Our Welcome Home Disaster (and a Warning)

Throughout our trip back to Illinois, I kept mentioning how excited I was to come home to a clean house.  While Mike was finishing up some school things before we originally left for California, I had time to give the house a good cleaning.  It's always nice to come home after a long trip, but especially when you know everything is put away and vacuumed.

Before we left, we had completely turned off the air conditioning.  While we were gone, Illinois was hit with record highs in heat and humidity.  All together, it was a very bad combination.

Our happy bubble burst when we walked in to our house and it smelled like a musty cellar.  The kitchen chairs had random spots of mold growing on them where tiny fingers must have left invisible prints.  We cleaned those up, then continued searching the house for the culprit of the horrible smell.  We did find a small leak under the kitchen sink that looked like it had been there for a lot longer than 2 months.  Mike fixed the leak and replaced the sheet rock.

Gradually we found other random mold/mildew offenders: leather shoes in our closet or under the kids' beds, the pack-n-play in its case, clothes in the kids dress up bin, backs of dressers/shelves, etc.  At first we were just cleaning to get the musty smell out of our house.  After the first few days I started to not be able to breathe.  Everyone else in the family was fine, but I was wheezing and was having a really hard time catching my breath, especially at night, which is very scary when you are supposed to be getting oxygen for two people.  One night I even slept out in the car (it was too late to call anyone).

We spent the remaining days of Mike's summer vacation and the first week of the new semester cleaning our house from top to bottom.  We cleaned one room at a time by taking all of the furniture out, shampooing the carpets and washing the walls, then only bringing the furniture and clothes back in when they were thoroughly cleaned.  We had to wash all of the "clean" clothes that were in our dressers and hanging in our closets.  Thankfully we have wonderful friends who helped with this overwhelming task.

In fact on my birthday (yes, it was lovely that Caleb's birthday, my birthday, and our anniversary all fell within the time of this fiasco), while I went out to see The Help with my book group friends, my law wife friends came over and, with Mike's permission and direction, started cleaning the kitchen, the pantry and the linen closet.  Under normal circumstances I would have been embarrassed and felt really bad for having my friends serve me like this, but at this point I was feeling pretty humbled and so thankful to have such wonderful friends.

To make a long story short, once we cleaned up the invisible mess in our home, I started breathing better.  I mentioned the trouble breathing at a prenatal appointment and then felt dumb for not going to urgent care when I couldn't breathe.  She was quite concerned for me and the baby and made sure I got an inhaler to use as needed.  It has come in handy in the handful of instances where I have needed it.  Overall, it could have been so much worse.  It was nice that for the most part (besides the kitchen chairs, shoes, etc that I mentioned) we were just cleaning relatively clean things (no gross messes), but a little frustrating that the enemy was invisible.  The result is a house that is even cleaner than when we moved in!

The lesson to be learned is:
If you live in a humid area, don't turn off your A/C when you go out of town for 2 months.  Paying a few months of utilities is much more economical (and a lot less work) than dealing with the consequences of the alternative.