and break down what it really takes to heal from mold illness. Whether you're dealing with unexplained symptoms and no real answers, or you know mold is your problem, you've done everything right, and yet you're still not better. This podcast is for you. I'm Aubrey, and I spent 12 years struggling with mold toxicity. before finally learning why nothing was working. Mold wasn't my only problem. Not knowing how to heal from it was. This is where guessing ends and real healing begins. Let's get started. Aubree Felderhoff back to Mold Free Mom and today guys, I have a very exciting guest. This is Lindsay Reeves and she is the owner and operator of Hope the Mold Dog and the co-founder Safe Mold Inspections of NWA. After experiencing a severe toxic mold exposure that left her family extremely sick and forced them to abandon their home and belongings, Lindsay and her husband Blake committed themselves to helping others by offering detailed investigative style mold inspections. So I am so excited to have Lindsay welcome. Lindsay Reeves Thank you, thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be on here. Aubree Felderhoff start off. I know that your family had a similar story actually to my family having to leave our home and all of our belongings start from scratch. your family went through something so traumatic with mold exposure. Can you take us back, Lindsay, to maybe when you had a moment of clarity that something was seriously wrong in your home? Lindsay Reeves Yeah, and I will try not to cry because I do cry often when I talk about our story. It was many years ago, but it's still very painful. So in 2014, my husband's company moved us to Alfreda, Georgia. We're born and raised in Arkansas and at the time we had two young daughters. We thought it would be a fun adventure for our family. so we got there and we had a five month old daughter and a two year old daughter and we rented a house. Alpharetta was a booming area. It was really hard to find a rental house. We were like number 17 on every list that we got to and so we finally found a house and we were like we'll take it, we'll take it, you know. And we had seen it it was a beautiful house on a nice cul-de-sac and a huge backyard and we were like this is perfect our kids can ride their bikes and it's going to be wonderful. we moved in and the day we got there our daughter started screaming, our five month old. And we thought, okay, well, you know, it was a long drive to get here and this is a new situation we'll figure this out. Well, she didn't stop screaming. She screamed for two and a half years. And I kept taking her to the doctor and it was like something's wrong. She won't stop screaming. She's not eating. She's, awake at night. She's headbutting and doing all these things, spitting and kicking. And they were like, oh, she's a preemie. It's normal. These are sensory problems. And I was just like no I don't think it is. I think there's something very, very wrong. And so they were like, no, you know, take out fragrance and dyes and you know, take her to therapy and use essential oils. I don't know, we did all the things, right? And nothing, nothing helped. And the one thing that did help looking back on it now that I should have caught, but I didn't was if I would take her out of the house and put her in the van and drive her around, she would stop screaming. didn't we went on for a long time with her having a lot of issues and then our two-year-old started having issues not long after we moved in maybe within just a few months her vision got really really bad. She started getting bronchitis all the time. Just she would have it for a few weeks. She would get over it, get it again immediately. She started having rashes. She got a bunch of cavities out of nowhere. She started falling down for no reason. She said everything hurt. She had nosebleeds. Her tonsils were swollen. We adopted our son. He was 17 when he moved in with us. He started getting sick. I started getting sick. ⁓ And the last person standing was my husband. He traveled for work and so he wasn't there very much. And so he was doing great and he was just on the outside watching all of us disintegrate and could not figure out why his family was just falling apart. we went to all the doctors. No one ever mentioned mold. So it took us a long time to connect the dots that it was the house that was causing all of this. just, thought everyone was sick. but everyone had such different symptoms, they didn't really overlap and so we couldn't connect it to one central thing. I mean we thought it was weird that everybody was so so so sick, but one's over here with gastrointestinal issues and one's neurological issues and one's breathing and skin and so we just didn't put the dots together for way too long unfortunately. Aubree Felderhoff That is so similar and I know we've talked offline but it's so similar to my Family's story. It's it's almost chilling. But you're right That's something that throws so many people off is when everyone is sick But it all looks different because mold can literally look like anything it affects every single system and