New Location

Once we received the ERMI results on our house our first plan of action was to organize evacuation of the home. Unfortunately this was not as simple as packing a bag and moving out, but thankfully we had somewhat suspected the possibility that Mold Toxins was a problem, so we were aware of some of what is necessary to remove yourself from mold toxins.

I had no idea that mold spores live in pretty much EVERYTHING, but the reality is that mold spores can hunker down and enjoy life in any porous item.  The only items that it cannot get into is non-porous items like glass, metal, ceramic, porcelain.  And the thing that makes them so difficult to deal with is the fact that they can survive "dormant" in your items for a very long time and when the right condition arises quickly come back to life and recontaminate everything.

Given how high our test results were we quickly realized the reality that we could not take items from our home with or we would be cross contaminating our new location.  We are currently in a temporary location, which is my parents home.  We have temporarily allowed some items that are debatable on whether they can be cleaned until we get everything figured out, but for the rest we want to make sure that we do not contaminate their home as well and so besides clothing we pretty much took nothing with.

The biggest debateable item is clothing.  Some say with proper cleaning you can clean clothes that are less than 1/2" thick, other state that cleaning clothes has not worked for them and most say it's not worth the chance that you do not actually kill all the mold spores and mycotoxins and they begin to reproduce again and contaminate your new location.  Because the initial period of leaving a toxin home also results in detoxification we chose to do the cleaning method on our clothes for the time being and will replace them when we find a permanant home.  We took our clothes to the laundry mat and cleaned them with borax, vinegar and detergent and we continue to use this method after each wear, washing anything that our bodies touch after one use.  So the washing machine is getting a work out cleaning clothing, towels and sheets regularly.  And showers are a daily necessity to continue to clean any toxins that are released from the body. The kids are not allowed back to the home since they are the ones who are sick, but if Rob and I go to our house it requires a separate set of clothes and showering as soon as we get back.  All of this reminds me a bit of living on a pig farm ... except backwards since we're trying to not let the toxins outside of the house and on the pig farm you try to keep outside toxins from getting into the barn.

It sounds like we're a danger to be around 😕  But we were more dangerous to be around before we left our home then we are now, and so far we haven't heard of anyone who has become ill from being in contact with us or our home  😊  These methods are use in order to help us stay as clean as possible and being to heal.  A short amount of contact with toxic mold is not normally a problem for the average person, but the issues we are dealing with are a build up of several years of exposure.  If we do not take careful precautions now, we will never know if this is the answer as to why the kids are sick.

As for the house, lots of difficult and complicated decisions need to be made there.  For now we need to do more investigating and get some further professional help before we make any decisions.  One thing we know:  We will not return to it, it simply would not be safe for our family and we would always wonder if we are safe.   This is actually something we already decided before the test results came in.  We felt that we would always questions the situation even if the results came back half decent and so it was best to start over fresh somewhere else.  

I am running out of time (have to go to the library now for internet 😒) so I will have to close off here.