We hadn't been in our basement for a while, even though my friend James lives down there - or maybe because of it. Recently, after finishing the basement door, we went down there to clean up a real mess in the front part where there's the huge pile of unexcavated dirt. The cats had been using it as a gigantic litter box for nearly a year. In the end, cleanup meant bagging and carrying out as many as ten bags of dirt. While we were down there, I was reminded of the little wooden closet (about 3' by 6') in the back of the basement beneath our side porch. It's a little wooden box of OSB with a cheap door that we had decided not to demolish when we demoed the "finished" basement two years ago.

In retrospect, not destroying the closet was a mistake. I think I have been heavily influenced by Mike Holmes from Holmes on Homes. In a recent episode, he was working with a family who had leaky windows and mold in their walls. Though we didn't know that there were moisture and mold problems in this closet at the time we did the rest of the basement, we missed an opportunity to uncover the problem.

The issue here was two-fold. Firstly, the closet was poorly constructed in the first place. It was made with 2x3s and OSB, with the bare wood placed directly against the flagstone foundation and floor. Since the floor of our basement is earth, there was a reasonable chance that the wood here was laid down directly on DIRT. As if this was not enough, it seems as though the pipe that runs to the garden hose hookup outside had begun to leak, and the previous owners solved this problem by turning it off at the valve inside the house. Being very forgetful people, we have a tendency to forget to do this. As a result, the ground near the porch tends to saturate with water, especially in the summer when the garden hose is most used.

It didn't take long for it to get bad, but because it had a door, we left the closet mostly unused and ignored for two summers. The funny thing is that we weren't really using it, which was our rationale for not demolishing it in the first place. All the while, the mold continued to grow.

Now, there was no way for us to know for sure that the mold in the basement was affecting our family. We didn't do any kind of air quality test or spore count. Such tests exist, but I don't personally believe they are worthwhile if you don't have the money for professional mold mitigation. Until recently, we have had bigger fish to fry: lead abatement, electrical problems, rooms without walls and ceilings, an aborted project to finish our attic space, etc, etc, etc.

But, slowly it has started to sink in to my little brain that we might be hurt from this problem in serious ways. Each spring since we bought the house in 2005, I have suffered from great difficulty breathing that feels like a kind of bronchitis. The first year, I had assumed that I was sick. The second spring, I believed it was the long term effect of plaster dust from demolition - a perfectly reasonable and possibly partially correct belief. This past spring, I was really starting to wonder, since I hadn't done any work in a while on account of being ill and tired much of the time.

Here is a list of some of the symptoms we experienced that correspond to the symptoms of mold contamination.

·                     Otherwise normally healthy inhabitants are ill unusually often or for long periods of time (months instead of weeks).

·                     People have difficulty breathing, severe allergy, asthma, or bronchitis like symptoms.

·                     Symptoms are worst on damp or rainy days.

Whatever the risk, it seemed reasonable to think that we were not dealing with any "toxic" mold or else things would have been much worse. Given that we were already suffering from whatever was growing there, I decided the best thing would be to get it out of our house as fast as possible.

Firstly, I will say that I would never try this in the wintertime. We have decent ventilation and a couple of HEPA vacuums, but there is a significant risk that if you carry moldy stuff through your living area, you'll just make the problem worse - at least in the short run. Our strategy for dealing with this was not great - put everything we could into contractor bags before carrying it up, carry everything else out quickly and carefully, and ventilate and vacuum diligently. If I had been more concerned with what I saw, I might've put up a vapor barrier between the passageway out of our house and the living room, but as it happens it didn't seem to be too necessary. In the final analysis we were probably just taking unnecessary chances and got lucky.

So, Saturday was entirely consumed by demolition. I can only be thankful that the closet was so shoddily built; it made for a far easier destruction. To keep the risk to the family low, I was the only one working in the enclosed space. We couldn't find the respirator, so I had to make due with a dust mask - not good.

So what did my destruction reveal? Well, firstly, the flagstone foundation walls to our house are maybe 3 feet thick or more. This was our first peek at the full width of the foundation and eases my mind about the crumbling mortar I have seen between the stones; they aren't going anywhere in a hurry. Second, the back of the closet is dug all the way out to the foundation of our porch, which appears to be a cinder block wall built on a small and sloppy looking concrete footer. It's not far below the soil line and maybe it's not even below the frost line, which would be bad. Below the foundation, the closet was dug out into the clay soil. You can see the roots from the bushes protruding from it in search for water. On either side of the closet the flag stones seem to get wider as you go up, where you'd expect them to be getting narrower. Perhaps this was an outside exit at some point in the past? The floor of the closet had a poured concrete slab going all the way to the back, which surprised me. The earth in the back had begun to erode and appears to have undercut the porch foundation and stones by about 3-6 inches, so clearly we don't want to leave it this way indefinitely. We could do a lot to stop this erosion by ensuring that we aren't adding any additional water to the soil via our garden hose. It's now very clear where the water that rotted the wood must've come from.

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I was breaking the OSB into chunks that would fit in a 6 mil contractor bags. We couldn't really do much about the larger pieces and the longest of the 2x3s. Alara carried the larger wood and most of the bags upstairs and out of the house while I continued to work. After several hours of bashing away with a pry bar, I was covered with sweat. In fact, my clothes were damp and quickly became so chilly that I got the shakes and had to change them.

I would set aside the entire day if you intend to do this kind of work on your own - either with or without the mold. You'd be surprised how much framing there is in a small closet, and at the end of the day you will probably not want to work anymore anyway. I spent the "extra" time going over the bathroom ceiling with some bleach to get rid of pesky mold spots that were growing there, and helping with the vac & vent operations to do our best to clean the house of any spores and exchange the air - as much for the bleach smell as anything the mold might've done to impact the air quality.

One suggestion I can make is that you should keep a reciprocating saw (jigsaw, saws-all, or both) handy. In my case, there were lots of places where these tools wouldn't work well because of closeness to the stone, unknowns behind the wood, or a desire to reduce the amount of dust. However, there were really tough points where not having them would have brought work to a standstill or frustrated me to the point of total collapse. (It is deeply satisfying to take a saw to a particularly stubborn stud and watch it fold like a paper napkin.)

Maybe it's all in my head, but I actually felt like I was breathing a little easier yesterday.