Mold Prevention in Your Bathroom

Your bathroom is the room in your home that most people associate with cleanliness, but it’s one of the worst places for you to allow mold to propagate. Along with the kitchen, this is one of the most common places for mold to be found in the home. What can you do to prevent mold from growing in your bathroom? Here are a few tips.

Check the caulking around the bath tub or shower stall and make sure it isn’t cracked, broken, or even missing in certain areas. If you feel cold air coming in through a hole in the caulking, you should re-caulk it immediately.

It’s not uncommon to find mold growing around the base of your toilet, especially if the toilet has overflowed often in the past or worse, if you have carpet in your bathroom instead of tile. Carpet is generally a bad idea in a bathroom unless you’re very diligent in cleaning up spills of water as soon as they’re made.

You want a vent or a fan in your bathroom so that heat and moisture can escape to the outside of the house. Mold grows not only on the floors of the bathroom, but also on the ceilings where water has been absorbed due to the steam of taking a shower being unable to escape the room.

If you can see mold on the outer surface of your bathroom wall, odds are that you’re looking at a mold problem inside the wall, as well, and cleaning the mold off the outer surface of the wall isn’t going to be enough. If you truly want to get rid of all the mold, you’ll want to replace mold-contaminated building materials, except for wood supports. This includes plywood, carpet, papered sheetrock, plasterboard, and etcetera. If your bathroom has carpet in it and you find mold growing anywhere near the floor, replace the carpet.