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So, we almost finished moving out today; we finally got someone to come and pick up the dresser we couldn't move ourselves. It was a friend from work, great guy and super amazing with wood work. He knew how to fix the varnish problems and do some minimal repair work on a far corner caused by my dropping a heavy chest on it (I have no upper body strength at all and I lost my grip during that move).
I can't believe he and his scrawny little friend lifted that old chest like it was a sack of cotton; they lifted it up to their waists and carried it out the door in five minutes. I'm amazed.
It took me half an hour of pushing and huffing to barely nudge it two and a half inches away from the wall.
Anyway..
We discovered the most horrible thing ever.
Okay, maybe not ever, but it was still mega gross.
......
As some of you know my DH and I have been having issues with the landlord of this fucking apartment since Christmas. The amount of mold that sprung up over night (example, it was one of the wettest winters in WA in a decade and the complex STILL ran the sprinklers every day at 2 am, rain or shine. The exception was when the snow was too thick to let the sprinklers rise) was disgusting. I didn't know how to handle the mold since I was a SoCal native and my DH a NM transplant. Mold is something we hardly deal with.
I asked for help and she said to use a bleach and water solution.
So I did.
It took care of the problem but it'd come back with a fucking vengeance, that mold.
It was so bad there were two and a half inch wide rings around the windows and doors. I called the landlord and all that resulted of that was the super coming in to do a quick wipe-down, then lectured on mold-preventative precautions:
Leave the blinds open on sunny days (HA HA HA!)
Spritz bleach/water solution weekly (actually, his recommendation was to use lysol mold and mildew remover)
Open up the windows every day (again, HA HA HA! We worked all day and the fucking house was drafty but okay, we opened up the fucking windows).
Vacuum
Blah. Blah.
Over Christmas I got an awful cold that wouldn't go away. The little kid developed a cough that sounded terrible. Everyone was coughing and hacking...
But still we'd open up the blinds, clean the windowsills, open the windows....even though it was super cold, wet and miserable.
The cat started losing her fur.
I called the landlord again and said the mold was back and it looked like it was coming through the paint on the window sills/walls. Nobody every showed up to see that.
We kept up the regimen of cleaning every day.
My cold turned into a dry cough that persisted all day, every day and got worse when I came home. My husband was having asthma attacks every other day. The kid was missing a lot of school because he'd wake up in the middle of the night, throwing up. It was a miserable cycle -- I'd get better, DH would get better, ML would get better, FL would get better, BL would get sick; I'd get sick, DH would get sick, ML would get sick, FL would get sick, BL would have by now, been better but the vomiting started up again.
We'd go out on family escursions to parks, malls, anything... and our colds would go away.
We'd come home and BAM, breathing issues.
By now it is January.
I called the apartments, told them we were having MUSHROOMS growing on our carpet. I wanted to get out of the lease.
Same lecture.
So Hubs and I would take bleach wipes, gloves and go to town cleaning up the mushrooms in our room. -sigh- I should have taken pictures.
Mysterious spots began to spring up along the carpet. Icky brown, cola-colored spots in odd shapes. Cat's fur began to fall off again.
I left another frantic message saying everybody'd been sick for almost two months now. The mold was back. It was coming through the paint. Please. We need help or get released from the lease.
Nothing.
Regimen continued.
...
February. Still a cold, wet, snowy month. We got told the mold was our problem because we used the heaters too much and simply were not ventilating the rooms enough. So I confiscated the small space heaters for a fortnight to see if that'd help. Everybody slept huddled with their room mates like chickens in a coup on a windy day. After one particularly awful snow storm (roads were iced over and people were stuck in their driveways. Schools closed, work closed....people were just not leaving their homes), we slept huddled around the fireplace.
The next day we ran out of combustibles (wood, paper, books ...) I said "fuck that shit, each room gets its space heater again and we're cranking up the base board heaters.)
Baseboard heaters weren't working, by the by. It is now March and the Water Boob of late December has been drained and the drywall left to , well, dry since.. well.. December. MIL's room has had a fucking HOLE, exposed drywall laddened in mold for three months.
Mold issue was still persistent. Since every one else had various degrees of asthma and a cough, I took the job of cleaning it out. The mold, I realize, is no longer greenish in color but black.
