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Killing Toxic Black Mold - How to Remove Mold Safely

Video Summary
Killing Toxic Black Mold - How to Remove Mold Safely

What happens when you mix water, heat and an organic material? Well, you get mold.

Wasn't expecting that when we decided to take that bookshelf down. Now, I've got a serious problem on my hands. I have more mold, I have a lot of mold. I have it all over the place and it's going to have to be taken care of before I can move on with my renovation and make this home more energy efficient.

You can see I'm wearing some funky clothing. I've got my hoodie, my little vest here I can't even get it on. There you go. So I'm ready to go. But I'm taking all of the precautions to make sure I don't get mold all over my body, to make sure I don't get it in my lungs, to make sure I don't get it in my eyes, on my hands or anything else.

So, if you have a project like this you can actually do it if you take a lot of precautions. I have completely air sealed this room off from the rest of the house. I've turned off the HVAC equipment. My furnace is off, my air conditioning is off, it will not turn on. And the reason that I don't want that to happen is the last thing I want to is have my furnace turn on and suck all these mold spores into my furnace and blow them all around the rest of my house.

So it's possible to take care of this. I'm going to do it. I feel comfortable doing this. If you don't feel comfortable doing it and you have a large spot like this take precautions or call a professional. There's no doubt that this can make you extremely sick. And if you have a baby on the way like I do or if you have infants or young children or the elderly in your home. They are very susceptible to the some of the mold spores and it can make them very sick. And it'll make a normal person sick just in general.

So I'm going to try to avoid getting sick. Of course, if I do I'll let you know what it's like. In reality, I think I'm pretty well covered here. But I am doing every possible thing the EPA recommends to make sure I don't get sick and nobody else in this house gets sick.

So the next step is going to be for me to actually:
Cut this drywall out.
Put it black plastic bags.
Seal them up really good.
And get rid of it.

So in order to get rid of the mold, you need to be extremely careful. The last thing you want to do is stir up this mess. So I'm carefully removing each piece. And you can see here the mold is coming off very easily. It actually ate the paper, most of the paper that was on the other side of the drywall. It actually consumed it. So right here in the middle where I'm scoring it with a razor knife it was coming off really easily.

Now, I'm running a razor knife and cutting sections off to make sure that I stay focused where I'm at and don't start just tearing the paper off and releasing mold spores into the air. So I delicately remove the paper, then fold it in half and put it in trash bags and close the trash bag up.

Sometimes, you'll need to use a putty knife or I'm using a 5 in 1 tool to do it here. But it helps to keep the paper from tearing. Some of the spots the mold hadn't quite eaten all the way through the paper.

Now that the majority of the mold is gone, I can start tearing the wall apart. So I'm carefully cutting into the drywall. And carefully removing the drywall because drywall is basically two pieces of paper wrapped around a gypsum core. Gypsum is a cement based product that isn't organic but as you can see here, mold is on the back of the drywall. And the drywall actually falls apart because there's no pieces of paper holding it together anymore.

So you never no what's going to happen with mold; you never know where it's going to go. It could be going all the way to the ceiling, it could be on the other side of this wall right here. I'm not exactly sure. I can see the insulation has mold in it, you can see it right there. So I know this insulation has to go. I don't know what's on the other side of that wall. The other side of that wall may have drywall problems, I might have to remove all of the drywall on the other side of that yet.

So, you want to make sure you get rid of all of the mold and wipe the surfaces down and clean it with a biocide to make sure. All of this framing is going to have to be cleaned with a biocide or some coating to make sure that it doesn't reappear because the mold spores are going to be there.

But, the most important thing is for me to figure out exactly what is going on with this roof. So, that's what I'm going to do next, we'll see how it goes.

If you're sick and tired of spending too much money on your energy bills, stop by my website at HowToHomeInsulation.com. You'll find the videos and information you need to start saving money on your energy bills right now. My name is Corey Binford. Thanks for watching.