Mold inspection and testing in Hallam, PA

Hallam incorporated as a borough in 1908, carved out of Hellam Township, and the two municipalities have spelled their names differently on purpose ever since. It is a compact place — a few hundred houses, a tight grid, and a good part of it fronting the old Lincoln Highway, now Route 462. When people call me from Hallam, the house is usually somewhere between ninety and a hundred and forty years old, and the mold problem is usually attached to something that was built later than the house itself.

Additions are the dominant pattern. A frame house from 1900 that has picked up a kitchen, a bathroom, a back bedroom and an enclosed porch over the decades has four or five roof-to-wall seams that were each handled by a different builder to a different standard. Those seams are where water enters. Flashing that was face-nailed and caulked instead of woven in, a low-slope addition roof draining against an original wall, a gutter that dies into a valley with no outlet: any of them puts water into a wall cavity that nobody can see. And the water does not surface where it entered. It tracks down a stud or along a top plate and shows up as a stain in the middle of a ceiling, one room over, in a different season. That is why I work these houses from both sides of the joint — attic side where there is access, room side with a camera and a meter — instead of taking the stain at face value.

Enclosed porches are the second thing, and they are almost a signature of this borough. A porch that was open in 1915 and glassed in around 1960 has a floor system sitting a foot or two off bare or badly drained ground, a shallow footing, a roof that was never meant to be part of the thermal envelope, and often no insulation or vapor control anywhere in the assembly. In the summer it runs humid; in the winter the framing condenses. When I read joist and subfloor moisture under one of those porches the numbers are frequently double what they are under the original house. If something in your house smells musty and the smell is worst in the back room, that is the first place I look.

The cellars are the baseline condition rather than the emergency. Stone, rubble and early block foundations were built to hold up a house and keep food cool, and they do both. What they do not do is keep a space dry, because there is no exterior damp-proofing, no drainage plane and usually no footing drain. So the masonry wicks ground moisture all year and the cellar runs high humidity from May into September. That is normal for the construction. What makes it a problem is either material stored against the wall that can support growth, or an air path — open joist bays, a chase, a balloon-framed wall — that carries cellar air up into the living space. I take paired air samples with an outdoor control specifically to answer that second question, because knowing the cellar has spores in it tells you nothing useful on its own.

The cheap fixes come up constantly here. Hallam lots are narrow, side yards are tight, and a lot of the grade pitches back toward the house because that is how the street was cut. Add a gutter that overflows or a downspout that discharges eighteen inches from the wall and you have loaded the foundation with every inch of rain that hits the roof. On a good number of my Hallam reports the first item on the fix list costs a few hundred dollars in extensions and regrading, and it does more for the cellar than any interior system would.

Whatever I find, the report is a diagnosis and not a sales pitch. I do not sell remediation, I take no referral fees from remediation, waterproofing or HVAC contractors, and I have no ownership in the lab. If your Hallam house tests clean, the report says clean.