Mold Removal in Irving, TX
The hall closet in your 1968 south Irving ranch has smelled sour since spring, and this week you found the baseboard along the back wall swollen and soft. The tile in the hallway outside has felt warm under bare feet for a month. Nothing is dripping anywhere you can see. This site connects you by phone with an independent local provider who does mold removal in Irving and across western Dallas County.
Reading the slab before anyone touches the wall
The crew starts with instruments, not tools. A pin meter on the drywall and a non-invasive meter across the slab show how far the water spread, and on a slab house that is almost always farther sideways than the stain suggests. A thermal camera picks up the warm track of a leaking hot-water line under the concrete. They mark the wet line on the closet side, the hallway side, and any bedroom that shares the wall.
Then containment goes up. Plastic seals the doorway, the supply and return grilles in that end of the house are taped over, and a HEPA air scrubber is ducted out a window so the work area runs under negative pressure. Demolition dust stays inside the plastic instead of traveling through the ductwork.
Your first hour: the main valve, a plumber, and the camera on your phone
If the floor is warm or the water meter spins with every fixture off, shut the main valve at the street or the house and call a plumber about a slab leak; the mold crew cannot finish until the line is fixed. Photograph the baseboard, the floor, and the wall before anyone moves anything.
Keep the air conditioning on and the fan set to auto. Do not pull the baseboard or cut the drywall yourself; a wet board sheds spores when it tears, and without plastic across the door they ride the return air into every room. Skip the bleach. It soaks the paper face of the drywall and leaves the growth in the gypsum behind it.
What leaves in bags and what stays on the slab
Wet drywall, baseboard, carpet pad, and any insulation inside the wall come out to a set height above the moisture mark and go into sealed bags inside the containment. Studs, the bottom plate, and the slab stay if they read dry after cleaning. A bottom plate that sat in water for months sometimes has to be cut and sistered, and the crew tells you before they do it.
Every surface inside the plastic is HEPA vacuumed and wiped. Air movers and a dehumidifier run until the framing and the slab edge meter dry, which after a long slab leak can take most of a week. Growth that reached the ductwork or the attic becomes HVAC mold cleaning or attic mold remediation. Several wet rooms make it whole-home mold remediation. Closing the wall is mold damage repair.
Copper under thin slabs, clay under everything
Houses built in south Irving between the 1950s and the 1970s sit on thin slabs with copper supply lines and cast iron drains run beneath them. The Blackland clay under those slabs swells in a wet May and shrinks in a dry August, and fifty years of that movement works copper joints loose and rusts cast iron through. Las Colinas and Valley Ranch houses from the 1980s onward sit on post-tension slabs that move less, but their supply lines run through a 130-degree attic where the February 2021 freeze split them by the thousand.
Texas licenses this work under Chapter 1958 of the Occupations Code. Removing more than 25 contiguous square feet of growth takes a licensed mold remediation contractor, the same company may not assess and remediate the same project, and you are owed a Certificate of Mold Damage Remediation within ten days of completion. Most Texas homeowner policies pay for a sudden leak and exclude a slow one, so tell the adjuster the date you first noticed the warm floor.
When you pick up the phone about a soft baseboard
Have the address, which pipe or appliance you suspect, and how long the wall has looked and smelled like this. Say whether a plumber has already found the leak and whether anyone has painted over the spot. Call (469) 652-8352.