depending on You know just genetically how we're wired different areas of our body are gonna be weaker and more susceptible to damage And yes, it's so hard. So how did y'all eventually figure it out? Lindsay Reeves So I had taken myself and the kids to dozens of doctors and specialists and never ever ever did a person mention our house not a single time and The final kind of straw that broke the camel's back was my husband started working out in the basement and that was kind of the epicenter of the mold in the house and when he started working out in the basement his liver numbers shot up really high and we had just lost my dad like five months previous to that, yeah about five months previous to that of liver failure from a medication that a doctor had put him on and that was a really bad way. You don't want to die from liver failure. It was really awful. And I was just like, my gosh, like I just lost my dad to liver issues. I can't lose my husband. And so we just started spiraling and my husband just got on Google, literally got on the internet and started typing in symptoms. And that's how we figured out. I'll never forget it. I was in Sprout shopping my husband texted me and he was like, I called my mom, I bought her a plane ticket, she's flying here tomorrow, you and the girls are going back to Arkansas and you're not coming back until I figure this out. And so that's exactly what happened. I was just sitting in sprouts and I read that text and I was like, of course my mind was garbage, right? Like my mind, I was a zombie at that point. I was barely functioning just to keep everyone alive. I mean, barely. And so I read that text and I was like, I think my husband's lost his mind. And little did I know, like he was saving our lives. So the girls and I, my mother-in-law flew in the next day. The girls and I packed a very, very, very small bag of a few things. We left everything pretty much there and took off to Arkansas. When we got to Arkansas, we got rid of all of their clothes and got new clothes and like. We just sat there and waited on my husband to call with the results on the house. Aubree Felderhoff And you guys did not go back, right? You the girls did not go back. Lindsay Reeves no, the girls never set foot in that house again. My husband hired a mold inspector. He came in and he walked around the house for a while. He walked in the basement and before he ever did a single test, he said, never let your kids come in his house again. And I was just shocked. mean, we were all shocked because we had no idea that mold could do all those things. He did do testing and we had stacubotrus and cotomium in an air sample, which most people, if you know anything about mold, getting those two in an air sample is very, very hard to do. You have to have a significant amount of contamination for that to be present in air samples. And this wasn't a provoked air sample either. It was just a of the mill air sample. We also had a insane amount of aspergillus and so we just had a trifecta of really bad mold and he basically explained it to my husband of you know you've got these different mold species in the basement they are trying to kill each other and they're killing you in the process. Aubree Felderhoff that you're the innocent bystander. let's bridge over, Lindsay, how did you guys go from almost, it sounds like losing your life like my family to mold dog? How did you come across hope? How did that whole, because y'all didn't use a mold dog the first time, right, in your home?
Lindsay Reeves Now.:
We didn't. So when we went through our mold experience, my husband and I were just shocked that mold could do that. We knew mold was dangerous. We knew you didn't buy a house that had mold, but we always thought, know, oh, you would know. Like it would be obvious if you had a mold problem. You know, you think about a house built, hundred years ago with mold like crawling up the wall. And that's what we kind of had in our head. And we were like, this is a really nice house. And it was, 20 years old. It wasn't even 20 years old at that point. And so we were just like this, you know, it's crazy. And we just dug in and started researching because this was, we left that house in 2017. There weren't a lot of functional doctors. There weren't a bunch of Facebook groups. There weren't podcasts. There wasn't a mold free mom, out there doing this wonderful work. And so, you know, I kind of joke and I say we had to make it up as we went and we literally did. we thought, Okay, we're just gonna learn as much about this as we possibly can because we don't know how to get better. We don't know how to heal ourselves. And so that's what we did. We just dug in and started researching and learning anything and everything we could about mold. And as a result of that, I just wanted to scream out from the rooftops. I was like, no family should go through this. Like no mom. should be watching her kids dying in front of her face and not be able to get answers. This is not okay. And so we just told everybody. if anybody would listen to us, we told them. as a result, we kind of became the crazy mold people.
