Sometimes you know almost immediately.
You walk through the front door and within minutes something feels different. Your eyes begin to bother you. Your nose becomes stuffy. Your throat feels irritated. Your head feels heavy, or the energy you had twenty minutes ago suddenly seems to disappear. You may not know what changed, but you’ve experienced it enough times to recognize that something happens when you enter that particular environment.
For other people, the connection is much harder to see.
You may have lived in the same house for years and never connected how you feel with where you live. Then you go away for three days and realize you’re sleeping a little better. You take a ten-day vacation and somewhere in the middle of it notice that the headache you’ve become accustomed to hasn’t been there. Maybe you’re away for two weeks before you suddenly realize, I haven’t felt this good in months.
Then you come home.
Perhaps you notice the difference before you’ve finished unpacking. Perhaps nothing happens until that evening. Maybe you wake up the next morning feeling the way you did before you left.
That’s when a question begins.
Is my home affecting me?
It can be a difficult question because home is supposed to be the place where we feel safest. It’s where we sleep, eat, raise our children and recover at the end of the day. Most of us don’t walk through our homes thinking about what’s behind the drywall, underneath the flooring, inside the HVAC system or in a crawlspace we haven’t looked at since we bought the house.
Why would we?
Until something gives us a reason.
Maybe there was a leak. Maybe you found mold. Maybe a doctor asked whether there had ever been water damage in your home. Maybe testing uncovered something you weren’t expecting. Or maybe nobody has found anything at all and the only thing you know is that you feel different somewhere else.
That last situation can be particularly frustrating because eventually you may begin questioning yourself.
Your spouse seems fine. Your coworkers spend eight hours in the same office. Your children live in the same house. Nobody else seems to be experiencing what you’re experiencing.
But people aren’t identical.
Age, health, previous exposures, allergies, immune responses, the amount of time spent in a particular area and many other individual differences can influence how people experience the same environment. Even within one family, one person may spend eight hours every night in a bedroom beside an exterior wall while another sleeps at the opposite end of the house. One person may work from home while everyone else leaves each morning.
The fact that someone else feels fine doesn’t answer what is happening to you.
Sometimes your body has also had so little opportunity to experience a different environment that you no longer recognize how you’ve been feeling.
If you wake up congested every morning for two years, eventually waking up congested can simply become morning. If you feel exhausted every evening, exhaustion becomes what evenings feel like. If your head is foggy every afternoon, you adapt your life around it.
You may not recognize the contrast until the environment changes.
That’s why three days away may matter. Ten days may tell you something three days didn’t. For someone else, the difference may be obvious within an hour of leaving.
There isn’t a stopwatch that tells us how quickly everyone should notice a change.
And the place that gets your attention may not be your home.
It may be your workplace. Your car. A hotel. A friend’s house. A particular store. It may be somewhere you visit only occasionally.
Maybe your child is perfectly fine most of the week, but every time the family spends a weekend at your mother-in-law’s house, your child becomes congested or starts coughing. You return home and things settle down. A month later you visit again and the same thing happens.
At some point, coincidence becomes something worth looking at more carefully.
It doesn’t tell you what’s in the building. It tells you there is a pattern worth understanding.
Years ago, I remember walking into some Lowe’s stores when Rug Doctor rental machines were kept near the entrance. I could sometimes smell that familiar damp, musty odor around the machines almost as soon as I entered. Other people walked right past without reacting to it at all.
Think about the life of a rental carpet-cleaning machine. It travels from building to building and encounters carpeting, water, dirt, pet contamination and whatever may be present in those environments. Then it comes back to the store and eventually goes somewhere else.
The point isn’t that every rental machine contains mold. The point is how easily we forget that things move between environments.
So do we.
We leave home wearing clothing and carrying a laptop bag. We get into a vehicle. We spend eight hours in another building. We sit on furniture, walk across floors, handle materials and then bring ourselves and our belongings back home.
Our environments aren’t always as separate as we imagine them to be.
A vehicle is a good example. We rarely think of a car as a building, but from an environmental standpoint it has many familiar characteristics. It’s an enclosed space with carpeting, upholstery, ventilation, filtration and an air-conditioning system. Water can enter around windshields, sunroofs, door seals and body seams. Moisture can remain beneath carpeting where the surface appears perfectly dry. Cabin filters collect material from the air moving through the ventilation system.
If you’ve been away for ten days and feel considerably better, then get into your vehicle and notice the return of something before you’ve even reached home, don’t ignore that detail.
It may become part of the story.
Buildings themselves tell stories too, but you have to know where to look.
We tend to divide a building according to how we use it. That’s the basement. That’s my bedroom. That’s the mechanical room. My office is on the fifth floor. The water damage happened on the second.
