The importance of trusting your nose

Well, we thought we got through Hurricane Ike with pretty minimal damage (and in comparison to other people on our street, we really did), but just discovered another little "present"that Ike left behind a few days ago.

Bob and my dad had finally gotten the siding put back up and the stray shingles blown off the roof nailed back down on Monday evening. We thought we were in the clear now that the house was back in order and the refrigerator/freezer were more or less restocked to their pre-Ike levels. Funny thing was, every time I would walk back in our master bathroom, something just didn't smell quite right. The trash had been emptied and the bathroom cleaned, but I still kept getting whiffs of something that was NOT there before.

Of course my immediate thought was to look upwards to check for water damage since we had had some shingles blown off...maybe there were some on the other side of the house that were missing and we didn't know it, which had allowed some water to seep down somewhere. Didn't see anything unusual though when I looked around the ceilings in our bedroom and closet, so the mystery remained, that is until Bob picked up a pair of his shoes in our master bedroom closet and discovered a nice layer of mold all over the soles and on the carpet underneath where the shoes had been sitting. Yuck!

That explained the smell for sure. I kept thinking it smelled something like mold, but because I couldn't see the mold anywhere, I wasn't sure. The nasty stuff was hiding in a very small area of our master bedroom closet along the front of the house, probably where some water had gotten blown in around the window or somewhere else. We didn't notice any damp carpet because the only area that was still somewhat damp was behind and under a large chest of drawers. Once we moved the chest and saw the faint beginnings of mold on the baseboard by the window and some green stains on the carpet where Bob's shoes had been sitting, it became quite apparent we found our smelly culprit!

The next step was to decide what to do...since it was a pretty small area, should we just bleach the baseboards and steam clean the carpet, or rip the carpet completely out? Well, it didn't take us long to realize that we would never feel 100% comfortable with Baby Anna sleeping back there if we didn't completely replace the carpet. That first sneeze or cough she utters would cause me to second guess even the best steam cleaning job!

So Bob has spent the last few days ripping up the carpet and pads, bleaching the baseboards and floor where the moldy carpet was hiding, and is now off getting quotes to have someone come replace the carpet. I wish I had been more persistent in finding the cause of the moldy smell so we could have started this process a little sooner. Bob even said he thought something had smelled funny too, but for some reason we didn't say anything to each other about it. Ahhh, the breakdown in marital communication, the subject of another post....should've trusted the ol' nose a little more!!

Got any more hidden presents, Ike?