Aubree Felderhoff Eww.:
Lindsay Reeves to our friends and family. And so they just started sending anybody and everybody that they knew to us that said they had mold. They're called Blake and Lindsey. During that whole time, we had heard about mold dogs. We had heard about Bill Whitstein training mold dogs and his story. We knew about mold inspections and we knew the limitations of a lot of mold inspections and we kind of knew the industry standard. we spent years just talking to people on the phone, answering questions, being a shoulder to cry on. just trying to help them because when we went through it, we had no one to talk to. And so we just wanted to be helpful to anybody that was going through it in any way possible. And so after years of doing that, we finally felt like we were at a point where God was calling us to move into the inspection space. so Blake started the mold inspection business on the side while he was still working his full-time sales job. And then after him having the business and moving to full-time, we finally got to a point where we just thought, you know, we've always wanted to have a mold dog. We think that would be a great addition to the team because we saw these homes where. We just felt like there's something we might be missing. so we decided to get a mold dog and we got hope and had her trained down in Florida by Bill Whitstein and added her in 24 and she's been a wonderful addition. Aubree Felderhoff and she's so cute too. you and Blake work together, which I love, and y'all do this joint inspection, but walk us through what that looks like with Hope and with Blake and with you, are y'all all in there together, or how does that work as a joint company? Lindsay Reeves we do go at the same time. Kind of the industry standard is you have either a mold inspector, and most mold inspectors come in and they are there for maybe an hour, they run air samples, they don't do deep investigations, they're just kind of very high level. and then you have people that have mold dogs which can come in and find a lot of information you know what I mean with the mold dogs but we wanted to do both but we wanted to do the inspection where it was super super long and detailed and so when we start on a house you know I tell people I'm like Blake is going to inspect the house like we're not there and Hope and I are going to inspect the house like he's not there and then we're going to meet in the middle and so when we get there Blake starts on the outside of of the house because there's a lot that the outside of our homes can tell us about, danger areas, risk points. And so he starts on the outside. I start on the inside with her. I take her through the entire house and mark anything where she smells mold with blue tape. And then when he gets finished, he comes in, he does an infrared scan on the house. He starts going through the house, you know, room by room, piece by piece. And when Hope and I finish, I just grab him and I'm like, hey, let's walk through all of this. Let's talk about this. Like, why did she tag this? What do we think is going on here? And then she and I are, we leave at that point and he takes over to finish the inspection. tell people a lot of what Hope tags overlaps with what Blake was already gonna check. He was already gonna check the kitchen sink, right? Like if she tags the kitchen sink, he was already gonna check it. However, there are those other areas where if she tags a wall in this random spot, you know, and it has no signs of damage, Blake was not gonna check that. If there was no history of damage, there's no signs of damage, he would have never known to check that. And so that's really where she shines, is finding those areas where never in a million years would even a seven hour inspection have probably found that. Aubree Felderhoff That is such a benefit. So how often do you feel like that happens where she's tagging something that is so out of the norm, out of the blue, and it's mold that just he would have missed? Lindsay Reeves You know, I haven't really paid attention to like how often it is, but I just tell people I'm like on any given job I can't tell you is Blake gonna be the hero of the day is Hope gonna be the hero of the day or are they both the hero of the day and I would say honestly I mean I'm a little biased right but I'm gonna have to say that on most jobs. They're both the hero, right? So with hope I don't take her in addicts. I don't take her in crawl spaces. I
Aubree:
Lindsay Reeves I don't take her in areas where there's a lot of visible mold. if you've got a garage or some room where there's just mold crawling up the wall, I'm not taking her in there. You know what I mean? So that's all Blake. My joke is that if it's too dangerous for my dog, I send my husband. Aubree Felderhoff I love that. Okay, so I want to know a little bit more about we had a mold dog for the most recent water damage event that we had, but I wasn't home. I had gotten the heck out of my home many weeks before. So I want to know what does that look like? for her to tag something? I'm envisioning tagging with her paw, but I know that's not what's happening. So tell me, tell me more about what that looks like with Hope. Lindsay Reeves so her training is to sit when she finds mold I do a directed search with her and so I lead her through the rooms. I'm watching her. I'm watching her behavior and when she alerts she sits. Now she is a 12 pound Jack Russell and she has a lot of energy. She doesn't sit for long. She gets really excited and so she sits and then she jumps up and down and like catapults Aubree Felderhoff yet. Lindsay Reeves holds herself up in the air it's really super cute. if I tell her to show me where it is she will either use her nose, her paw, or her body to kind of like show me a direction. I have times where she'll nose it, I've had times where she'll run into it with her shoulder, I've had times where she literally like high-fived it. Aubree Felderhoff Woo! Lindsay Reeves stuff like that but it's just knowing their behavior some dogs sit some dogs point and some dogs lay down it really depends on the dog and their training but hers is to sit and then jump up in the air that's exactly what she does she gets so excited Aubree Felderhoff Like, look at me, I found it! This is so I know she's 12 pounds. She cannot be very tall. What if it's above her or in the air system or how does she direct you then? Lindsay Reeves if it's coming up a lot of times she'll sweep up like with her nose but also that's part of just the training of knowing why she might be tagging and so you know know a lot of people they'll have a mold dog come out they'll see the blue tape on the wall and if the handler doesn't really explain things to them they may open that wall up and find nothing
Aubree:
Lindsay Reeves and be like, the dog was wrong. The dog had a false alert when really it was up in the air. It was in the ceiling or it was at the top of the wall. And so that's part of why having Blake on our inspections right then and there is so helpful. It really saves customers from kind of going on a... Aubree Felderhoff you Lindsay Reeves Search you know what I mean and gives them very targeted direction on why she's alerting to a specific area So what I tell people There's usually not false alerts. They are not alerting for no reason there is a reason It may be a very very very small reason it might be microscopic you might not see it even you know what I mean? She will tag let's say for example example, she'll take antiques. They have just been sitting in grandma's moldy basement for 50 years and there is literally no mold growing on them. But it has been exposed to a moldy environment so long that it's kind of just absorbed into it and is part of the material now.
