mold

Our basement can be damp sometimes - like after a torrential rain - but the corner where we keep the washer and dryer was always dry. So we put down a couple of sheets of linoleum on the floor, just to make it a little more welcoming if you wanted to shuffle loads of laundry in your socks.

Then we had a winter with near-record snow. And then the thaw, which brought water to the damp corner of the basement, and then some. Some water ran over by the dryer, and my wife foolishly decided to see if a lot had accumulated under the linoleum. She called me at work, anxious and disgusted.

A few days before this happened, I walked into the men's bathroom in our office one morning, only to find one of our staff - a woman - in there, pouring something down the drain in the middle of the floor. I related this disturbing incident to a few friends in the office, only to discover that one of them was no stranger to the custodial arts. "Ah, Backdown," he said. "I remember it well." I asked him how to deal with the mold problem. TSP? Sulfuric acid? Arson? Bleach, he said, mixed with water.

That evening, I pulled up a corner of the linoleum to see for myself. It looked liked a horde of caterpillars had gone there to die. It takes a fair amount to gross me out: I grew up on a farm with three brothers and I've worked in fast food. We have four cats in our house, I assume that every horizontal surface has been exposed to cat butt. And mold is friendly stuff, right? It struck me that if I could cultivate a species of mold that only ate cat vomit, my life would be vastly improved. So this mold didn't freak me out overly much, but it had to go.

We sent off our boy to spend the night with the grandparents. My wife gathered equipment for the expedition: rubber gloves, scrubbing brushes, contractor-grade garbage bags. Side note: if you need to dispose of something toxic, disturbing or otherwise embarrassing - say, 40 square feet of moldy linoleum - contractor-grade garbage bags are the way to go. Heck, you could dispose of contractors in them.

It's not often that we have an evening to ourselves, so we decided to go out for dinner. I failed to convince my wife that my cat-vomit-devouring mold business was a sure thing, despite a catchy name (Mold For The Home®). We had a beer to steel ourselves for the exciting Friday night we had in store. Then we headed home, suited up and headed down the basement stairs.

We've been thinking about moving to the suburbs next year, so maybe discussing the mold problem could come back to haunt us. More importantly, I should stress that I won't be putting any further effort into the designer mold business.

Honestly, the cleanup wasn't all that bad. We cut the linoleum up into strips, rolled it up and carefully placed it into the garbage bags. We kept spraying everything with the bleach to keep things from spreading, then we scrubbed the floor and hosed it down. For good measure, we then bleached, scrubbed and hosed everything a couple more times. Except for the bunny suits, we treated the whole process like an asbestos removal. (Which I have done before. No, not in this house - the only problem here is mold. And the damp basement. And cats. Maybe a few wolf spiders.)