The high humidity sometimes makes things mold.
Our bedroom had been starting to stink a little bit, so this weekend my Studly Hubby did a very studly thing: he moved the bed away from the wall, pulled out everything from under it, and pulled off the mattress. He exposed a whole world of mold we didn't know about: along the wall behind the bed, on the carpet, and even on the side of the bedside table. The mattress itself wasn't visibly moldy but it stank, and so did the mattress cover and the bedskirt. With the help of a lot of bleach we managed to clean up most of it. Unfortunately the mattress and the room still smell bad so we ran out this afternoon and bought a new filter for our fancy Hepa air filter (which we hadn't been running) and we bought a dehumidifier, and we opened all the windows and turned everything on and brought in the fan. I even put some lemon oil in a spray bottle and sprayed it around the room. In just a few hours the dehumidifier collected about 2 gallons of water so at least that's working. The room is still a little stinky so we're making use of the futon in our second bedroom tonight, which has not had any mold problems thank goodness.
We've notified our landlord who I am hoping will check the carpet and perhaps foot the bill for a steam cleaning (and we will if they don't). We also bought a hyper-allergenic mattress cover which I had been thinking about buying for a few years now - supposedly it keeps everything bad trapped and away from you and is fully washable. If we wanted more we could buy a similar cover for our down comforter, and we already had pillow covers (which have been great). I've heard good things about these things from my allergy-suffering friends so my optimistic perspective is that hey, at least now I have an excuse to try that mattress cover.
I'm not super experienced dealing with mold so I'm happy to take suggestions if there's anything we didn't do that might be helpful.
Meanwhile here are some pictures:
The mold along the wall before my Studly Hubby cleaned it all up (I wouldn't go near the stuff).Some mold on a leather jacket that was in our bedroom closet. Fortunately the mold cleaned off fine and the jacket
is sparkling clean now. A pair of shoes didn't make it though (they were old anyway). Hopefully nothing else is wrecked.Stupid mold!
3 comments:
Damp is a problem here in Scotland too. Ventilation is the key. We always open a window in the morning in our bedroom until the condensation on the windows has gone. The winter might be better as the central heating system will inhibit condensation (that is actually everywhere - not just the windows).
You want "hypo-allergenic". What a difference a couple of letters make.
I hope that that D wore a mask--mold can be pretty dangerous as well as disgusting!!
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