Hey guys,
So we just had new carpet installed at our new place yesterday. I was walking around upstairs looking at the subfloors after they pulled the carpet up and saw several locations where there appears to have been either recent or older water damage - water stains in baseboards, subflooring and saturated tack strip, etc.
Here are pics:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/wQHHUheDjV4FQaMA6I tried to feel and in one room (the purple one in the album pics) it almost felt damp. I asked the carpet guy and he said he didn't think it was damp or wet.
Last year the sellers had roof work done where they replaced the membrane,etc of the entire roof and had to have a water damage/restoration company rip out portions of the master bedroom/closet. The adjacent room appears to have been slightly impacted as the tack strip in the corner that's on the other side of the master bedroom) was darker and obviously saturated from that. The closet of this same bedroom also looked to have water stains (not sure if this was from when they experienced leaking in the master bedroom last year and just didn't notice/address it in the other bedroom/s, or if the other water damage was from even before all that).
(patchwork on the wall was to remediate a gas leak discovered during escrow where a previous flooring contractor drove a nail right through the baseboard and got it lodged into a gas line)
Aside from that, assuming the new underlayment/membrane is good, there's only one other spot (outside of the purple room) that may not be as waterproofed (or where the waterproofing has failed). There's a clay tile ledge outside the window of that bedroom where it seems water could potentially pool up (this is also in the album) and, historically, it seems this might have been a cause of water intrusion.
There's also an area of the garage directly below the bedroom/area of suspected water entry where the drywall tape and paint are cracked and peeling a bit in the corner (also in the pics)
I contacted one of the water damage/restoration companies who I had check a wet wall on the first floor (during escrow) and he referred me to a "mold specialist" local to the area who also does or used to contract for many years. He seemed to know what he was talking about but when it came to the cost of doing the inspection, he quoted $450 to inspect the interior and exterior for potential water entry/leak points and on top of that a minimum of 4 mold samples (I think air samples) where each sample is $135. Total cost for this kind of inspection would run just shy of $1000...
(During escrow, the home inspector we used called out the downstairs wet wall and then the sellers wanted us to have mold testing done to confirm the presence of mold... I felt like this was a waste of time since we knew the wall was wet but the mold test came back positive. We weren't planning to remediate until after moving in though)
Thoughts and opinions? Have any of you ever done anything like this? Is it worth doing? I was just planning to have the roofer come out and take a look at that ledge in addition to quoting me on broken roof tiles from the fumigation we recently did. I also ordered a cheap gas sniffer and moisture meter of Amazon - after having gone through multiple gas leak and water damage/moisture issues, I figure these are useful tools to have if you ever suspect either.
