Hi, it’s Rick, from Bay Area Mole Pros. One of the most common problems we have here in the bay area has to do with the moisture beneath the home in the crawl space. This morning, I went out on a mold inspection in the city of Berkeley below the university. The home was a 1960s vintage home, and the tenant living there noticed what she thought was black mold on her.
She called the management company. They sent out a handyman and he literally started pulling the dry wall down from the walls. So she moved out for a couple of days. She went back to her apartment this morning and found the walls opened up and she gave me a call. So I went out there and started taking moisture measurements.
I found that not only was the framing wet, I’m talking about the studs in the wall. The plates on the walls all the way down to the sub floor, into the hardwood and the substrate beneath the bathroom tile, all saturated. There were no obvious signs of leak in this home. I found a small roof leak. You could see it coming down an abs event line.
So that was a small leak. It did not account for what we found in this apartment, but when you opened up the hatch to get into the crawl space, There was so much water down there that it has to be the reason that we’re experiencing all this moisture in the frame. So this, this crawlspace had so much water.
It’s getting up into the framing and the framing is pulling it all the way up. It’s waking it up the walks into the drywall, into the framing, into the studs, into the sub, looking into the kitchen.
The day that the tenant moved out, the management company came in here and started pulling out cabinets and opening up the walls. This wall has already been re dry wall. This is new dry wall on this wall.
The problem is the framing is soaking wet. It’s so wet. You can feel it with your hands, but this framing is, is just completely saturated with moisture and they had already covered this back up with new drywall.
Framing is saturated here. The lesson here is if you’ve got a lot of groundwater under your home, you’ve got to do something about it because eventually that water’s going to make its way into your home.