This story is sort of embarrassing to share with the general public, but we must share tales of our newlywed life right? This weekend a really awesome friend of ours is coming to stay for a week in honor of our other best friends' wedding. Knowing that we want the best place to offer for many of our friends who will be stopping by, we have been on ultra-cleaning duty for the week. We're talking about dusting window sills, scrubbing the floors, and polishing our fake wood furniture.
I literally have a schedule of cleaning to get done by Saturday. Among other items, today's agenda included an attack on the bathrooms. I hate to use the word attack from the start, because we are generally tidy people and the bathrooms were not all that bad.
For some background information here, I need to tell you that when we first moved into our house we primarily used the master bathroom attached to our bedroom. All was fine and dandy except the shower plumbing was starting to get tricky. The shower head began leaking water even after the nozzle was turned off. It was getting so annoying that we had to keep the bathroom door shut at night. Robbie was annoyed by the sound, while I was annoyed by the thought of wasting so much water. (ask Robbie how it drives me kaaa-razy when he brushes his teeth with the water running!) After a trip to the hardware store that brags about helping you fix your house, we thought we had fixed the leaky shower head.
All was fine for about a week, then the water pressure went to almost non-existent. We are talking weaker than pouring water out of a bottle. With no time to fix it, we just moved our shower routine to the guest bathroom. Until then, we had never used the guest shower. Why walk further than 10 feet from the bed? This is quite a task at 5am! We were over-joyed with the discovery that the guest bathroom shower had water pressure like a power washer. Soon our memories of the master bathroom shower were sprayed away.
Fast-forward roughly 4 months to today. The last time we used our master bathroom for showering (circa mid-April) we just closed the shower doors and left it at that. "We will try to fix the water pressure later, it's fine for now" is what we said. Famous last words.
I opened the shower doors today and almost had a heart attack. I sat on the nearby toilet (lid closed thank you!) pondering how we used this bathroom for everything but showering for this long without getting sick. Apparently the shower head had a very tiny water leak...not loud enough to notice...but enough to have stagnant water on the floor of the shower. There was pink mold. Brown mold. Black mold. You-name-the-color-mold all over the floor of the shower and the tiles closest to the floor. I was so appalled because even though the shower doors are frosty clear, you couldn't notice anything from the outside of the shower. No smell. Nothing.
Wishing I had a Haz-Mat suit, I prepared for battle. Elbow high rubber gloves? Check. Every kind of antibacterial/bleach chemical known to man? Check. Hazardous waste container? Check. Exhaust fan turned on? Check. Disposable cleaning cloths? Check. Face mask? Thought of this one afterwards.
After carefully and thoroughly cleaning out the shower floor I scrubbed my arms (even though I wore gloves) and changed clothes. Ugh. How did we not notice that? More importantly--who can we get to help us fix that leak!? My mind started thinking about mold and its potential dangers. Then I realized my best friend who is coming to stay with us this weekend just had a horrible experience with mold. Oh crap.
My friend just moved out of a house that experienced what we did with our shower...except on a house-wide scale. They had an unknown leak in their plumbing throughout the foundation of the house. Both my friend and her father got pneumonia from the mold exposure. As a result my friend has terrible asthma now. It has been making her pregnancy quite uncomfortable and a concern for the baby getting enough oxygen. Thankfully it hasn't been too bad recently. The doctor even had some reservations about her flying because of it.
Our shower mold is nowhere near the scale of what happened at her house, and it is cleaned up now. But it really makes me wonder if we escaped getting sick from our mold, or if cleaning it today with the exhaust fan going has exposed me to some crazy mold spores. I doubt it. I soaked that floor really well before I even started scrubbing. Time will only tell.
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