Our Toxic Mold Exposure Story: From Dream Home to Worst Nightmare:

This post is about our family’s experience with toxic mold exposure.

Whether you are starting your own journey with toxic mold exposure or just curious, I hope what I share in this post about my family’s experience with toxic mold helps you or someone you know.

Moving Into Our Dream Home

In 2014 our family of 7 moved into what we thought was our dream home. Four other families bid on the home at the same time and we won. I think it was the heartfelt email we sent sharing with the sellers how ideal this home would be for raising our big family. It also could have been that we bid a bit over asking price. lol

Beyond the beautiful neighborhood with well kept lawns and sidewalks, we fell in love with our home’s newly remodeled kitchen, marble tiled bathrooms, hardwood floors, and decadent trim details. The sunroom was one of the features that stole my heart. There were no signs of mold… like, none. No signs of damage (and definitely no signs of toxic mold exposure) and no need for remodeling or updating: the home was wonderful as is.

When we won the bid we felt like we had hit the lottery. Moving from Florida where we lived in an over priced box of a home that was literally built by a company called “First Home Builders” we just couldn’t believe how lucky we were to now be the owners of a beautiful home that we could see ourselves living in for the rest of our lives.

Making the Home Our Own

I’m not going to lie, some homes are more fun to decorate than others. Our home was one filled with character and quirks, just enough to make every room special and it was a dream to decorate. As a working mom with five very young kids that I homeschooled I didn’t have a lot of time to decorate but when I was able to paint and furnish a room I just felt so great about it.

A Sudden Shift: When Our Son’s Health Began to Change

When we moved into our home, our son had just turned one year old. He was the easiest and sweetest baby and toddler- we literally would call him “Jesus baby” because he was all around sunshine and kindness. Around age two we started to see a few strange symptoms like he would vomit up yellow liquid every now and then and had a very distended belly.

Then, right after his fourth birthday, during a very long road trip back home from a trip to Florida, everything changed. I literally remember the moment… we had stopped a taco place and were eating outside on their patio and he threw the whole tray of food and then started running. I followed him back around the building (which was totally safe) and was yelled at by someone that worked there for being on that part of their property. We had never seen him like this.

We got back into the car and started driving. He kept getting out of his carseat. We had to pull over and buy a whole new car seat, hoping that would help whatever was going on. We then stopped at a mall to eat and walk around.

As we were eating he suddenly got up from the table and started running out of the restaurant and into the mall. This all might seem like maybe normal 4 year old behavior but I’m telling you- it was not and it was a very very sudden shift.

We stopped another time on that ride home (we actually had to get a hotel to spend the night because it was taking so many stops to get home) and we pulled into a giant gravel lot off of an exit in the middle of Georgia. He had gotten out of his seat again so we let him out of the car so he could run around in a safe place.

I got out with him to keep him safe. I started crying in desperation and fear. A car came out of nowhere and pulled in the big lot to ask if I was ok (Sam was in the van with the rest of the kids close by but I’m sure it looked crazy with me standing there with a toddler running and me crying).

I told the man I was ok but we were just having a hard time and our son was struggling. This guy then tells me that it is all going to be ok… he tells me that he was in foster care and really messed things up and was once on the most wanted list… he told me that he had given his life to Christ and God had turned his life around and that we were making a difference as adoptive parents (two of my sons are adopted). He told our son that God had a plan for his life and that his mother loved him and he was blessed to have a family that loved him.

So… yeah… that was the day our son’s switch flipped and he totally changed… lots of crazy scary behavior and a visit from an ex-convict in the middle of nowhere to tell me God had a plan it would be ok. YEAH- that is how my life is… God always shows up, in weird but impactful ways.

From that day on, things continued to get worse… His behavior continued to be erratic and dangerous and often violent. His physical symptoms also spiraled out of control: he had sever constipation that could only be managed by a lot of laxatives (we tried natural measures for years), he was constantly getting hives and having allergic reactions, he would wake up with “allergic shiners” where his eyes were swollen, OCD symptoms like spitting continually and yelling the same thing over and over and over showed up, he would scream for food and then throw everything we made at us. He refused to go to school or church or to leave the house, and he would go non-verbal.

