When Lori and Nate Lee moved from Maryland to Lewis Center five years ago, they bought the perfect home for their growing family: 2,800 square feet, four bedrooms and a basement they immediately finished.
For four years, they enjoyed the home - until this summer, when they decided to replace the wood deck with a concrete patio and discovered rotted wood where the deck was attached to the home.
The Lees contacted Craig Reichman, owner of C&R Builders in Sunbury, who started removing stucco to determine the extent of the rot.
What he found, in addition to the rot, was mold - under the stucco, under the two doors leading into the home and under the wood floor near the doors.
"I kept cutting and cutting and cutting,"
said Reichman, who has spent the past month repairing the damage.
For Reichman, the discovery was all too familiar. He and other builders and experts say mold plagues some newer central Ohio homes, especially those built during the housing boom of 1999 to 2006.
"I'm seeing this over and over," Reichman said. "The time frame when those homes were built, in that period, five to seven years, will have those issues."
The Lees' $390,000 home was built by Darby Homes, a custom homebuilder that is now out of business. But the problem isn't confined to one builder.
"I've seen it from several builders," Reichman said. "It's sad to say that homes built 100 years ago are holding up better, which is upsetting because we have so much better technology and materials today if we used them."
Others agree that mold has become a familiar problem in new homes, especially those with stucco siding.
"There were not problems like this 35 or 40 years ago," said Jerry Warner, the city of Delaware's chief building inspector who helped a Delaware couple negotiate a mold problem with Dominion Homes.
In that case, the problems were so advanced that Dominion replaced the stucco, insulation, weather wrap and sheathing on an outside wall. The homeowners thought their problems had been solved until they discovered that electrical outlets along the same wall were so damp that they occasionally sizzled, and that moisture buildup was pushing kitchen baseboards from the wall.
Now, the homeowners are continuing talks with the builder.
When easily removed in bathrooms and kitchens, mold is usually harmless. But some types of mold such as stachybotrys can be dangerous, especially to infants and children and those with respiratory problems.
Building experts and others who have combated mold say there are several reasons that it seems to be a greater problem in newer homes than older ones.
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