In two weeks I was bedridden with a cough that made me piss my pants and my lungs ached. FINALLY I said 'fuck you' to the bills and went to the doctor. It is now late March and I have pneumonia.
Sick, exhausted and pissed off, I leave a long, ranting letter and ask, for the upteenth time, "when the fuck is someone going to come and fix that damned wall? We got mold of all colors up on these walls-- the kid's got a cough since December, my cat is bald, my husband's asthma attacks are getting worse, everyone's vomiting and I just got diagnosed with pneumonia. I am tired of waiting. I WANT OUT!"
.....
And then I spent all month of May moving the fuck out. The rain has ceased since late April, the weather has been in the high 80s and I purposely left the windows open all day every day for two weeks and every day I come to that piece of shit apartment ... I am still cleaning mold off the windowsills, around the sinks and floor.
Small amounts and I figured "well.. its over, I guess."
until that lovely oak dresser got moved.
That dresser, you guys, is three feet tall and seventy five inches wide.
Half the length of the dresser (against the wall of course, the dresser was untouched, protected by its varnish) was covered in green-black and red fuzz. The full height of said dresser was cast on said walls in fuzzy shadows, its depth shared on the eastern wall.
The spores had begun to creep toward the ceiling.
I was horrified.
I had a tower fan on that dresser on that corner since the last summer...and it was run every day in an effort to circulate the air since the mold issues arose because, per the landlord, the mold was caused by stale air.
>.<
And who suffered the air on a nightly basis and worked as a wind barrier? Me.
I cleaned the mold on my own, weekly with a bleach-based cleanser (which I come to find out is TOXIC and UNHEALTHY in a household full of asthmatics/folks with compromised respiratory systems) for months. And the spores were blown to ME for months.
No wonder I've been so fucking sick.
I mean.. I got better, like 70% my first night in jail. I got over my pneumonia during those four days and the headaches/coughing started up the day I came home.
I am livid.
Absolutely fucking livid...
And I've no clue what to do.
In the meantime I've taken pictures and I've left the stains there (two similar mold clouds have formed in the closet of that room too) and the moldy dry wall and I am refusing to do any more cleaning. I just.. I'm not going to subject my body to that shit anymore.
I'm not going to get my husband sicker (since we've been going back to the apartment every day for the last two weeks to clean he's been getting asthma attacks every other day).
What should I do now?
I can't believe he and his scrawny little friend lifted that old chest like it was a sack of cotton; they lifted it up to their waists and carried it out the door in five minutes. I'm amazed.
It took me half an hour of pushing and huffing to barely nudge it two and a half inches away from the wall.
Anyway..
We discovered the most horrible thing ever.
Okay, maybe not ever, but it was still mega gross.
......
As some of you know my DH and I have been having issues with the landlord of this fucking apartment since Christmas. The amount of mold that sprung up over night (example, it was one of the wettest winters in WA in a decade and the complex STILL ran the sprinklers every day at 2 am, rain or shine. The exception was when the snow was too thick to let the sprinklers rise) was disgusting. I didn't know how to handle the mold since I was a SoCal native and my DH a NM transplant. Mold is something we hardly deal with.
I asked for help and she said to use a bleach and water solution.
So I did.
It took care of the problem but it'd come back with a fucking vengeance, that mold.
It was so bad there were two and a half inch wide rings around the windows and doors. I called the landlord and all that resulted of that was the super coming in to do a quick wipe-down, then lectured on mold-preventative precautions:
Leave the blinds open on sunny days (HA HA HA!)
Spritz bleach/water solution weekly (actually, his recommendation was to use lysol mold and mildew remover)
Open up the windows every day (again, HA HA HA! We worked all day and the fucking house was drafty but okay, we opened up the fucking windows).
Vacuum
Blah. Blah.
Over Christmas I got an awful cold that wouldn't go away. The little kid developed a cough that sounded terrible. Everyone was coughing and hacking...
But still we'd open up the blinds, clean the windowsills, open the windows....even though it was super cold, wet and miserable.
The cat started losing her fur.
I called the landlord again and said the mold was back and it looked like it was coming through the paint on the window sills/walls. Nobody every showed up to see that.
We kept up the regimen of cleaning every day.