Aubree:
Whoa. Lindsay Reeves run a lot of people's day with antiques because she tags a lot of antiques. And so for that, for example, there's no visible mold on there, but it is so embedded in it that she can still smell it. if someone's really sick and they're detoxing from mold, she'll tag where they lay. Yeah. Aubree Felderhoff That is incredible. I did not realize they were that able to such a tiny degree detect that. Huh. ⁓ Lindsay Reeves Yeah. Yeah. That's why I say I'm like. You really have to have a lot more information. And so that's the reason that the handlers need to know an extraordinary amount about mold, homes, building science, mold inspections, you know, all of that kind of thing, because it's not just super cut and dry 100 % of the time. Sometimes you really do have to do some research and try to figure out, okay, what's going on here? Why is she tagging this particular area? Is it up high? Is it in the H track? Aubree Felderhoff let me ask you this and I'm sure it's on the mind of a lot of people but it's always been on my mind How do dogs not get sick from mold because when we were in our first house for almost a decade We had two dogs and they were sick They had a lot I had a cat that died of at the time mysterious cancer and you know It kept coming back and she was young and it was out of the blue Well, I know it's not but how how are dogs able to be so close and smelling you know for mold and yet not coming down with the same sicknesses that we do Lindsay Reeves so that was something that we really worried about early on too because we did have dogs in the house that we were in. We are dog people. I love dogs. Like I'd have so many dogs that my husband would let me. ⁓ But he cuts me off at four. More is enough. ⁓ Aubree Felderhoff I'm at three and I'm cut off. ⁓ Lindsay Reeves ⁓ So our dogs did get sick so we were very worried about that and so we did a lot of research we talked to the trainers we dug in a lot on that and dogs are designed by God to be outside all day every day with their nose in the dirt hunting that's what they are designed to do. Dirt has mold. It's everywhere. And so they are designed to do scent work and purge that scent work constantly. It is a different mechanism than their breathing. And so if they are in a house 24 hours a day, seven days a week and there's mold and they're just laying there, they will, they will definitely get sick. When they are doing scent work and you'll have to look at your dog when we get off the desk, but they have little slits. in the side of their noses. Those little slits help them to be able to purge the scent work constantly. So when they are doing scent work it's a different mechanism and so that's how they are able to not get sick. When they are doing that scent work it's not inhaling it the same as breathing. also take a lot of precautions Hope and I don't do more than two homes a day. It's generally one Because we do most of our inspections with Blake and so he may be in a house anywhere from four and a half to seven and a half hours And so he can do one inspection a day. So we pretty much do one inspection a day So we limit the amount of time that she's in those houses. It's very quick. She might be in a house about 40 minutes total I'm probably going to be in there around two hours and she might be 40 minutes of that. So her part is very quick. And then if we get to a property and it's really bad, we won't do it. we tell people upfront that she is there to find hidden mold. That's her job. If it's growing up the wall and on all the furniture, you don't need me, you don't need her. You need my husband. He has a very, very nice, expensive suit where he looks like an astronaut about to take off to outer space that has his own air filtration system on his back and a hood, like this big huge helmet. And so he has fresh, clean air all the time. have that when I go into houses and I don't want to get sick and I definitely don't want my dog sick and so we have gotten to properties before where we declined to go in after like I do an initial inspection on the house Blake and I walk the house before we ever let hope go in and we've walked through some houses where I was just like I'm sorry but my dog and I are not gonna be able to do the inspection Blake's gonna have to do this one on his own Aubree Felderhoff Yeah, it sounds like y'all take incredible care of her and protect her more than yourself, you know? as you were talking about the slits on the side of their nose, I was thinking, know, drug dogs don't get high sniffing for drugs. So guess that makes sense that they're not inhaling in the same way that we do in breath work. I had just never connected the dots. So fascinating. Lindsay Reeves we do. ⁓ she's my Aubree Felderhoff For someone that is suspecting mold but was told maybe that everything looks fine by another mold inspector, what