No one wishes mold in their house and can avoid it also. You know there are 1000 kinds of mold in nature. When the mold spores flow inside your home and discover suitable, moist environments, they begin to grow. As a result, it damages your floor and can establish hazardous to your family health.
However, it is not easy to get rid of it and keep it from coming back. When you notice it’s growing under your flooring, you require fixing the cause and kill the mold, then replace the flooring.
If you have moist subflooring, mold can grow easily there. Although you can clean the floor yourself, it’s not easy to remove mold under the hardwood floor. You are fighting with killing the mold, but sometimes it’s difficult even to see mold under hardwood floors. If you follow the proper trip to remove mold under the hardwood floor, you can save your time, money, and health altogether.
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Why is Mold Risky for health?
Mold can grow everywhere so that you have to keep an eye out for what type of mold and amount in your environment. Molds have a severe ability to damage your health and property.
If anyone inhaled mold spores or mycotoxins released into the air, it could cause allergic reactions in people who have sensitivities to mold. Besides, when you come to close with mold, it can cause nasal stuffiness, throat irritation, coughing or wheezing, eye irritation, skin irritation, or severe allergic reactions.
On the other hand, if you are suffering from chronic lung illnesses, you can also get severe infections in your lungs to having mold in your house. So it would be better to stay away from compost piles, cut grass, and heavily wooded areas.
How to Find Signs of Mold under Hardwood Floors
Molds habitually appear as staining, discoloration, and fuzzy growth on the surface of a wooden floor. There are various colors of mold in nature, such as black, white, green, gray, brown, or yellow. And they usually grow up in water, spills or moisture areas.
It can be a bit challenging job to detect mold growing under the hardwood floor. You can smell it, though. Mold produces pungent musty smell in your home, and if you smell the musty, pungent, earthy odor, you might have mold under the hardwood floor.
As a homeowner, when you encounter such an odor as a homeowner, you should carefully examine these areas prone to moisture such as below the sink, under carpets, kitchen cabinets, basements, and around appliances that utilize water. If you can not fix that problem, mold can damage your hardwood floor and your family’s health.
How to Remove Mold under Hardwood Floors?
When you find any mold in your home, do not hesitate to take immediate action. First of all, you must think about what causes mold on your wood floor and figure out how you can stop it. If there is a leakage or spill in your house, make sure to fix it before proceeding with the removal. If you think not able to remove mold completely, you will have to consult a wood flooring expert who may counsel refinishing, replace the floorboards, or remove the mold.
Firstly, remove room furnishings. It would be best if you carried uncontaminated things to a mold-free area. Seal and take the furniture outside immediately. Throw away easily replaced items if they are infected with mold. Take all washable carpets and furniture in the sun and place them after the house is complete.
Open windows and doors to allow air circulation in the room. Set a fan on the window, pointing outwards that will keep well ventilations.
Next, you will pry away the baseboard wall trim in the infected area. Similarly, pull up any transitional floor trim. Remove the whole flooring in the room. Besides, if you think the mold infects only in a small area of the floor and you can patch only that area. Remove only the trim needed to access the area of the floor involved plus two feet extra. Then you might observe to remove mold properly.
Observe your hardwood flooring carefully. If you need to treat it, pile it from the one side, and first focus on treating the sub-floor. It should be started from a corner of the room and pry up hardwood boards.
Using Vinegar to Remove Mold
Vinegar is a perfect solution to remove mold under the hardwood floor. Before using vinegar, you need some tools.
What you need
- Face dust mask
- Protective hand gloves
- Distilled White Vinegar
- Water
- Bucket
- Paper towels
- Spray bottle
Though vinegar is a natural and organic object, extended exposure to vinegar can irritate your skin. To protect your skin, use hand gloves, and take face mask when you are working with vinegar. Open the windows to keep airflow inside the room.
In a large bucket, mix 1 cup of vinegar with 1 gallon of water. Pour the solution in a spray bottle, treat mold affected areas, or apply it directly from the bucket if you have large areas to address.
Take a broom or brush into the solution, mop the liquid over the sub-floor, and then wait for 10 to 15 minutes to allow the water some time to soak the mold, so the spores will not be released. Scrub the area with the broom or brush before applying fresh solution again and waiting for another ten minutes.
Once you have done the job, wipe the space clean using warm water, and allow the area to dry. If the mold persists, repeat this entire method until the entire mold has been removed.
Use Bleach to Kill Mold
What you need
- Face dust mask
- Protective hand gloves
- Bleach
- Water
- Bucket
- Paper towels
- Spray bottle
Before making the bleach solution, you need to wear a face mask and put on hand gloves. Take water and bleach at an 8:1 ratio into the bucket. Mix it properly, and put the solution in a spray bottle. Spray the bleach solution in the moldy area, and let it sit for several minutes.
Then use a paper towel to wipe up the bleach solution. The bleach solution will kill any live mold before it spreads. Though it looks physically removed all of the mold, there may still be spores present that are too small to see.
Use mold remover
It would be better to use mold remover. There are many kinds of mold removers in the market that you can get quickly. They are made especially to kill or remove mold. There everything recommends how you will use it. Some experts also recommend using these mold remover product.
Is mold on hardwood floors dangerous?
The moist, wet hardwood floors are their perfect breeding ground. But are they dangerous? Generally speaking, no, they are not. For starters, hardwood floor molds are a species of ground molds, which can hardly affect your health. However, a person with a weak immunity may face an allergic reaction to it. Everyone else is totally safe.
What causes mold on hardwood floors?
Molds can form almost anywhere, especially in moist and high humid places. Turns out, the underpart of hardwood floors trap a lot of moisture. Additionally, light can’t reach the portion underneath, causing molds to increase their colonies. But don’t worry. If you don’t have an allergic reaction to molds, these won’t harm you as well.
Can mold grow under hardwood floors?
Yes. No matter how hard you try, molds will still find a way into the underpart of hardwood floors. The reason is, hardwood floors are organic and their underpart has tons of trapped moisture. As a result molds settle down under hardwood floors from the air.
Last line
At the end of the discussion, we can say that if any spongy materials come across with the mold, they may be contaminated. This means you make sure to remove and discard these items. Make sure there is no extra water because mold will not survive without water.
It would help if you correctly discarded away every bit of the mold that can not come back with a vengeance.