My cold turned into a dry cough that persisted all day, every day and got worse when I came home. My husband was having asthma attacks every other day. The kid was missing a lot of school because he'd wake up in the middle of the night, throwing up. It was a miserable cycle -- I'd get better, DH would get better, ML would get better, FL would get better, BL would get sick; I'd get sick, DH would get sick, ML would get sick, FL would get sick, BL would have by now, been better but the vomiting started up again.
We'd go out on family escursions to parks, malls, anything... and our colds would go away.
We'd come home and BAM, breathing issues.
By now it is January.
I called the apartments, told them we were having MUSHROOMS growing on our carpet. I wanted to get out of the lease.
Same lecture.
So Hubs and I would take bleach wipes, gloves and go to town cleaning up the mushrooms in our room. -sigh- I should have taken pictures.
Mysterious spots began to spring up along the carpet. Icky brown, cola-colored spots in odd shapes. Cat's fur began to fall off again.
I left another frantic message saying everybody'd been sick for almost two months now. The mold was back. It was coming through the paint. Please. We need help or get released from the lease.
Nothing.
Regimen continued.
...
February. Still a cold, wet, snowy month. We got told the mold was our problem because we used the heaters too much and simply were not ventilating the rooms enough. So I confiscated the small space heaters for a fortnight to see if that'd help. Everybody slept huddled with their room mates like chickens in a coup on a windy day. After one particularly awful snow storm (roads were iced over and people were stuck in their driveways. Schools closed, work closed....people were just not leaving their homes), we slept huddled around the fireplace.
The next day we ran out of combustibles (wood, paper, books ...) I said "fuck that shit, each room gets its space heater again and we're cranking up the base board heaters.)
Baseboard heaters weren't working, by the by. It is now March and the Water Boob of late December has been drained and the drywall left to , well, dry since.. well.. December. MIL's room has had a fucking HOLE, exposed drywall laddened in mold for three months.
Mold issue was still persistent. Since every one else had various degrees of asthma and a cough, I took the job of cleaning it out. The mold, I realize, is no longer greenish in color but black.
In two weeks I was bedridden with a cough that made me piss my pants and my lungs ached. FINALLY I said 'fuck you' to the bills and went to the doctor. It is now late March and I have pneumonia.
Sick, exhausted and pissed off, I leave a long, ranting letter and ask, for the upteenth time, "when the fuck is someone going to come and fix that damned wall? We got mold of all colors up on these walls-- the kid's got a cough since December, my cat is bald, my husband's asthma attacks are getting worse, everyone's vomiting and I just got diagnosed with pneumonia. I am tired of waiting. I WANT OUT!"
.....
And then I spent all month of May moving the fuck out. The rain has ceased since late April, the weather has been in the high 80s and I purposely left the windows open all day every day for two weeks and every day I come to that piece of shit apartment ... I am still cleaning mold off the windowsills, around the sinks and floor.
Small amounts and I figured "well.. its over, I guess."
until that lovely oak dresser got moved.
That dresser, you guys, is three feet tall and seventy five inches wide.
Half the length of the dresser (against the wall of course, the dresser was untouched, protected by its varnish) was covered in green-black and red fuzz. The full height of said dresser was cast on said walls in fuzzy shadows, its depth shared on the eastern wall.
The spores had begun to creep toward the ceiling.
I was horrified.
I had a tower fan on that dresser on that corner since the last summer...and it was run every day in an effort to circulate the air since the mold issues arose because, per the landlord, the mold was caused by stale air.
>.<
And who suffered the air on a nightly basis and worked as a wind barrier? Me.
I cleaned the mold on my own, weekly with a bleach-based cleanser (which I come to find out is TOXIC and UNHEALTHY in a household full of asthmatics/folks with compromised respiratory systems) for months. And the spores were blown to ME for months.
No wonder I've been so fucking sick.
I mean.. I got better, like 70% my first night in jail. I got over my pneumonia during those four days and the headaches/coughing started up the day I came home.
I am livid.
Absolutely fucking livid...
And I've no clue what to do.
In the meantime I've taken pictures and I've left the stains there (two similar mold clouds have formed in the closet of that room too) and the moldy dry wall and I am refusing to do any more cleaning. I just.. I'm not going to subject my body to that shit anymore.
I'm not going to get my husband sicker (since we've been going back to the apartment every day for the last two weeks to clean he's been getting asthma attacks every other day).
What should I do now?
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