Welcome to Blue Ridge Timber Frame

" We spent several years researching our project and looked at a number of timber frame companies throughout the country. We're extremely happy with Blue Ridge. The craftsmanship of our frame is excellent."

- D.&D. C. of
of Meyersville, NJ

by: Harry Hannah

Doesn't mold have just as much right to live on this planet as I do? Yeah, maybe, but not in my house. We who have been on this earth for a while have grown up and lived in houses that have had some mold in them. We accepted it as part of life. Some of my earliest memories are of the beautiful large farmhouse my family lived in when I was a youngster. The basement had a certain moldy smell that even today brings back wonderful memories of playing around the piles of potatoes and turnips or climbing on the shelves of homemade canned goods. I remember spending time turning the large stone-grinding wheel as my father sharpened the axe to cut the ten cord of wood we needed to heat the house. I remember turning the handle on the wringer washing machine to get the rinse water out of the clothes before mother hung them out on the clothesline. I didn't understand how you could hang wet clothes out in weather that was 30 or 40 degrees below zero, take them back in frozen stiff as a board and as soon as they thawed out they were dry. (I will touch on this later.) All of this was in an area that would be declared unsafe by today's standards, and maybe I should have sued some one for endangering my health.

I have strayed off track of the point of this dissertation; mold and how bad is it? I have read a lot of articles about construction and some of them deal with how to prevent mold, how to clean up mold and even about the law suits taking place over mold. In most of the mold litigation suits I have followed, someone was trying to get a large amount of money by going after a builder or developer, claiming a multitude of illnesses related to the mold in their home or office. The courts typically have not found in favor of the plaintiffs. The majority of scientific research conducted by environmental health physicians, immunologists, allergists and scientists do not show a connection between mold and illnesses. Two of the most compelling documents on this issue, are: the 2004 publication, Damp Indoor Space and Health by the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies, and 2006 paper, The Medical Effects of Mold Exposure by the American Academy of Allergy Asthma and Immunology. Both papers found there was no causative link between mold and health problems.

Taken to its lowest common denominator, mold is caused by moisture intrusion into a building. This can happen in several ways. If you build a house on your property and set it too low for the surrounding ground, you have built a problem. I have inspected several houses in the Asheville area that would have been much better homes if they had been built one or two feet higher out of the ground or simply moved to higher ground on the same property. Some people have unknowingly built in wet areas. When I was a teen, I did work digging a trench and placing pipe along the side of a house and out through the yard to channel water away from the front of the house. The house had been built during a dry spell and when the rains came the homeowners had a river of water 2" deep flowing across their basement floor and out the back door. When you build a house you need to put drainpipes around the perimeter of the house. The proper elevation for the pipe is to have the top of the pipe lower than the bottom of the basement floor slab. I lived in a house (I did not build) where the basement slab would actually float after a rain. When you walked in the basement water would squish up where the floor met the walls. After a couple of days, the rainwater would drain away and the floor slab would settle down. These are extreme cases but a mistake as simple as leaving the vapor barrier from under the slab can allow moisture to migrate into your basement. Having spent a couple of years of my career in surveying I learned the value of taking the topography of the home site and eliminate the guesswork.

Another place that can be troublesome for moisture damage leading to mold is around doors and windows. The manufacturers of door and windows are very specific in their instructions of how to properly flash and seal around their product.

One of the rules of science is nature abhors a vacuum. This applies to moisture as well. Warm air holds moisture, and cold air will not hold moisture. The moisture in warm air will always try to migrate to the cold air to fill the vacuum of moisture there. (Remember the clothes drying in sub-zero weather). In cold weather, the warm air inside your home will try to migrate to the outside to equalize the temperature differential, and it will take the moisture with it. When the warm moisture laden air meets the cold air, usually somewhere in the middle of the wall, you have the dew point. The moisture from the warm air condenses into ice at the dew point and when the weather outside warms up, you have water in your wall that promotes decay and mold. We work to stop this process by placing a vapor barrier on the warm side of the insulation. This is why on a cold night if you climb up into an attic, you see small tubular shaped ice pallets hanging from the underside of the roof deck. The moisture from the warm air has condensed and frozen on the nails that transfer cold into the attic. Remember you have a lot of nails in your house and the moisture condensed on these nails melts and drops into your insulation, lowering the R value and providing a place for mold to grow. During warm weather the moisture outside wants to migrate into your home and we usually handle this with air conditioning. Our company uses structural insulated panels because they do not have thermal bridging air infiltration or air gaps that allow condensation.

Speaking of attics, another fond memory I have of my youth and our farmhouse in Canada is the pungent smell of mold mixed with the petro-chemical odors of the tarpaper and roof shingles. I enjoyed these odors as I climbed around the treasures stored there on bare ceiling joist without floor boards or insulation with the danger of slipping and going through the lath and plaster ceiling of the second floor. It's a wonder I survived my childhood. If your house has a mold problem, what do you do about it? The first step is to identify the source of the moisture intrusion and remedy it. When you eliminate the source of moisture the mold colony should die. We, however, are seldom happy to just kill the mold; we want the mold removed from our home. You can sand and scrape or wire brush it. You can spray all manner of substances from bleach to exotic chemical blends that may actually be more harmful than the mold you want to remove. The most ingenious method of mold removal I have come across is the use of dry ice blasting. In this process the dry ice particles are accelerated into a pressurized air stream to impact the surface being cleaned. This process is non-toxic, non-corrosive, non-abrasive, will not harm the substrate being blasted and is not harmful to the operator. The dry ice is at a temperature of almost 110 below zero Fahrenheit and, when it hits the substrate it freezes the moisture and contaminates, causing them to shrink and lose adhesion to the substrate. Dry ice blasting will remove up to 1/32 of an inch of the wood surface being cleaned. Then the only thing left to do is vacuum the residual mold and wood that was removed during the blasting. It does not generate any secondary waste stream because the carbon dioxide sublimates into the atmosphere. This process is easy, thorough and cuts back significantly on manpower.

You may laugh at my use of nostalgia. But how many memories of Grandma's house include some slight whiffs of mold? No one wants mold in his or her home even for nostalgic reasons. The best defense is a good offence. Build or buy a well constructed home and work at keeping it dry. Harry Hannah

Blue Ridge Timber Frame Inc.

Information in this article was garnered from a publication of the Province of Saskatchewan on proper insulation of houses, the Mold & Moisture Management Magazine and my own experience.

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