When we moved to Orcas, we bought a house that was in excellent shape from a single woman who was very gentle on it. We, too, have been gentle on the house but the room our kids share, which was previously unused before we moved in, is partly subterranean and holds air moisture quite well.
Over the years, with two kids sleeping in a small room and their warm, moist breath filling the air all night every night without any circulation, I began to feel bothered by the subtle smell of mildew or mold each winter night when I would read them a story and tuck them in.
The smell went away every late spring, and summer’s warmth and sunshine would cause us to forget all about it. Until winter came again. Each subsequent winter, I felt more and more uncomfortable about what the kids might be breathing in all night. My husband never smelled it but I definitely did.
I was always dusting under the beds and checking the walls for indications of mold, and there was never anything startling. There was usually a little one-inch-square place in the corner where the baseboards meet that was off-color that I would bleach or cover with tea tree oil, and that was it.
That subtle smell persisted, though. I ordered a mold testing kit and swabbed various parts of the walls that had the least air circulation. The results reported a slight detection of mold but it didn’t seem to match my concern about that dank air.
A few more years passed, and I still felt wary. The cheap, white, plastic carpeting in our kids’ room was so wiry that there was no way to tell by touch whether it was accumulating moisture, so we had a floor guy come in and pull back parts of the carpet to reveal what was underneath and advise us on subterranean moisture build-up. He found nothing.
I was not imagining that smell, though. You know mold when you smell it. Especially when you’ve lived most of your life in warm, sunny places where mold doesn’t proliferate. It’s striking when you smell it.
About seven or eight years into living here, my husband and I began discussing new flooring. It’s an expensive prospect, and we deliberated over it for a long time. We began stopping in Maritime Design in town, chatting with owners Conny and Forrest Loving about it. We hemmed and hawed for a couple years. Do we really need to do this? Is it worth the cost? Should we only do the kids’ room, or spread out to the living room and kitchen? Will it be colder than having carpet? Will we find more problems in the end? Will we make this big change only to find that the smell persists and wonder where mold is growing?
Last summer we went for it. Amazingly, the timing of Forrest’s installation schedule perfectly coincided with a trip we had planned. It couldn’t have fallen into place any better if we had tried. We left Forrest with the key and returned three weeks later to a whole new floor, from the kitchen and living room to the boys’ bedroom. We didn’t have one moment of inconvenience since we happened to be gone during the exact window that he was available for our job.
Forrest didn’t find any problems under the carpet, but I’m so glad we made this choice. I don’t smell what I smelled anymore. The house is actually a bit warmer, as the wood absorbs the heat of the sun when it’s sunny, and the house warms up so nicely. The wood is also warmer on my bare feet than the linoleum floor we had in the kitchen. And boy, does the house look nice!
I’ve been wanting to write this ever since then, but I’ve had a project that was all-consuming until now. Conny and Forrest know this industry backwards and forwards, they are the kindest of people, and they did such a professional job from the administrative end to the laying of the engineered wood.
If you need some flooring help, go to Maritime Design at 434 Prune Alley in Eastsound, or email Conny at conny@maritimedesigninc.com. They know what they’re doing.
I wish I had before and after shots. Here’s what our floor looks like today…
