Mold-Free Home: A Guide to Holiday Cleaning

6 min read

The festive season is always a memorable and exciting time when friends and families get together, but many understandably dread the cleaning tasks that follow hosting guests. Cleaning up is a tiring but necessary task to maintain your home. It also helps you assess any damage after all the cooking, eating, and foot traffic from your guests. A significant problem to look out for while and after hosting throughout the holidays is mold.

Below, we offer some simple yet effective holiday cleaning tips to help keep mold away from your home.

What You Need To Know About Mold

Mold is naturally occurring and has important biological and ecological roles in nature. However, mold that grows indoors does more harm than good. Firstly, it can trigger adverse health effects ranging from minor allergic reactions, like red eyes and sneezing, to severe symptoms like terrible headaches, painful sinuses, and difficulty breathing. Secondly, mold can permanently damage property with surface discoloration, accelerated deterioration, and rotting. The mold that thrives undetected for months or years can weaken a structure, making houses and buildings unsafe for occupants.

Here are a few more things you should know about mold:

• It is a fungus that spreads and proliferates by spreading airborne spores.
• Mold needs a damp, humid environment with organic matter nearby to thrive.
• If mold spores land on a spot with ideal environmental conditions, they will germinate, and microbial growth can begin within 72 hours.
• Mold spores will begin forming a colony within three to 12 days.
• Mold will become visible and spread even faster in 18 to 21 days.
• The mold that grows on porous, organic surfaces like wood and plant-based substrates forms long roots that anchor deep into the material. It is more difficult to kill than mold growing on hard, non-porous surfaces.

Holiday Cleaning Checklist

It’s vital to detect mold as early as possible to treat and remove it before it can wreak havoc on your property or health. Here’s a short checklist to help you detect mold over the holidays:

• Check mold-prone areas—Mold can grow virtually anywhere. However, given its propensity for moisture and humidity, some places are more susceptible to microbial growth than others. Here are the high-risk areas to check:

• • Bathrooms: inside shower stalls, beneath the bathtub, the space between the bathroom wall and the toilet or urinal
  • Kitchen: the sink, inside and around the dishwasher and refrigerator
  • Basement: all walls, the floor, and ceiling
  • Laundry room: inside the washer and dryer and near any exposed water pipe

• Attic: in the corners, the ceiling, around the casement window, near any exposed HVAC pipe, etc.

• Wipe up any spills—Drinking and dancing are part and parcel of holiday celebrations at home, so you can expect some guests to spill some drink or food. If and when this happens, tidy up the mess and dry the wet floors as quickly as possible to prevent moisture and food particles from lingering, creating an ideal spot for mold spores to germinate.

• Sweep floors and vacuum carpets—When cleaning up after a holiday house party, sweep the living room, dining area, kitchen, hallway leading to your bathroom, and other places where people had walked around carrying food and drink. Vacuum carpets, too, if there are any. The goal is to remove any crumb or morsel of food that mold can feed on.

• Open the windows for a few minutes—Allow natural ventilation to sweep through your home and fill it with cool air. Lowering indoor humidity can go a long way to preventing mold from taking root inside your home.

• Check for signs of air leaks, gutter leaks, and plumbing issues—If there’s just one item in this holiday cleaning checklist you can’t skip, it should be this. Leaky pipes, damaged gutters, and gaps in the building envelope permit excessive moisture inside your home, which is one of the main requirements of a mold-friendly environment.

This short checklist covers the essentials for mold prevention in a residential property. Use it to keep your home mold-free during and beyond the holidays.

Holiday Cleaning Tips for Mold Prevention

Here are more tips on how to clean your home and create a hostile environment for mold.

• Use a vacuum cleaner with HEPA filters—These filters prevent tiny mold spores from escaping the dust chamber and spreading further into your home.
• Wipe kitchen and bathroom surfaces with a bleach solution after cleaning—Chlorine can kill mold, but remember, it’s not as effective at treating microbial growth on porous surfaces. A chlorine solution, therefore, is best for tiled or treated concrete surfaces. Just make sure to follow the recommended ratio for safe bleach use.
• Add moisture-absorbing silica gel packets—These should be placed inside boxes and containers when putting away holiday decorations.
• Don’t use a soaked rag to wipe glass windows and doors—Use enough water or a glass cleaning solution to clean and polish windows and glass walls. A soaked rag can drench the bottoms of window or glass door casings, violating the number one rule of keeping wet-prone areas of your home dry.
• Throw spoiled food properly—When you have so much food inside your fridge, some can go bad faster than your household can eat. Put the spoiled leftovers inside sealed food waste containers or bags to keep mold spores from reaching them.
• Clean from top to bottom—This rule of thumb applies to mold prevention cleaning SOPs. Start from the attic, then the bathrooms, and then down to the bathrooms, kitchen, and dining room. Cleaning systematically from room to room prevents mold spores from spreading.

Trust Experienced Professionals for Mold Removal in Las Vegas

Our mold remediation specialists at Restoration 1 of Greater Las Vegas are well-equipped and licensed to offer professional residential mold removal in Las Vegas. Careless mold removal can result in spores spreading further inside a house, so it’s crucial to call experienced professionals. Lastly, as a property restoration company, we are ready and available to repair mold damage and restore the affected areas in your home.

Contact Restoration 1 of Greater Las Vegas today.