For a season he would try to open the car door while driving and would get out of his carseat. I would constantly have to pull over for 30 minutes or so to try to get him to a safe state. It would often take us an hour or two to get him into the car after church. After too much of this we just had to stop leaving the house- it wasn’t safe.

Most of his “storms” as we liked to call them lasted about an hour- they would come in and be SO intense and hellish and he would be completely non-verbal and then they would break and he would cry and usually want to be held and then finally agree to eat. It was so insane.

I felt like I was living in a mental hospital. I couldn’t leave the house and there was only one babysitter we felt safe ever leaving him with (and she moved after a year) so for years my husband and I didn’t go on a date or leave the house together.

We begged schools for help and they gaslit us and caused a lot of trauma to us and to our son. He would have panic attacks at school and not be compliant so they would send him home or suspend him (he tipped over a chair once when no other kids were there and they suspended him for 3 days).

We tried countless therapists, doctors, and therapies- nobody had seen anything like what we were experiencing. Some psychologists said it was autism, some said sever anxiety, some brought up other scary options but really nobody knew.

He would get allergic shiners all the time but we just couldn’t figure out the reason for all the weird symptoms.

Finally, A Diagnosis That Fit

This pic looks scary but it’s just a neuro-feedback cap and the syringe has ultrasound jelly that helps the leads be more conductive. No pain involved.

None of the expensive therapies (like neurofeedback) worked. None of the supplements or medications worked. We went to a neurologist that treated in a holistic and traditional way and they suggested he might have a brain inflammation disease called PANS, which stands for Pediatric Acute Neuro-psychiatric Syndrome.

I researched it and all of the PANS/PANDAS symptoms fit: acute onset (it all started one day on the car trip home from Florida), OCD (spitting and repetitive yelling), rage (um- I can’t even share the details… check), anxiety, food refusal, tummy issues… the list goes on and he pretty much had every symptom.

PANS is basically brain inflammation caused by an environmental toxin. Those with PANDAS have their inflammation caused by strep. PANS is caused basically by anything other than strep.

The common causes of PANS are: other infections, viruses, mold, heavy metals, parasites, other toxins, or sometimes extreme allergies. We had pages of positive lab results showing gut dysbiosis, inflammation, and even brain inflammation but we could not get any of the common causes of PANS to show up on a lab (this is because many of these causes are very tricky to catch on labs and also because often these sick kids have impaired detoxification and elimination systems and therefore the toxins are stuck in the body and not detoxing out and showing on urine and poop samples).

Finding the Root Cause of the PANS

Almost every night I would fall asleep reading medical research articles, trying to find something that I could be missing… a cause for his PANS that I had missed. There was no reason to believe we had mold in the house because there were no signs of mold visually or otherwise but I wanted to be SURE and so I hired a mold inspector I found via a Facebook ad and he came and did and inspecting and an air test.

This was in 2020. Everything came back fine. We also had our son tested with a mycotoxin panel to test his body for mold. He showed only small amounts of one type of mold in his body- such slight amounts that they were negligible. With these results, we ruled out mold as a cause of his illness.

Two years later things were so bad that I had become severely depressed. I did not think about how I felt as depression at that point but I would wake up every day and not want to be alive. Life was so extremely miserable. I can’t even begin to explain what a tortuous and awful disease PANS/PANDAS is. I recommend you search youtube for PANS/PANDAS to learn more about this scary disease.

I got to the point that I started to think about how many sleeping pills it would take to go to sleep and never wake up. As soon as those thoughts entered my mind I told my mom and she told me to tell my husband. When I did he decided to leave his career as a nurse (which had become even more strenuous and time consuming since covid) so that he could be home more to help me with our son and give me space to heal.

At that point, my husband was working 4 12 hour shifts a week to help pay for all of the expensive doctor’s bills for our son. This meant I was raising the 5 kids and dealing with the fallout of PANS by myself for over half of the week.

I agreed to financially support our family ( I work from home as a photo editor and now blogger) while he took on the brunt of our son’s illness. After a few months of living out the life I had been living as primary caregiver my husband fully understood just how sick our son was and how bad the situation was.

