The mold issue revisited

Our contractor still hasn't fixed our crawl space mold issue. He now thinks he has. Not. Even. Close. The mold started growing in the foundation crawl space shortly after they got the floor covered (and it rained, a bunch...and then turned winter). That was a good 3 months ago or more. We kept being told not to worry about it, they will clean it up. But they did nothing. Then when the HVAC guy came in a couple weeks ago (right after the roof got put on) he said get another opening cut into the floor and get the air circulating with some fans down there to dry it out, at least. Contractor sent two fans with the framers and we had one fan. It did pretty much dry out (of course the mold would still need to be fixed). Then the contractor had the guys bring 2 "ozone machines", that he told us would get rid of the odor and kill the mold. Umm...no, they only kill odor, not to mention they are extremely dangerous to humans! Like DH turns them off when anyone is working in the house, even though the little machines are underneath the house.

So, DH has to keep on the contractor about this. We were going to have the foundation also spray foamed with insulation. Well, they are about ready to be at that point, but obviously aren't going to do it until the mold issue is gone. Same thing with the HVAC guy, he's not installing his ducting and putting the furnace down there until it's fixed.

Contractor comes out with his helper guy late Wednesday morning and goes and looks down there (DH thought he seemed a bit startled at what it looked like). He said two "kids" (it's 2 young guys who usually do concrete work) are on their way and they will be spending the next 3 days scrubbing it all down with bleach, supposedly to kill all the mold. Even with those ozone machines going all night, every night, it still smells down there, not to mention breathing the mold. Contractor gives the boys some cash and says run into town and pick up some face masks (you know, those white kind that you wear at the hospital) and he and the other guy leave. DH is like OMG. you guys are not going to spend hours down there with little white face masks on, so he digs out his 2 respirator face masks for them to use. They had 2 gallons of bleach with them and were putting some in buckets with water and spent about 5 hours total on Wednesday under there. Left at 4pm. Came back yesterday morning and worked a few hours and said "we're done, it's all cleaned up". Yesterday after they left DH goes down under there and there is just water running down the sides of the foundation, in some spots. Still some mold.

We decided to call a mold remediation company to have them come out and give us an evaluation and estimate. This morning we told the builder that's what we are doing, so he knows what is going on. Like DH told him, sorry, but 2-3 gallons of bleach is not going to fix this issue, in our opinion. Two guys came out this afternoon and one went underneath and took readings and bunches of pictures. Showed me some of the pictures where the wood is still totally mold spots. He said the wood down there is reading 23% saturated with moisture. It should be under 10%. What we have means the wood is rotting. He said there were two big wet spots on the ground, that he didn't know if maybe water was coming up from the ground? DH said, they weren't there the other day. We all came to the conclusion that the two boys just dumped the rest of the bleach water from their buckets down in the crawlspace when they got done! DH then crawled down there to go see where the wet spots were and put his nose down there, smelled like bleach, so pretty sure that's what they did. DH texted one of the boys and yep, that's what they did. That's why you don't have 2 young kids who know nothing about how to fix this doing it.

He guesses it will be between $15,000-$20,000 to fix. He then said this should be covered under the contractor's insurance (we've been told that by the hvac and insulation owners, too). I said is it through our construction insurance policy I had to take out or through contractor's insurance? He said we should check with our insurance company. It would probably be claimed through them, but that then they would go after the contractor's insurance.  He will have the estimate to us on Monday.

They also explained how they fix it. It's like a 10 day process. They use hundreds of pounds of baking soda and blast it everywhere. Then they use a hepa vacuum and vacuum it up. They they wipe down every surface, and then go over it again with the vacuum. They explained why bleach does not work. When they are done they send out the testing results to an independent 3rd party to verify it's all gone. They also explained about how dangerous these ozone boxes are! We told him what our contractor said when he was here....he's just going to leave us the boxes, so once we are all living in the house, whenever we leave we can just go down and turn on the ozone machines, while we are gone. The remediation guys eyes bugged out! He said you don't want to have those going in any area humans live..even when you aren't home....even underneath the house! I said not to mention, if we do leave the house, our two dogs are still in the house. Good grief.

So, now I'm sure it's going to be a big issue with insurance/contractor, etc. UGH!!!!