Mold: What to Keep, Toss and How to Clean Your Items – Q&A with Corey Levy and Angela Pifer

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If you’ve ever gone through mold remediation, you know that removing the mold is only part of the story.

Then you look around at your clothes. Your books. Your mattress. Your couch. Your artwork. The box of family photos you’ve had for 20 years.

And suddenly the question becomes:

What am I supposed to do with all of this?

That’s where this gets incredibly emotional.

You’ve already dealt with the expense and disruption of finding mold and remediating your home. The last thing anyone wants to hear is, “Now throw everything away.”

And thankfully, that isn’t the answer.

In this replay, I’m joined by Corey Levy, cofounder of Yes We Inspect, for an in depth conversation about: Mold: What to Keep, Toss, and How to Clean Your Items

We walk through what happens after the mold source has been removed, because spores, fragments, mycotoxins, and dust don’t necessarily stay neatly contained in the area where the mold was growing.

They can settle on belongings throughout the home.

That means remediation of the source and cleaning the contents are two different parts of the process.

During our conversation, Corey and I talk through how to approach a full pack out, why we like creating an outdoor staging area with a clean side and a dirty side, how the home should be cleaned from top to bottom, and why simply wiping everything once may not be enough.

We also get into the question everyone really wants answered:

Can I keep this?

We talk about clothing and bedding, shoes, mattresses and pillows, couches and upholstered furniture, wood furniture, artwork, books, photos, documents, rugs, and some of those sentimental items that aren’t so easy to replace.

And we discuss fogging, including something I think is really important:

Fogging isn’t remediation.

It doesn’t replace physically removing the mold source. But when it’s used at the right point in the cleaning process, it can help bring very fine airborne particulate down so it can actually be removed.

Most importantly, this conversation gives you a framework for making decisions without feeling like you have to stand in the middle of your house and choose between throwing away your entire life or bringing everything back in and hoping for the best.

If you’re going through remediation now, you’ve gone through it in the past, or you’re trying to figure out whether your belongings could be contributing to ongoing exposure, I really encourage you to watch this one.

There’s a process here. And once you understand how to separate what can be cleaned from what truly needs to go, this becomes much less overwhelming.