Finally, Answers! How We Figured Out We Had Toxic Mold Exposure

Just as suddenly as my son became ill, I figured out the root cause also in a moment. One day, while walking through my bedroom and the adjacent room, I smelled what smelled like mold. I sniffed around and realized the smell was coming from a vent in our bedroom. On one of the vents mold had started to grow- something we had never ever seen.

When I type this now I realize how extreme our response was to just smelling mold but I’m telling you, in that moment, we both knew that it was mold making our son sick. Maybe my husband might have thought I was overreacting once but now that he was home all day, living out the chaos of the disease, he was immediately on board with taking action.

We made a plan for my son and I to find somewhere else to sleep at night until we could investigate further. Our thought was that if we could sleep somewhere else then that would be 8-12 hours a day away from what was probably making him sick.

We arranged that night for us to drive an hour away to stay with my in-laws. When we went to pick up some clothes to take with us, my son absolutely freaked out. He said we were trying to break up the family (at this point he was 9 years old).

As parents of an adopted child we understood that something like this was a very serious fear for an adopted child to have and even though we knew we were just spending the night somewhere else and of course not actually breaking up the family, we knew that we needed to keep the family together so we told the rest of the kids to grab their school clothes and backpacks for the next day and get in the car.

We had no plan on where to go, just that we needed to stay together. We found a hotel and stayed there… little did we know that that was the last time we would live/stay in our home for another 19 months.

Our first day after fleeing the house. The 7 of us lived in this hotel room for 10 weeks while we waited to find out what insurance would do and what our mold situation actually was.

What Came Next: Finding The Toxic Mold

I new, after having already hired a mold inspector and getting a false negative that finding the mold (if there was any) was not going to be easy so I got SERIOUS. If anyone suspects mold in their home, especially if they have a sick person in their home, I highly recommend the steps I took.

Steps I took that didn’t help

• I bought petri dishes used for mold sampling and used a petri dish for every room to try to figure out if we had mold. Even thought these results ended up being pretty true, I don’t think they are worth the time or money… they aren’t going to help you find the mold source and might give another false negative.
• I bought a very expensive vacuum because I freaked out and wanted to do something. Thankfully I quickly realized that possibly contaminating a new and expensive vacuum without a plan or results didn’t make sense so I saved it for later.

Steps that I took that I ABSOLUTELY recommend:

• I spent about a week searching for mold inspectors the following ways:
  • I searched local facebook groups for “mold inspector” and “mold remediator” and read reviews and made a list of who I wanted to contact.
  • I Googled “mold inspector near me” and “mold remediators near me” and dug DEEP- don’t just look at the top results, look pages deep, deep into the Google maps list, and on yelp and Angie’s list.. make a list and then look at all the websites.
  • I called around to local holistic doctors and asked if they had any patients that had healed from mold illness or PANS that had remediated their homes and who they used to successfully remediate.
  • I searched Facebook for people who had shared their own personal story and got their recommendations.
  • I took my list of possibilities and looked at their website to find anything about PANS or mold illness- anything to show that they saw mold as health threat and were knowledgeable about it. I glossed over anything that looked like a big business that probably trained young guys and didn’t have a personally connection to their work.
  • As I narrowed down the list, I called those that I thought might be the best. Some of these pros just gave me a sales pitch or sounded like they wanted to get off of the phone- most of them sounded like that. What was different, the people I hired were the ones that were passionate about what they did and went deeper in the conversation- asked questions, talked about health, showed compassion.
• I ordered an ERMI (swiffer option) online and collected dust samples from the tops of door frames and book shelves (do not collect from the floor or from anywhere you think you see mold).
• I hired TWO inspection teams instead of one.

What the Inspection Teams Found

The first inspector was a single guy that was recommended by a Facebook friend who had had her own nightmare with mold. He drove down from two hours away and he charged $1,200. He took swab samples and did a very thorough write up. He found mold in our crawl space and a spot on the ceiling of our sun room (which did have a water spot we had overlooked).

Two hours later, the second inspection team came. I had found them by searching Facebook groups and calling doctor’s offices. It was a team of three: a husband and wife and a second guy. They also had a child with PANS and had lived through mold and were VERY in tune with it and the signs.

