Five kinds of work
Mold services in Ann Arbor
Four of these five begin with the same visit, because until somebody has established where the water is arriving from, every one of them is a guess with a price attached.
The five, and the order they usually happen in
Mold inspection and moisture diagnosis
Finding the water before pricing the repair. Washtenaw County’s own position is that in most cases sampling is not necessary, which makes the visual survey the thing you are actually buying.
Read about inspection → 02Basement and crawl space mold
Where most Ann Arbor mold lives. A below-grade wall can be wet from outside, wet from condensation, or wet from a leak, and the three want completely different repairs.
Read about basements → 03Attic mold and roof ventilation
Usually a ventilation fault rather than a roof leak. A bath fan discharging into the attic puts warm wet air against a cold roof deck every night of a Michigan winter.
Read about attics → 04Water damage drying and material removal
The 48-hour window the EPA sets for drying wet building materials, and which porous materials have to come out rather than be dried in place.
Read about drying → 05Rental property mold and certificates of compliance
Ann Arbor inspects every rental unit every 30 months. Passing that inspection and fixing the moisture behind it are two different jobs, and only one of them holds until the next one.
Read about rentals →Start from the symptom
Which one you are probably looking at
Most people arrive at this having noticed one specific thing, not having decided they need a category of work. These are the five starting points that come up most often in Ann Arbor houses, and where each tends to lead.
- A musty smell in the basement with nothing visible. Very common here and it does not necessarily mean a large problem, but it does mean moisture somewhere. Starts with an inspection, which is looking for the water rather than the mold.
- Dark staining along the bottom of a below-grade wall. Points at basement work, and the first thing worth settling is whether it is arriving through the wall or condensing on it, because those want opposite repairs.
- Grey or black patches on the underside of the roof boards. Nearly always an attic ventilation fault, not a roof leak, and cleaning it without correcting the airflow buys you a winter or two.
- A pipe let go, or the sump did not keep up. Then the clock matters more than anything else on this page. Drying inside 48 hours is a different job, and a much cheaper one, than remediation afterwards.
- An inspector has written it up on a rental. That is rental compliance work, where the trap is that the fastest way to clear the violation and the only way to stop it recurring are not the same piece of work.
If none of those quite fits, describing what you have actually seen is more useful than picking a category. The survey exists to answer that question, and it is the one visit that is worth booking before you know what you need.
One visit first
Book the survey, not the remedy
Every one of these pages says some version of the same thing, so it may as well be said once here: the moisture source decides the work. A company that can price the repair before anyone has found the source is pricing a guess, and you will pay for the difference twice.
Tell us which part of the building, roughly how large an area, and whether it is worse in winter or in summer. That last one is more diagnostic than it sounds.