Dumb Ideas and Dampness don't mix

Coming into the house, we knew we had a little bit of a mold problem in the basement. The inspector had pointed out some "microbial evidence" on one wall. The thought was we would pull off a small amount of paneling, clean the wood studs behind it, and clean the backside of the other side of the wall. Easy right?

So we picked up the right gear to clean up the mold. A little bleach, a nice high filter mask, and some new, heavy duty gloves. See how wonderfully photogenic they make Matt....

This is why we don't take selfies

Now that we were geared up properly, we went in and took off some paneling. Imagine our surprise when we found, dun, dun, dun......DRYWALL!!!!!!! Some yahoo had put up a nice drywall installation and COVERED IT WITH HORRIBLE AWFUL PANELING!!!!! WHY?!?!?!?!

The good news was that after finding the drywall, the cause of the mold was quite clear. The inspector had thought that the metal floor joists were creating condensate and dripping between the walls. Nope. What was happening was that the drywall and paneling were trapping moisture and creating a perfect environment for mold between the two walls. The worse news (way past the bad news) is that the mold was much worse than we thought it was. Just look at these pictures of the drywall behind the paneling....

Luckily this was the worst it got

But boy was it everywhere, and on walls we weren't expecting it on

In the end we took out the bottom half of four walls, both paneling and drywall. In addition, many of the paneling pieces on the foundation walls, which were just glued to some 2" XPS foam insulation, had some water damage or dampness on them so we removed the bottoms of them as well. Luckily, we got pictures of the carnage and the aftermath for you all to enjoy.

Deconstruction is therapeutic!

99 pieces of gunk from the wall, 99 pieces of gunk....

We just pulled off the lower half to make less trash and take less time

Hammers make poor straight cutters..

Finally all cleaned up. I think we had 5 full bags of debris.

In the long run, this doesn't have a whole lot of effect on our plans. We were planning on redoing the basement anyways, and the way most of it is currently put together is a bit too slipshod for our liking. Unfortunately, in the short run, it means Matt is out of his nice, cozy basement office and has to relocate upstairs until it can be fixed. He is quite vexed at this, especially since he probably will be waiting 'til sometime next year for anything to get done.