Help KateLyn and Barry Rebuild After Mold Disaster

Short story… We lost everything to mold. This is the equivalent of our house burning down and losing everything to a fire (except worse because we had to literally throw out everything item with our own hands).

We’re reaching out to our community for help.

Here is a video to see the extent of our lost belongings: https://youtube.com/shorts/9hxm2CgvXTo

Long story… As many of you know, last December we decided to move down to Virginia in hopes of warmer weather and a change of pace. This wasn’t a decision we took lightly - we went down, visited, researched… we fell in love with the mountains and decided that this would be the place for us.

We found a house to rent in one of the nicest neighborhoods in the city, with a long term plan to buy or build. We were surrounded by other gorgeous houses, a running path, and friendly people who always said hello.

Everything was good until… things started to warm up. One day we decided to open the windows, and when we did, we realized there was loads more dirt in the windows than we thought. Thinking nothing of it at the time, we vacuumed them and cleaned them out.

From that day on it was like a silent, invisible bomb had gone off in the house.

That very day KateLyn started having health issues she’d never had before. She had a sore throat that had been lingering for a week or two got worse and lasted for a couple days… then a week… then multiple weeks. (Side note – She’s never gotten sick for long periods of time, this was highly unusual).

Then she started having random dizzy spells, tension headaches, horrible brain fog, and as it progressed, twinges in the back of my neck, especially the left side.

As the symptoms progressed, she started to get worried; she thought she might have something terminal. She ruled out allergies pretty quickly, as she was only sick at home, though when she went to her office, her symptoms would go away within a couple hours.

As her symptoms worsened and she started to feel more and more “off”, she remembered that her friend had told her about her symptoms when she had mold in her house…and that’s when it hit her.

She was sure we had mold.

From here things only got worse - as it continued to warm up, the musty/sour smell increased all throughout the house. At this point, Barry was also having symptoms. Our breathing was restricted, at night, especially, we could barely breathe.

Dizzy spells increased, fogginess increased, and the twinges in the back of our necks became prominent. To put it lightly - we were scared. Our health was declining RAPIDLY, and as sick as we were, it was hard to think through what to do.

Fast forward a couple weeks from there – we reached out to our landlord, she ordered a mold test (took another week or two to get the inspector in the house, and the results back), and the results came back as we thought - we did, indeed have mold. Worse, there were multiple molds detected in the air test, one of them a “sticky mold”. According to the inspector, that was “very concerning. That type of mold should not be in the air.”

We got the tests back just at the right time, as we were so sick we had been sleeping in a tent on the back patio because our symptoms were so bad in the house. After a few nights in the tent, we decided it was time to get an Airbnb.

We tried to save our clothes using a special mold solution, but after washing each load 3-4 times, the musty/sour smell still remained on the clothes, triggering symptoms in us yet again. At this point we realized we had to throw all of our clothes out.

This is when we knew we were in big trouble. If our clothes were that bad, that meant the rest of the house had mold spores in every crevice and surface. After doing the research, reading others’ stories in the same situation, talking to multiple remediation and mold experts, we realized what it would take to clean it all, and we decided the most plausible solution was to throw everything out.

It wasn’t worth the risk to take the mold with us to a new, clean environment, and it would be too lengthy of a process to clean every item we had. Even if we did, no one could actually guarantee it’s 100% mold free.

We spent the next month cleaning out the house, throwing away every single item we’ve ever owned (furniture, electronics, tools... everything) and cleaning and/or quarantining the things we needed to keep (taxes/important documents like birth certificates, etc).

It took us one month going back and forth from the Airbnb to the house to clean everything out, pay the junk guys to take all of our stuff, and finally, we were released from the lease - many hard days and tears later.

Early on in the process we asked ourselves if we could go through this again, and the answer was no. Now knowing how common this was down in the south, we weren’t willing to take the risk.

In the end, Maine was calling us back. There were many things that were beautiful about being down there - our new friends who welcomed us with open arms, and the beautiful views.

Most everything else, though, was not going well, including my job as a therapist, and we had realized we were homesick for Maine in ways we never could have guessed.

On May 1 we packed up all of our things in the Airbnb (at this point, everything we own fits in 4 bins), and drove up to Maine.

So here we are, currently in Newry, Maine, recuperating and resting up. We’ve been uprooted from any sort of stability for almost 2 months now, and for the first time within these 2 months I feel I can breathe (literally and figuratively).

We are starting over from a completely blank slate. The only thing we were able to save were our cell phones, which had a sealed case, a tiny hard drive from Barry’s old computer, and some of the food that was sealed completely. Everything else we’ve had to throw out. Literally 99% of our belongings are gone.

If you’re wondering why Insurance hasn’t helped us, it’s because there wasn’t a sudden event that would’ve caused the mold to form from that. For example, a pipe burst, and we didn’t know about it, and it was dripping, and caused the mold to be formed from that pipe bursting.

For us, the story is moving on and trying to put this all behind us.

So we ask our dear friends, and family to help us in our time of need. We don’t have an exact total for our loss, but the estimation is over $20,000

With Gratitude,

KateLyn & Barry