would you recommend? Like would you recommend at that point getting a mold dog, getting a different inspector? Lindsay Reeves Yeah, so it really depends on the situation and... what they have going on and why they suspect that. So when we talk to people, we do ⁓ a pretty lengthy intake on customers before we ever do an inspection for them. so we know. Before we go to a house, would say 99.9 % of the time, we are already 100 % positive they've got problems before we ever get there because of our intake. And so, you know, I would tell people if they've talked to an inspector or had someone in and they said, oh, the house is fine. What did that inspector do and how long were they there? If they came in and they were there for an hour and they ran air samples, you wasted your money. I'm very sorry, but you need to find somebody else. That is not sufficient and unfortunately we have to go back and people have to hire us to come in because they've done that in the past and they said there was nothing wrong and then we go in there and find, major issues. areas have really great inspectors some areas don't The good thing about the mold dogs is a lot of them travel So if you are in one of those areas where you can't get a an inspector to come in and do a really good Investigative detailed inspection you probably can't get a mold dog to come to your area And so I would definitely say just do more research and keep digging because if you suspect mold, you're probably right. What we tell people is your body is a really good sensor and trust your gut. If your gut is telling you that that's a problem, it probably is. So you need to continue down that path until you get answers. Aubree Felderhoff So true. some of the, common mistakes that you've seen from families in how they respond to y'all's findings? Like maybe y'all have a really good investigative report, you have a plan in place for them, and then where do they go wrong? Because I know families that have remediated and remain not well, so I wanna hear the secrets from the trade over here. Lindsay Reeves Okay, so I would say probably the number one place they go wrong is trying to do the remediation themselves. That almost never works. When... Aubree Felderhoff Mmm, yes. Lindsay Reeves We hear someone and they tell us that their husband is gonna do the remediation work. We try very, very, very hard to discourage them from doing that because your husband might be a great roofer or he might be great with HVACs or he may be a builder. He may know a lot of this, but if he does not know remediation and mold very, very, very specifically and is not trained in that, he's probably going to cause more problems And so I would say DIY remediation is probably the number one way we see things go really, really, really bad. would say the second one is analysis paralysis. That's the other one where we give them the information, they know what needs to be done, and they get stuck and cannot move forward. and then they call us eight months later and start asking questions and we're like, this is, you know, months ago, why didn't you do anything? And they're like, well, was overwhelmed and so I just didn't do anything, you know, and by that point it's worse. They're sicker, it's harder, it's gonna be more expensive, it's more time consuming and so I would say those are the two biggest issues we probably see. Aubree Felderhoff yet. And I understand both of them. I mean I understand how expensive it is and wanting to do it yourself I was way too sick to even consider that but the analysis paralysis piece of the overwhelm of this entire journey my goodness, but Lindsey is right like not making a decision is still a decision You know, you're deciding not to do anything. It will not Go away if you avoid it not going away It's all these things on the internet telling you that mold toxins die after a certain amount of time and none of that is true None of that is true. The problem is not going away. You have to address it or it will not get better So i'm so glad you said that I have loved our time together and I would love for you to share a little bit more about where you guys service with hope and Blake in case any of my listeners want to reach out Lindsay Reeves are in Northwest Arkansas. We serve Arkansas, Eastern Oklahoma and Southern Missouri. So we try to stay within a few hours of our little area, but we've gone five, six hours away. If people need us and they call us, we try to help if we can. Aubree Felderhoff Lindsay, I've had a blast just chatting with you. I've learned so much. I know everyone listening has learned as well. So I just want to say thank you so much for coming on. Lindsay Reeves Thank you. Thank you so much. I love what you're doing. So thank you for doing that and keep spreading the word. Aubree Felderhoff 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.