This is a long and boring story so stop reading right now.

Back when I was removing the carpet to prepare for the floorboard install, and found mould, it started a roller coaster of money sucking events.

It started with me calling a mould expert. I had one week before the floorboards would be installed, with no chance of rescheduling since we would move in only days after they were laid. I was in full panic mode.

Mould-man came out and had a look already the next day and said I could easily treat the stuff I could see myself. He said it’d be fine to lay the floorboards as scheduled and he’d come back and treat the mould from underneath the house, as well as inside if we really wanted to. I very much liked mould-man.

So I started by my own mould treatment with oil of cloves. Yup. Oil of cloves (that’s “nejlikeolja” for you Swedes). It was my mother-in-law’s tip on how to kill the fuzzies. I had never even heard of the stuff. You get it at the pharmacy and when I walked in and asked for it, the pharmacist asked “is it for teeth or mould?”, so apparently it’s a well known remedy for mould. Or teeth?! Mouldy teeth? I have NO idea.

So I treated the mould with oil of cloves and I tell ya, that stuff SMELLS. It sort of smelled like an overdose of Christmas (cloves is often used en masse around Christmas where I grew up).

This is happening at the same time as I was trying to kill remove the cork tiles in the study with mineral turpentine. So I got the turps stinking up the place, and then the oil of cloves reeking through the house too. I was wondering if I should’ve Googled if the two make for a chemical reaction that will kill a small town.

This is getting to be too long of a story.

We got the mould-man back to gas the crap out of the house with his super-mould-killer gas. He gassed our house from underneath and through the entire house. We had to evacuate. View from the hotel room. Roughing it during evac.

When we came back the house smelled if possible even worse than during my cloves-turps treatment but we knew the house was squeaky clean. It cost us a bit but we figured it was worth it considering the option of living with mould.

A couple of days later we proceeded with the next step of the mould fighting process i.e. the constant moisture under the house that was the cause of it all. Mould-man had put us in touch with Ventilation-man and he and his team came to install an under-house ventilation system together with a subfloor insulation for a couple of easy thousands. This not only stopped the dead-freeze creeping up through our floors but also exchanges all the air under the house many many times per hour, thus keeping all the moisture away.

That was all the mould taken care of for all eternity. These three actions; mould removal, insulation and moisture removal, now also allowed us to actually utilise the under-house area for storage.

Now. This is where things really get out of hand with the unexpected spending and the bleeding of dollars.

When ventilation-man walked me through the subfloor installations he just in passing mentioned their positive pressure ventilation system, i.e. climate control system. We were planning for ducted air-condition down the line, but DOWN THE LINE because that install costs around $9000. But we got curious of his system and did some research and as it turned out it seemed this positive pressure ventilation system would work better for us and our health concerns, while ducted air-con would not have been ideal for us.

Ventilation-man’s install would also only (I’m laugh-crying a little when I say “only”) cost us $6000.

And did I mention how cold we were?

So. Feast your eyes!

What? You don’t think this is pretty?

Nono, please keep looking at it. I need the value for money.

This puppy cost $6000. Of course it came with some stuff in the roof you can’t actually see, BUT STILL.

Go away. You’ve had you’re 15 minutes.

The fun part is that it’s working. The wee control unit sits outside the guest room.

We also got seven of these distributed over the house.

So between the

• mould killing
• subfloor insulation
• subfloor ventilation, and
• positive pressure ventilation

we’ve spent a God awful amount of our renovation money already. And none of it is stuff you can actually see and say “oooh, pretty”.

It feels a bit like we’ve been haemorrhaging money since we bought our house. Most of it was planned, some of it for straight away, some of it was meant to be for later (a climate control system), and then some that wasn’t planned at all. I’m sure it’s all par for the course when you buy property but can we just slow down now a bit please?! Or at least start spending money on stuff that’s PRETTY and that you can SEE.

Noo, not YOU!

(If you’re still reading you’ve officially earned five, FIVE Anna points that can be redeemed at any time.)