This team was like Olympic level… they found SO much mold and a bunch of active leaks. They crawled every foot of our nasty crawl space and found a leak near the far end (that I’m sure no inspector before had looked).

They also found a few other little tiny leaks in bathrooms. They took hundreds of pictures and basically said our house had a major mold issue.

Around the same time as the inspection we got our ERMI results back and they were also BAD: 38.4… YIKES- that is so so so bad. The suggested course of action was to gut most of our home and remediate.

What We Did Next

The next thing to do was to make an insurance claim and to decide who we would hire to remediate. I really wanted to trust the inspectors that said they had found all of the hidden mold but to make sure they were the right choice to do the remediation I asked for references and I called or texted like 10-12 of the people on that list.

Most of the people said they had remediated and then moved anyway but that the team did a great job. We decided to go ahead with them.

Warning about Insurance

One of my biggest regrets about our remediation was that we made an insurance claim. Our remediators told us they had a really great case for water damage because they had found active leaks and had so much evidence. We originally had a insurance adjuster come out and he was great and told us that if we needed to stay in a hotel it would be covered and if they needed to do new floors and cabinets in the kitchen (where there was a fridge leak) they would do that.

We felt really good. We had also talked to someone else who had been taken care of by insurance and put up in a hotel.

At this point we were living in an extended stay hotel, one because we had no other choices- nobody, not even family would let us stay with them, and also because we thought it would at least be partially covered.

When the insurance adjusters came and met with the inspectors, it was a different person, a lady that had been rude to Sam (my husband) on the phone but when he had asked to have the first adjuster back he was told that guy had been put on “desk duty”. The inspectors took the adjuster through everything they found.

As they walked around the adjuster also asked about our garage door that was damaged and our water heater that had just randomly broken and asked if we wanted to make a claim for those too. We said, sure because we were scared and didn’t know what to do. Looking back that was such a bad decision because we had already paid for a new garage door and our water heater was under warranty and those claims just put dings on our account.

In the end, the adjuster denied the previous claim that the other adjuster approved and put everything the inspectors showed them as mold instead of water damage (even though our inspectors very carefully did not mention mold on purpose).

Our insurance policy had a $5,000 mold cap and so in the end, insurance only paid out $5,000 for everything (plus I think $1,000ish for the water heater and garage door) and of course they did not cover our hotel.

At the end of everything they dropped us and only one place would pick us up and it costs an extra $6,000 a year. We will be black listed for 5 years and so that will be an extra $30,000 for only a $6,000 payout. The average insurance pay out for mold related damage is only $1,000-$10,000. They are way more likely to pay for a sudden water event like a washing machine overflowing than a hidden slow leak.

In contrast, my in-laws house burned down and under the same insurance they had EVERYTHING covered and now have a brand new house with all the highest end furnishings and they didn’t get dropped…

No Place To Live and So Alone

Once we realized our home was DEFINITELY not safe to stay in, insurance was barely paying, and we had just spent all of our savings staying in a hotel for 7-10 weeks and paying for all of our other expenses we became very desperate.

We were still living out of the garbage bag we had each packed when we left the house. We lived out of that bag of clothes for 19 months (and of course picked up a few more pieces of clothes along the way but not much).

We had 2 friends that offered their homes when they went out of town so we stayed there for a week and a half and a half in between hotel stays but then once we found out the insurance deal we had to look for a sustainable living situation.

We had to not only pay for all of the remediation ($30,000- which was a steal for how much work we needed) but also we had to pay for our mortgage and the home insurance and all of our other home utilities for the house we couldn’t live in.

We had no extra money for rent. I looked into getting a camper to live in but couldn’t find a camp ground either with space or that would allow more than 3 kids. I asked our HOA if we could live in a camper in our driveway and they said no. I started researching camping slots to live in a tent (7 of us in a tent at a campground and I worked from my computer….).

As I was looking for an open tent slot a woman that lived in our neighborhood that I had met during a walk a few days before called and said that God told her to invite our family to live with them- in their finished basement. This family had two teens and two foster kids that were toddlers. Normally I would not say yes but we had nowhere else to go and living in a strangers basement sounded a ton better than living in a tent.

