75 | Is Toxic Mold Hiding in Your Home? How to Find It When You Can't See It

Aubree Felderhoff What if the reason your family keeps getting sick has nothing to do with the viruses, the allergies, or the stress of the season, and everything to do with what is hiding inside your walls right now? Mold doesn't have to be visible to be destroying your health. And today, I'm going to show you how to find it. 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 Welcome back to Mold Free Mom. If you are joining us for the first time, I am your host Aubrey Felderhoff and I have survived mold with my family not once, but twice. And it has taken me over 12 years to finally find healing, which is what this podcast is dedicated to doing, helping you to find answers and heal and thrive after mold in a much shorter and cheaper route than I did. I want to help you to be educated and to move forward with confidence so that you can get back to living the life that used to be normal for you. Now today we're talking about a really common topic that I have had come up quite often with the clients that I've been working with and that is how do I even find the mold? Maybe I suspect mold. Maybe I have symptoms of mold, but to be honest, and I hear this often, I don't think it's in my house. I'm looking around, my house looks great. Maybe it's even new or newer or it's just been recently renovated and there is no reason for me to suspect mold and let me tell you I have been there in fact in my first home that we had mold in I adamantly denied that mold could be a problem for quite a while. There were zero visible signs. I did not smell any sort of indication of mold. I saw nothing. We had had no water leaks. And so I was adamant. There was no way that mold could be what was causing the over hundred plus symptoms that I had been experiencing for almost a decade. I'm here to tell you I was wrong. And so I hope that today helps you to begin to, if you are like me or even just curious, or maybe you have a friend or a family member who seems to just be getting sick and getting random diagnoses and not being able to find healing or the root cause, maybe consider sharing this episode with them. This might be the first step in their healing journey. So today I want to go through a few things that you can do if you are suspecting or just curious how to know if you even have mold in your house if you don't see it. And the first thing that you wanna consider is has your home ever had water damage in the past? Has it ever had a flood or a leak? Has a pipe burst? Is there, if it's not a home that you've owned the entire time, is there any sort of indication from the previous owners or disclosures in your paperwork that the home had remediation done or it had a flood? These are pretty critical puzzle pieces that help us to know if your home is even at risk of having mold. Now the second thing that you want to consider is you and your family. Are you sick? Are you plagued with fatigue and endless allergies or asthma or? thyroid disorders, hormonal dysregulation that no matter what you do, it doesn't get better. Do you have anxiety and depression mood imbalances or word recollection issues? Do you have some random, what seems so random, neurological problems? Maybe you have tremors or you have random aches and pains that migrate through your body, headaches. Maybe it's not you, maybe it's a child in the home or your husband or someone else in the home. But if someone in your home is sick and despite... continuing to do all the right things and all the treatments and all of the diet changes and the water and the exercising and the supplements and you're doing all the things and that person, maybe it's you, continues to seem to get sicker with new things or just not improve. That might be your point to raise the red flag. everyone has that family in mind that they think, man, they just can't catch a break. That was my family. We were so sick and it was one thing after another. Hospitalizations and constant doctors office visits and constant ER visits. We had pneumonia. We could never breathe. We had all of these random bacterial infections and sicknesses. And when we were sick, we couldn't recover. It didn't matter how. much elderberry syrup and vitamin C and vitamin D and all the things all the oils it didn't matter what I did my kids remained sick for so much longer than anybody else and it made me think it made me question was I doing enough was I doing the right things you know as a mom you tend to spiral into maybe I'm failing my kids maybe I'm not feeding them enough vegetables maybe I'm not making them wash their hands enough That was where my mindset was for the first few years of our mole journey because we just could not get well We could not recover. We could not stay well It was like every single birthday party and every single special occasion and every holiday At least one or two people in our house was sick around the clock summer spring fall and of course winter We were sick. So this is a good indication that if someone in your home Is sick you included and nothing seems to be working. It might be worth it considering are you treating the root cause here? And that root cause might not be the diagnosis that you currently have or the fact that you guys can't seem to get well. It might actually be your environment and mold. So that is a good indication to consider. The third thing I want you to think about is I want you to use your eyes and your nose in your home. So you start by looking around the home for visible water damage. Look for key signs of water damage. That could be hidden things like paint that is bubbled Paint that's chipping wood that is bowing in certain areas. Look at your air vents Okay guys when you see black covering your air vents. No, that's not normal and that's not healthy That is pretty indicative of a problem So start to look at these areas and one thing that I always tell people when they're just in the very beginning and they haven't even moved into if they need an inspector any of that is look around First, just the very low hanging fruit of areas where water is commonly running and where a pipe burst might be common. So in the kitchen, open up and look in, if you have an island by your dishwasher, look around that area. In the bathroom, inside the sink area, by the tubs, look at the grout, and then use your nose start to smell if you smell must that's an indication that you most likely have a problem must is not normal in a healthy home a Lot of times mold isn't visible Mold often grows in undisturbed wet dark places. Those are not gonna be places that are right out smack dab in the middle of your wall. Not usually. Oftentimes it's hidden. It was for us. On both occasions it was hidden. but there are often clues. So start to look around the areas with water. Check the AC vents, use your nose. And if you're still not finding anything, but you know, you just know. ⁓ Then consider bringing in a qualified mold inspector. Do not go to Home Depot and get a Petri dish guys that will tell you nothing Throw that idea out. You need at this point a qualified mold inspector a mold literate Inspector that can come in and tell you specifically Where the mold is and why it's there in the first place? I can't tell you how many people I've talked to that have had mold inspectors that will say, yep there's mold and have it removed and not actually look at why it was there. If we don't look at why it's there and we remove it, the problem will continue. you're treating, again, you're treating the symptom and not the root. So it's super important to have a qualified inspector come in, find the mold, decide why that mold is there, and make sure that that problem is mitigated so it doesn't continue and cost you more time, more health, and more money like my family suffered with for years down the road. if you don't know where to start, start with looking around your house visually and with that nose and look for these common signs of water damage, water leaking. take an inventory as if you were gonna move into this home and look at every wall and every baseboard and every cabinet and just begin to look. Just a visual inspection is a great place to start if you have no idea where to start or if you have no idea if this is even a problem. And another thing I would encourage you to do is hop on my website if you haven't yet and take my free mold symptom assessment. That'll tell you right there based on your symptoms and your health and the health of your home and a lot of other factors that play into it if this is something worth considering and what your next steps would be. Because I know that when you are considering mold, A, you don't want it to be mold, right? Who wants mold? But when you're even considering it, it is so overwhelming. It is such an overwhelming process to think that you may have mold in the home that is supposed to be safe for you and your family. It's supposed to be your haven and instead it might be a home that's slowly poisoning you and I know when I was going through it I was so overwhelmed with not knowing where to start, not knowing what to do first. I felt so helpless. I felt so terrified. And so I wanna encourage you today to take back that power, take back that power and start with the mold symptom assessment. It's free, it's on the website. I'll link it at the bottom. And then use your eyes and nose and start doing a visual assessment of your home. Alright, as always, if you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to me. I would love to connect and help you just to begin walking through this journey. You do not have to do it alone. I can't wait to see you next time. I have a very special guest lined up ready for you guys that I know you are going to enjoy so much. She is so much fun and so much smarter than me in the mold inspection industry. So I can't wait to share her with you. So I'll see you next time on Mold Free Mom. 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.