LESLIE: Next up is April from Michigan who finds The Money Pit on WKZO. And you’ve got a bathroom situation – mold. What’s going on?
APRIL: The bathroom has an exhaust fan. However, Lord only knows where it goes. (laughing) The house was built in 1963.
TOM: OK.
APRIL: The bathroom is the only room in the whole house that gets this. It’s on the ceiling. And no matter what I use to clean it – used KILZ to paint over it – it still gets these little squiggly black lines that just mass produce.
TOM: Yeah, that’s probably cladosporium, which is a type of mold that is very typical in bathrooms. It generally is not harmful to people. But it certainly is annoying. And the things that you need to do to get this under control, April, is first of all, you mentioned that you have an exhaust fan but you don’t know where it goes. What you need …
LESLIE: (overlapping voices) It could just be venting into the room above it, which would be causing moisture from the upstairs right down through it.
TOM: (overlapping voices) Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
APRIL: (overlapping voices) It’s going right into the attic.
TOM: And so, that condensation‘s forming and soaking right through the wall … the ceiling, I should say. So, you need to get that under control. You need to figure out where that’s going and it needs to be vented outside; not just … especially not up into the attic. I mean, all the way outside to control that moisture.
And then, once you get the moisture under control, if you start using the fan all the time, you’re going to have less reoccurrence of that. And then you use a mildew proof paint. I mean, Behr makes a good one that will work effectively. But it has to have a mildicide in it. OK?
APRIL: Alrighty.
TOM: And that’ll solve the problem. Alright, April? Thanks so much for calling us at 1-888-MONEY-PIT.
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