The building doesn’t necessarily recognize those boundaries.
Air moves according to pressure, temperature and mechanical forces, not according to the names we’ve given the rooms. HVAC systems can serve multiple areas. Exhaust fans remove air and influence pressure. Wind pushes against one side of a structure and creates different conditions on another. Warm air can rise through a building. Plumbing and electrical penetrations create connections through walls and floors. Wall cavities, utility chases, suspended ceilings, stairwells, attics and crawlspaces create pathways most occupants never see.
Moisture follows its own pathways.
A stain on a bedroom ceiling may begin with a problem in the attic. A wet basement wall may begin with grading or drainage outside. Condensation around an HVAC system may be related to temperature, airflow and humidity conditions that aren’t obvious when someone first sees the water.
This is why discovering contamination and understanding contamination are two different things.
Finding mold in the basement tells us where mold was found, but it doesn’t automatically tell us what happened upstairs. Finding contamination in one office tells us where it was discovered, but not necessarily what happened throughout an entire commercial building. To understand that, we have to look at what was happening in the building before anyone even knew there was a problem.
Contamination is rarely discovered the moment it begins. A roof may leak intermittently for months or years before a stain finally appears on the ceiling. Water can enter a crawlspace season after season without anyone noticing. A slow plumbing leak can remain hidden inside a wall while the room on the other side looks perfectly normal. Someone may repair the visible evidence of an old water problem without ever investigating what happened inside the wall, beneath the flooring or above the ceiling.
Meanwhile, life inside the building continues exactly as it always has. The furnace runs through the winter and the air conditioner runs through the summer. Doors open and close. People walk from room to room and floor to floor. Children play, pets move throughout the house, furniture gets rearranged, floors are vacuumed and belongings travel between rooms, vehicles, workplaces and other buildings. Repairs and renovations may even disturb materials long before anyone realizes there was a reason to handle them differently.
The building itself continues changing as well. Conditions during a humid July afternoon can be very different from conditions during a cold January night. Heavy rain can change moisture conditions. Heating and cooling systems cycle on and off. Exhaust fans, open doors, wind and temperature differences can change the way air moves through a structure. A commercial building filled with hundreds of people in the middle of the workday can behave differently after everyone has gone home for the night.
This is one reason people sometimes describe patterns that initially seem difficult to explain. They may feel worse during one season, after several days of rain, late in the workday or only when the heating or air-conditioning system is operating. Those details don’t necessarily tell us the cause, but they can help us understand where to look.
By the time someone finally discovers mold, moisture or another source of contamination, we may be looking at only the most visible part of a much longer story. Understanding that story means looking not only at what we can see today, but at what may have been happening inside that building before anyone knew there was a reason to look.
Mold is only one possible part of this conversation.
A damp or water-damaged environment can involve fungal material, bacteria, fragments and other particulates. Indoor environments can also contain dust, allergens, combustion products, fragrances and volatile organic compounds associated with paints, stains, varnishes, flooring, adhesives, cabinetry, cleaning products and other materials.
Sometimes a brand-new building bothers someone more than an old one.
Everything can look beautiful while paints, coatings, flooring, adhesives, furniture and cabinetry are still releasing chemicals into the indoor environment. For someone who has become chemically sensitive, walking into that space can be a very different experience from what another person experiences.
Other buildings carry contamination from their history.
A home that was previously used for methamphetamine production or heavy drug use presents different questions. A sewage event presents different questions. A crime scene, unattended death or other biological contamination event creates another set of considerations. An industrial or commercial building may have an environmental history the current occupants know very little about.
This is why “Is there mold?” is sometimes too small a question.
The better question may be, “What is happening in this environment?”
Recognizing that you feel different in a particular environment doesn’t tell you exactly what is happening inside that building, but it may be the first clue that there is more to understand. Air moves. Moisture moves. Heating and cooling systems operate. Doors open and close, pressure changes, people and belongings travel from one space to another, and the boundaries we see between rooms and floors aren’t always the boundaries that matter to a contaminant.
So if you’ve begun to notice that you feel better when you’re away and different when you return, you don’t have to know the reason before you start asking questions. Sometimes recognizing the pattern is the first step. Understanding how something in one part of a building could reach another part — and eventually reach you — is the next.
In the next AuntieGen Explains, we’re going further into how contaminants move through a building — through airflow, pressure differences, moisture pathways, mechanical systems, people and the everyday operation of the building itself. We’ll look at why contamination discovered in one location doesn’t necessarily tell us the whole story of where it has been, and why understanding the building as a complete environmental system can be so important when you’re trying to understand an exposure.
Next: AuntieGen Explains — How Contaminants Move Through a Building
Protection From What You Can’t See.
The Deepest Level of Clean.
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