Long-term savings from reduced mold remediation and healthcare costs.

Once mold has begun to grow inside a home, the cost of remediation is significant for several reasons.

Testing – this is required, first, in order to evaluate where there is mold in your home, so you can determine how to remediate it. And, testing is again performed in order to be certain mold reduction was successful once the remediation is complete.,

Mold Coach – this person is a process expert in remediation; an independent expert who will be sure your home was actually remediated, re-tested, and who can verify the mold levels are safe before you rebuild. The mold coach will also work with your general contractor to ensure water problem areas are built back correctly. 

General Contractor – it will be critical to find and employ a competent GC who understands water damage, mold, and how to rebuild the remediated areas of your home, using practices that limit and/or eliminate future mold growth. 

Therefore, building the home in a way that proactively addresses the potential for mold growth in all areas will potentially save you tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars in the long run.

Healthcare costs – discovering you have a mold illness like CIRS, Pans, or Pandas can lead to extremely expensive, long-term medical treatments, often because people may have been “chasing their symptoms” for illnesses they couldn’t identify for years. Conventional medicine has not yet caught up with how indoor air quality and mold can dramatically affect human health, and you may spend thousands of dollars and multiple years trying to determine why you feel so poorly. 

However, once you find what is commonly known as a “functional medicine doctor,” you may finally be able to put yourself on the road to recovery. This kind of medical professional can identify the issues you are facing. Often, however, these services involve considerable expense and time to address. 

Balancing upfront investment with future savings

The investment of building your home with mold-resistant practices and less-toxic materials will, first of all, offer peace of mind, but also potentially save you hundreds of thousands in future remediation and health costs. 

Material Costs and Availability

High-performance materials: vapor barriers, rain screens, low-toxicity lumber, and low-toxicity insulation – these are all great options for your new home and each one will likely increase the project’s bottom line, largely due to supply and demand. Builders don’t often use these materials, which means they are specialty products with a higher associated cost. 

Labor Costs

Specialized methods and contractor expertise.

My goal is to teach Architects and GCs how to build with proven methods that create mold-resistant homes & low-toxicity homes.

If your GC understands the principles laid out in this Blueprint, they will be committed to learning and adopting techniques that may be new to them, and training their subcontractors who typically don’t know these practices either. Hiring HVAC contractors and framers who understand these methods is highly preferred, but the challenge is that subcontractors do not have the context for these ideas, having been trained in the standard practices for decades.

It is specialized knowledge, but once learned, the cost to the GC is relatively the same to those using today’s conventional methods.  

Budgeting for Mold-Resistant Features

Incremental vs. comprehensive approaches to mold-resistant construction

Home building for anyone is expensive. Labor, material, building site conditions, and overhead costs are very expensive, regardless of your address or builder. Building a mold-resistant home has increased costs due to some of the specialty methods, products, and the required time / labor to implement them. Some cost increases are minimal, but others are not and need to be factored into the budget. 

Phased implementation strategies

In some instances, a phased approach can be used to reduce costs, however, since these systems are integrated throughout the building process, phasing these practices also may be very difficult and more costly in the end. 

I am an expert builder, but some of the building science guru’s that have studied and toiled to perfect these practices are listed below. Without their commitment, we would not be having this discussion. 

• Joseph Lstiburek (Moisture Control Handbook)
• John Banta (Prescriptions for a Healthy House)
• Allison Bailes (Energy Vanguard Blog)
• Peter Yost (Building Green Blog)
• Andy Pace
• Paula Baker LaPorte
• And many others

Research-Based Insights

Findings from journals such as Building and Environment, Journal of Building Physics, and other relevant scientific literature

The learning I’ve gained from the authors above cannot be overstated. Their expertise in building science, energy use, home assembly, etc. has been invaluable to me. 

I attempt to use many of their prescribed methods in all of my homes. However, there is a difference. Where they are scientists, architects, energy and green building products experts, they haven’t built many homes. 

Designs can be professional, effective, and healthy, but the general contractor watching over your project, training subcontractors, and check peoples work, will ultimately determine the quality, mold-resistant nature, and toxicity level of your home. 

Value of Mold-Resistant Homes in Real Estate

Marketability and resale value implications

As mold awareness in homes increases, the impact on the real estate market will be profound. More states are beginning to implement policies regarding mold disclosures in homes for sale, which will create the accountability of home sellers who may want instead to sell a property with no responsibility to disclose the “understood” health of the home. 

This impacts the value implications in two ways:

1. A house that is discovered to have mold will lose true value due to the cost of testing, mold remediation, re-testing, and rebuilding. These numbers will be significant and should be reflected in the appraisal and home sale value. 
2. However, if through testing and verification you are able to know your home is free of mold and water damage, or that remediation has been successful, home buyers will be aware of this, and your home’s value will potentially increase.