Hopeless

This is the worst situation I think I have experienced in my adult life. If you were hoping for some eloquent writing here, I am so sorry. I am so frustrated I can barely think in full sentences.

To catch you up to speed, we found TONS of mold in our home, which resulted in us gutting the house to the studs. Literally. Everything is gone—our walls, our attic, our insulation, our flooring, some of our subflooring, and almost all of our items.

We had a remediation company come in and move stuff out. We gutted the house, then they cleaned and sprayed. After remediation, we had two separate companies come out and test, just to make sure we weren’t getting screwed over. Both tests came back still too high, but one company didn’t even register the main mold that my body tested high for. The other company’s test did. So, we decided to go with their results and had to remediate again.

Our remediation company came back out and cleaned/sprayed AGAIN. We paid for one company to come out and test again to confirm we got all the mold. We just got the test results back today, and SOMEHOW the spore count has almost tripled from what it was a couple weeks ago AFTER remediation.

WHAT THE HECK. WHAT THE ACTUAL HECK?!

So far, we have paid $3,000 for four mold tests. We have done our due diligence by hiring an independent mold remediation company who only remediates and doesn’t test, to avoid a conflict of interest. We have hired two separate companies to test to make sure we are getting accurate results and not getting the wool pulled over our eyes.

We are at a complete loss. HOW. HOW on earth is the mold getting WORSE?! We’ve been questioning whether or not the tests are trustworthy from the get-go, but each room that tested high had tons of mold behind the walls, so they proved accurate for us. Now it’s hard to know. We have no clue what could be left to remove.

To add to the pressure and stress, we’re hemorrhaging money to get this taken care of. So far, we’ve paid almost $60,000 just to get the house gutted (while also doing most of the gutting ourselves), tested, remediated, and tested again. We haven’t paid the $10k for remediation yet, as we are waiting for the tests to give us the green light per our remediation agreement. I have my life savings, but… when do you draw the line?

I’ve been working super hard the past few years to save for a down payment to build my own bakery building. We are growing and need more space. I don’t own my building—I only rent the space we’re in—and I’ve wanted to build so there’s certainty that the bakery can continue to exist in Cortland. I’m gutted at the thought of dumping everything I have saved into a house I had already paid for. The house was almost entirely renovated. The bathroom renovation that discovered the mold was the last piece before the house was “complete.” The furniture was paid for. It was our own space to start our marriage and enjoy life before maybe having kids.

Now, everything—and I mean everything—has been put on hold.

Do we totally demo the house? Push everything over, take a $260k loss, and start over with nothing but my bakery funds, ditching the dream of building a bakery? Do we continue to keep spending money on gutting the house, with the uncertainty that it might not work or be a healthy space? Do we just try to sell it as-is, take a loss, and move? We don’t want to leave Cortland. We love it here.

It’s hard to see a way forward. At 35 and 41, we never thought we would be starting over and losing everything we’ve worked for all these years. It’s an indescribable feeling. We were supposed to be enjoying the first year of marriage, maybe taking a trip or two, thinking about starting a family. Now, none of that is even remotely possible. And I feel time ticking if we wanted to have kids, but it feels so wrong to even think about that when we don’t have a stable home for ourselves, even though we did for the past 10 years.

I know somehow this will not be our forever. I know one day we’ll look back on this season and it won’t feel as heavy as it does right now. But at the moment, we’re exhausted. We’re grieving. We’re scared. And we’re trying to keep showing up to work and life while everything behind the scenes feels like it’s falling apart.

I don’t really know what the next right decision is yet. We’re just trying to find a way forward without losing everything we’ve spent years building.

The whole thing just feels… hopeless.

Thanks for reading.