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Temperature and humidity readings indoors are similar to outdoor levels, according to Brennan's calculations. Moisture is the first thing they look for inside a house. Recent studies have shown that mold spores, which thrive in dampness, are potent allergens and an asthma trigger. Some studies have even shown that they can cause memory loss. Our biggest concern is the roof leak, which took the roofer three shots to fix. "It seems pretty much dried up," Brennan says, running his moisture meter up the wall. "You might have some dead mold back there, but I wouldn't bother ripping the walls out."
We don't have dust-mite covers on the beds, but neither Rachel nor I am allergic, and Rachel hasn't had an asthma attack since we left Los Angeles. Penny, our English Setter, doesn't shed much except in spring, and she is bathed once every two weeks. If she were a cat, Shaughnessy says, she would have to be bathed once a week to keep her dander down.
Everything was looking good until we got to the kitchen. Brennan noticed that there was no outside vent for the stove. Bottled smoke, which determines air flow between walls, led him to the crawl space. "Here it is," he called out from the darkness, pointing a light above his head. "It's all dumping right in here. The clothes dryer too." Contractors frequently forget--or don't bother--to hook up stoves and dryers to outside venting, says Brennan. "We see this all the time in problem buildings." In this case, the fumes we thought were leaving the house were being dumped into the crawl space. Worse, Shaughnessy points out, the nearby air-conditioning system could be sucking up the exhaust fumes and moisture from the dryer and recirculating them around the house. But we eat out a lot, and it's an easy fix.
Inside the crawl space, Brennan also found dryer lint clinging to the walls. "There's a lot of moisture dumping in here from the dryer too," he says. "And we've got some rodent poop by these holes around this ventilation duct." Mice can pass through a 3/8-in. hole, he says, and "they will come back to the house from two miles away if you don't kill them." Brennan used to be more casual about mice before 1993, when the Hanta virus, traced to mouse urine, killed 19 people in New Mexico. "They started finding it in New York and Connecticut, and now it's scattered around the country," he says.
The rest of the house got pretty good marks. The only mold was in the air-conditioning coils, which we'll get cleaned. We shouldn't store chlorine bleach and ammonia-based cleaners together in the upstairs bathroom. If combined they can produce highly toxic chlorine gas. The paint-storage room would be better off vented out of the house. Fumes from the garage are not an issue because our garage is freestanding. Still, Brennan urges us to get a carbon-monoxide detector.
"We found some things," Shaughnessy says, "but compared with most homes we get called to, they're extremely minor." The physical is over. We're going to live after all.