We spent two weeks with that family while we figured things out. I can not even tell you how much that changed our lives and how we will always remember their hospitality and kindness during a time where we felt utterly rejected and untouchable and desperate.

During this time, a friend told me of a friend who had just built a duplex and could rent it out to us. We asked our church to help us pay for the rent and they so graciously agreed. Up until that we hadn’t received the support we expected from our church but them paying our rent for a safe mold/free space was so insanely huge.

What We Did With Our Stuff After Realizing It Had Toxic Mold Exposure

So, we had the results back- our home was a mold infested hell hole disguised as a dream home. Here’s what we did immediately after finding the mold and deciding to gut and remediate:

• We had to get everything out asap. We had a couple of friends come and help us with this and I will never forget their sacrifice. We all suited up in masks and hazmat suites and got EVERYTHING OUT. We had 3 days to do this and I can’t tell you how much work that was.
• We threw away 80% of what we owned:
  • Everything porous: sofas, mattresses, pillows, baskets, wood that wasn’t well sealed, fabric containers, bags and shows, books, canvases and art, my wedding dress, lots of furniture, and anything that wasn’t worth triple cleaning and paying to store indefinitely.
• We rented a POD storage pod and put everything we were going to keep into it.
  • Every day we would small particle clean (hepa vacuum, damp wipe with Shockwave, dry wipe) the items in the POD and then move them to a climate-controlled storage locker down the road. The small particle cleaning sounds simple but you have to clean every single centimeter of every surface- 3 times and if you’re trying to safe something like a bunch of photographs you have to at the least microfiber wipe every single photo- both sides.
  • We had to take all of the clothes we decide to keep and triple wash it at a laundry mat: once with ammonia, once with epsom salts, and once with borax. This is the protocol to remove mycotoxins from clothing. This is ALL the clothing for 7 people at once- 3 times… Gah. After we did this, we moved all of these clothes to the storage center. When we finally moved back into the house and got the clothes out of storage, the kids clothes didn’t fit anymore.

Moving our stuff in a truck to take to the dump… you can’t keep sofas and mattresses and other porous things.

Renting a POD to store our remaining things while we cleaned them and them moved to storage was a smart move but if I had to do it again I would have cleaned and moved out anything made of wood first so it didn’t mold since the POD gets hot.

Washing ALL our clothing 3X was so expensive and time consuming but praise God for nice laundry mats to camp out in.

Why We Decided to Stay and Not Move

A lot of people wondered why we decided to stay and remediate and not sell and move. Here’s why:

• Financially we were kind of stuck- we had re-financed and locked in an amazing interest rate in 2020 and as this was all happening (in 2022) the interest rates were climbing by the day. If we sold, as is, we would have not only gotten way under value but we couldn’t have bought a new home in our area and been able to afford the payments.
• We love our home and the neighborhood.
• We know that every home has it’s pitfalls and now we knew our home’s. We had lived in the home for 10 years and hadn’t dealt with any other issues so we felt that if we gutted the home and remediated and rebuilt that it was basically better to know what we knew and deal with it head on then buy a new home that likely had it’s own problems.

Uncovering WHY Our Home Had Toxic Mold and We had Toxic Mold Exposure

It made no sense to me why our home had so much mold so I decided to look up the past owners that we bought the home from and ask them about the home’s history. Here’s what I found out:

• They had bought the home as a site unseen forclosure.
• The owner before them was a single mom with 5-6 kids. She hadn’t paid the mortgage in years and the water was shut off when they bought it.
• When they finally got in the house there were holes in the floor, bug infestations, and just overall grossness…
• They worked hard to make the home beautiful. It was not intended to be a flip, which is why it didn’t look like a flip and why we had no idea.
• Basically, I think they bought a home full of mold and they didn’t have the time or money to gut it so they just worked with what they saw and made things pretty but didn’t dig and didn’t follow proper mold remediation protocol if they did come across any mold.

How Long the Toxic Mold Remediation Took

The actual gutting and remediation only took about two months. Here’s what they did:

• Removed all insulation from the crawl space
• Removed mold from crawl space beams (at least tried)
• Encapsulated the crawl space
• Changed out all the flex duct in the crawl space for hard duct and cut new vents
• Removed all flooring everywhere.
• Removed the first layer of sub floor upstairs.
• Removed all subfloor in the kitchen dining room.
• Removed drywall in kitchen and bathrooms
• Put dehumidifier in craw space
• Added another support beam under the dining room
• Completely gutted the sunroom.

