Mold inspection and testing in West York, PA

West York is a compact borough, and the housing reflects it. Houses sit close together on narrow lots with alleys behind them, and the great majority are built on hollow concrete block rather than the stone you find inside the city or the poured walls you find out in the newer townships. Block matters more than people realize. Each unit is a row of hollow cores, and those cores wick and hold water. A wall can be bone dry on the surface and still read wet in the meter two or three courses up, because the water is inside the block moving by capillary action rather than running down the face of it.

Now add the thing that makes this borough distinct: an enormous share of these basements have been finished. Sometime in the last fifty years somebody built a rec room down there — studs nailed flat against the block, paneling or drywall over the studs, a drop ceiling, carpet with a foam pad. It was almost never done with a capillary break, a drainage plane or an air gap, because at the time nobody built that way. The result is an assembly that puts paper-faced drywall and organic pad in permanent contact with a wall that hands out moisture. When those rooms grow mold, they grow it on the back side of the finish, where you can't see it and you can only smell it.

The lot size is the other half of the story. With ten or fifteen feet between houses, everything that happens outside happens right at your foundation. A downspout that discharges at the corner instead of eight feet out. A driveway repaved with a pitch toward the house. A neighbor who regraded a bed, or replaced a walk, or added a patio that now sheds into your side yard. Out in Weigelstown a grading mistake has room to dissipate. Here it goes straight into the block.

The borough has also seen steady reinvestment, including newer infill housing along the West Market Street corridor, and steady flipping of the older stock. That cuts both ways for a buyer. Some of those renovations are genuinely good work. Others are masonry paint over efflorescence, a floating floor over a slab that has been wet for thirty years, and a fresh coat of white on a ceiling that was stained by a leak nobody chased. From a photograph the two are indistinguishable. From a moisture meter they aren't.

Upstairs, the recurring defect is ventilation that was added as an afterthought. Bathrooms in these houses often had no fan originally. When one got installed, it was frequently vented into a joist bay, into the soffit, or into the attic itself, and every shower since has been putting warm wet air somewhere it can't leave. Window air conditioners cause the summer version of the same problem: they cool a bedroom without dehumidifying the rest of the floor, so closets on exterior walls sit at high humidity for months.

What I do is separate those causes from each other with numbers rather than opinions. Moisture readings on the block, the framing and the finishes. Thermal imaging to find wet material behind a wall before anyone tears it out. Air and surface samples run by an independent accredited lab. Then a written report that says which problem you have, where the water enters, and what to fix first.