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mold as a fashionable reason to freak out
Wednesday, October 16 2024
Never much time passes between the things that the tenant at the Brewster Street rental complains about. Last summer it was rats, which was a legitimate problem, though one we were eventually able to solve. More recently she complained about an absence of hot water in a way that suggested maybe the hot water heater was broken. That would've been an emergency, and we came close to hiring a plumber to deal with it, since we were in Germany at the time. But then when I went there, I found that the problem was a clogged hot water hose beneath the bathroom sink. One time she even called us because a GFCI outlet had tripped; apparently she'd somehow never learned how to reset those.
The other day she complained about a moldy smell coming out of the heating ducts, perhaps because the heat had come on for the first time of the heating season due to a recent drop in temperatures. I should pause here to say something about mold. Somehow in recent decades, it became fashionable to freak the fuck out about mold. Inhaling spores from it became "unhealthy," and when people saw it growing on surfaces, they lost their minds, acting as if they'd just discovered their house was made entirely from asbestos. (Asbestos is another thing people freak out irrationally about. People working in asbestos mines or as asbestos insulation installers have every reason to freak out, but shingles made of asbestos are not dangerous.) My feeling about mold is as follows: humans, particularly Europeans, evolved alongside mold in uniformly dank conditions. This began in caves and continued in houses built with imperfect roofs and drainage systems. The people for whom mold was dangerous were weeded out of the gene pool many generations ago. Sure, mold is unpleasant, and nobody wants to inhale the spores. But it's unlikely to cause anything more than pyschological health problems.
So when I heard that now the Brewster Street tenant was complaining about mold, all I could do was roll my eyes. I told Gretchen to tell her that mold was her problem, not ours.
But then this morning Gretchen was listening to a program on the local leftie Kingston station (Radio Kingston at 107.9 MHz). It's a station where commentators tend to be concerned more for the welfare of tenants than for the profitability of renting a property. And someone talking about tenant issues specifically mentioned mold. It turns out that mold is a landlord responsibility. If that was the case, we'd have to at least investigate the issue.
So at 1:00pm, I drove out to Brewster Street with a five gallon bucket, latex gloves, a rag, and a big bottle of bleach. Somewhere along Broadway, the smell of bleach got so bad in the Forester that I had to roll the windows down. After I'd parked on Brewster Street, I found out why the bleach smell was so strong. The idiot who had last used the bleach (probably those weird dog sitters we'd hired for the first part of our recent European trip) hadn't screwed the cap down at all, and it had jiggled loose. Then bleach had sloshed out of the bottle. Fortunately, it was contained inside the five gallon bucket, but everything in that bucket, including a very nice rechargeable flashlight, had been soaking in several cups of undiluted bleach. Now the flashlight was on and flickering, though I hadn't actually turned it on. I used pliers to get it out of the bleach and then I managed to remove the screws holding it together and break one of the wires providing voltage. Hopefully after it dries out it will still work, but I don't know if that's how things go when it's bleach interacting with electronics (Donald Trump's ignorant rants about Hillary Clinton's emails notwithstanding.) I then dumped what I could of the bleach from the five gallon bucket back into the bottle.
Down in the basement, I soon had the furnace open. I sniffed around inside it, and it didn't have much of any smell. It certainly didn't smell like mold. I removed the air filter and took it with me to Home Depot to find a replacement, since replacing that was a way for me, as a landlord, to have "done something." Also, that filter probably hadn't been replaced since the furnace was installed back in the Spring of 2017 (when we recovered the house to a state of habitability after an unknown period of abandonment). But at Home Depot, I could find no filters that were as thick as the one in the Brewster Street basement. I found filters with the same width and height, so I ended up getting one of those that was only four (instead of five) inches thick, figuring that it probably doesn't matter much if a filter doesn't occupy all the duct length provided for a filter.
After installing the filter, I then hotwired the furnace so it would run. (This also required depressing a switch that normally is closed by the presence of a hatch.) When the furnace ran, I sniffed the air blowing through it and couldn't detect any mold. Indeed, even the basement itself didn't smell moldy, though that wouldn't've been the case had a dehumidifier not been running. I emptied the water out of it and then dumped the dilute bleach mixture in my bucket into various cracks in the concrete basement floor, mostly just to make it smell faintly of bleach down there. Usually my landlording chores produce real accomplishments, but this one felt like busywork, the kind of shit people do to make it look like they're earning their pay even when they have no idea what to actually do.
Back at the house, it was already past 3:00pm, so I took Charlotte for a walk (Neville didn't come). I went down to the end of the Farm Road, pre-positioned some nice pieces of bluestone from that recently-discovered micro-quarry in a place where I could pick it up later.
Then I got a message from Gretchen saying that Ken had asked if she could drop by his house off a nearby road to let his dog Rosie out, since she'd been cooped up unable to relieve herself for hours. I drove over there in the Forester (mostly so I could snag any good pieces of bluestone I saw along the way) and couldn't get into the house because it was locked. Not only that, but if Rosie was there, she was fast asleep.
After telling Gretchen this, she told me the location of a hidden key (I'd checked all the obvious places for one, but there was one obvious place I'd missed.) So I drove back out to Ken's place and was able to get in. But Rosie wasn't there. Fearing she might've randomly died, I checked all the closets and under the beds. Clearly something was wrong. Later it turned out that Ken had asked for Gretchen to let Rosie out for a run tomorrow, not today, and she'd garbled the timeline in her mind.
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