Seeing the underside of the carpet makes me want to gag.

Um… excuse me, this is what the tile under our toilet was sitting on… nothing. AH! There must have been a toilet leak with past owners that wasn’t taken care of. No wonder we had toxic mold exposure.

What it looked like when they tore out the carpet in the boys’ old room.

Goodbye flooring.

What Happened Next: Our Toxic Mold Exposure Story

After the house was gutted, we had to re-build. We were more than out of money and in debt so we had to do the re-build ourselves. We had a Go Fund Me and a few extremely generous friends help us with the major expenses of buying flooring and paying for someone to lay the flooring and to tile one bathroom so we would have a working shower.

Doing 95% of the work ourselves while working, living 20 minutes away, and parenting 5 kids was not easy or fast. Every day we put up drywall, mudded, and did other tasks to re-build.

Finally, after a year, the floors were down and we had a bathroom (I had been peeing in the backyard before this- don’t judge). We thought we could move back in but I reminded Sam that we needed to have a third party do a post-remediation inspection.

I went back to the drawing board and researched a ton and found another mold inspection company I felt good about. This was another husband and wife team where the wife had had toxic mold exposure illness herself in the past. Spoiler alert, they found lots of more mold:

• Every bathroom had more mold around where the sinks were.
• The main upstairs bathroom had more mold under the bathroom floor- so, the ceiling of the room below had to be removed.
• The roof randomly started leaking during this time so the once remediate sun room now was at risk again.
• We figured out that when it rained, the crawl space would retain water and so we had to put in a french drain and a sump pump and use sand to fill dips where water would pool.
• They said the crawl space still had mold.

It took another whole year to remove this mold. We were beyond out of money so these amazing remediators taught us how to remediate properly and Sam spent the next year removing the mold from every beam in the crawl space and remediating all the other areas.

Finally, We Were Done… Almost

FINALLY, we thought we were finished and so we had the inspectors (the second team that we trusted but the fourth all in all ) come back and do another inspection and an air test (air tests are not good for initial diagnosis but are used for post remediation testing).

The results from the inspection were great but the air test came back bad- a spore count of over 9,000 downstairs and this was after the initially remediation team had done a small particle wipe down and also after a group of teens from our church had done a small particle clean.

We realized that we had to do a much much more intense small particle cleaning of the home. The small particle cleaning method we used was called the “Pizza” method. It involves hepa vacuuming every square inch of the home, then using Benefect or Shockwave and a microfiber cloth to wipe down every inch, and then lastly a dry microfiber cloth…

When I say every inch I mean ceiling, floor, walls, trim, shelves, doors, every object… everything. It took about two months.

After we were done we had the house re-tested and the results came back in the 200s, which is GREAT! Finally, after 19 months, we could safely move back into our home!

Looking Back, The Signs Of Toxic Mold Exposure We Missed

Looking back, knowing what we know now, there were other signs of toxic mold exposure that we missed. Here they are:

• My teen daughters were having panic attacks a lot. They don’t now.
• My pre-teen son was dealing with anxiety. He doesn’t now.
• My husband and I both gained weight. Unfortunately we can’t seem to lose it. lol.
• Obviously I was extremely depressed. It’s hard to know if that was all from trauma or if some was from toxic mold exposure.
• Our home was SOOOOO dusty. I was constantly vacuuming and and dusting the trim on our walls. I thought that’s just how it was with 7 people, 2 dogs, and a cat but now I realize that was a sign of mold bi-product.
• Our crawl space was a mess. We had never owned a home with a crawl space so we just thought that’s what’s under the house… now we know that around 40% of the air you breath comes from the crawl space.
• Our vents were not sealed because it wasn’t code when our home was built (Late 70s) so there were gaps around the duct and the vent so air from the crawl space was literally just coming into our breathing air.
• There were cracks and gaps under the house letting air in that needed to be sealed.
• There was a vent in the wall that didn’t lead to anything- an old return vent that was never sealed.
• Flex duct in crawl spaces is no bueno and there was mold in our ducts.
• Our floors were molding from underneath because of the crawl space. When they ripped the flooring out they found mushrooms on the underside!
• The bathroom toilets and bathtub must have leaked at one point- before we owned the house because when the tile came up the subfloor was rotted completely.
• Any tiny water stain should not be ignored, we did have a few but we both grew up thinking that it wasn’t a big deal and could be painted over.
• Our cat couldn’t jump and was clumsy. This sounds so weird but it definitely was a sign because now our cat is just fine.
• Our bathrooms didn’t have vents/fans to dehumidify the rooms.

