Mold!

While I was poking around in the basement last weekend, during the recent hurricane, looking for water leaks, I found this:

How’s that for maximal ick factor?

That, dear friends, is the bottom of one of the new shelves that I put down in the basement last Winter so that I could get the boxes off of the floor ….. so that they wouldn’t get moldy. So the shelves got moldy. Go figure.

The problem appears to be a very humid basement and shelves that are made out of pressboard. The Mold Guy from ServPro told us that we need to de-humidify the basement….. and get rid of the crappy shelves.

This shelving stuff can’t even properly be called particle board since it looks like it was made out of sawdust or paper. It had already started to cave in under the weight of anything heavier than an empty box anyway. And now it has a bad case of Night-of-the-Living-Dead, seriously gross, hangy-downy, monster-drool mold.

So we have 7 sets of shelving, each of which has 5 shelves in it… and a bunch of them look like this. What to do?

First, we ran out and got a big de-humidifier so that we can dry out the basement, and then we donned our HAZMAT costumes….

and spent the weekend replacing the pressboard shelves with plywood. Joy.

Never owned a basement before. Who knew?