The view from the bottom of the driveway and porch.
A couple months ago I posted this picture (below) of my husband cleaning the ceiling in our lake house. Besides my close friends and family only a few knew about the purchase of this house. I feel I should have posted this several months ago but with life I am just now sitting down to type it out. My husband and I had been looking for a small family lake house for over a year. We knew that like all places that we looked at, we wanted to find something that needed to have some updates that other people may not be interested in taking on. Nothing too major because we live two hours away, but some minor things that we were comfortable taking on. My agent, Brandy, laughed when we walked in because the listing agent told her several things needed to be done to bring the property back to its former glory. Brandy knew we were up for the challenge. You also may be wondering why I didn’t use Leslie, we are best friends after all. In this case, I needed an agent that was also licensed in Mississippi as several properties we looked at were located there just across the state line. That being said, Brandy has been a good friend for many years and knew all about my fixer-upper tendencies. She knew when we walked around and started taking notes on what needed to be done that this cabin was a very real possibility.
As with any house, with every item we remove from the “to do” list, the list of things needing to get done seems to constantly get longer. We closed on the property a few months ago and quickly got to work during the off season on a few of the projects that needed to be quickly dealt with. The first one was the mold on the ceiling. I would assume that this is just one of the big reasons this house didn’t sell quickly.
At first glance mold is a big scary issue. Usually this is the part when you watch those shows about rehabbing houses where the main characters freak out and starts spouting off about how dangerous it is. Although true, by taking a second look, we can see that it is only on the surface and needed to be wiped off. Easy enough right? It was clear that there was lots of surface mold from that lack of circulation. The house has had very limited occupation over the last several years because the previous owner moved out west and was in no way able to visit as much as he liked. It was simply a case of “out of sight, out of mind” and during that time the house sat empty and stagnant.
So my husband then went on to do what he alway does with any new project – research, research, and YouTube the entire time while we waited to close on the house. We went up the first weekend after closing (President’s Day weekend) and went to work. After researching we found that a peroxide mix would kill the surface mold. Sounds simple but the ceilings in that house are over twenty feet high so we knew we would need to get the entire way up to spray and wash the mold off. You can rent scaffolding for a reasonable price so we picked it up and headed to Pickwick. Within the first few hours, we had the scaffolding up and the first round of hydrogen peroxide on the ceiling. We simply sprayed it on thick and let it soak over night, while this will kill the mold it doesn’t remove the mold or keep from coming back. Day two my husband sprayed again and scrubbed the ceiling. I was amazed at how easily it came off. After scrubbing my husband did a quick wipe down to be sure the mold was completely gone and moved on to the next area. We finished our weekend off with replacing both ceiling fans. The fans that were in the house we too small and easily turned off and forgotten about. We replaced the fans with a bigger newer fan and then had them set up with a smart switch. The fans are set up with a smart switch that now runs them for several hours a day circulating the air and this will help prevent the mold from growing again.
It took almost the entire weekend between set up and break down. To be honest, I had very little to do with this, just watching him freaked me out so I stayed out of the room most of the time. I actually spent the entire weekend cleaning every single other surface in that place. By there time we left, we legit had sanitized every single surface, I can honestly say this is the first time during a house clean I “bleached” the ceiling.
Coffee and Construction Dust 