How We Healed From The Toxic Mold Exposure

Healing from toxic mold exposure is both complicated but also can be pretty simple. Here’s what we did:

• Obviously moved out of the toxic mold exposure and into a mold-free space for 19 months.
• When we first moved out my sick son and I started to get worse- his behavior got worse and he projectile vomited. I had really bad heart palpitations. We were both prescribed and taking a binder.
• Everyone besides my son and myself (who were the most effected) was able to heal just over time by being out of a toxic mold exposure situation and eating healthy foods and having lowered stress.
• After taking a course on toxic mold exposure and biotoxin illness, I decided to use the Cell Core comprehensive phases to detox my son. I chose these phases because they opened up the detox pathways first and they also, over time, in the correct order addressed other biotoxins like parasites and lymes co-infections. Most of the time, with PANS, there’s not just one root cause, mold often is a gateway to lowering the immune system and allowing other toxins in.
• Cell Core’s Comprehensive Phases started working almost immediately- after nothing working in the past. He went through all the phases (phases are just kits of supplements that are pre-set to work together) over 9 months and then, after a 6 month break, when we started to see a little regression we started all over again and he improved immediately.
• Lots of trampoline jumping to help the lymphatic system and to help my son sweat.
• Time in our portable Therasage sauna.
• Time outside.
• Lots of family time and slow living.
• LOTS of prayer.

Where We Are Now: Moving Back In

When we moved back in we had the following:

• One finished master bathroom for the 7 of us to share.
• One other working toilet upstairs but no other baths or showers or sinks.
• Flooring in every room.
• Finished laundry room.
• Kitchen has cabinets but no doors or drawer fronts, countertops, and all working appliances.
• Bedrooms have walls and beds.
• Dining room has a table (it took 8 months though because I had to build one).

What we still don’t have/need to do:

• Lots of rooms need paint and some need drywall mudding or drywall repair.
• All rooms need baseboards and some need crown molding.
• We have one half bath and two full baths that need to be tiled, finished, and have installed vanities.
• Living room needs a lot of repairs on the fire place, mudding, paint, trim, furniture, lighting.
• Sunroom needs further remediation- we have to jack the roof up to remove a beam with mold- room is closed off.
• Converted garage needs mudding, finishing, window repair.
• All windows need repair inside and outside- they are wood.
• Fascia need replaced.
• Bedrooms need molding and decorating.
• Office needs molding and paint and decorating.
• I’m going to stop there because this list is overwhelming me- lots and lots to do….

My Final Takeaways from Our Toxic Mold Exposure Journey

I started The Handsome Home as a way to share both our journey of re-building our home but also what we learned along the way about building homes, caring for them, and making decisions that will benefit the long term.

When I was younger, I thought a house was a thing you purchased and decorated and made handsome… I thought the idea of flipping a home for money was genius and I thought that when you sold a home that it was the new owner’s responsibility to know what they were buying and deal with it.

Now that I’m 20 years into being a home owner and I’ve dealt with catastrophic loss due to someone else’s decisions regarding our home before we owned it, I see things VERY differently. Now I see a house as a shelter to be built and nurtured with one of two motivations:

1. With the intention of the home being your forever home. This means making choices that will serve you when you are 80 and 90 years old and can no longer easily maintain things. This means considering future grand children and guests and putting them before your things.
2. With the intention of stewarding the property and making it better for the next family that you sell it to.

Please follow along here, on the blog and on our social media accounts as we build a handsome home that is just as safe and functional as it is beautiful.

This post was about our toxic mold exposure story.