Rebuilding the Old House

Lars Poulsen - 2026-05-21

When we found mold in our house, we were abruptly pushed into a large home construction project of unknown scope, but on a tight timeline.

Our House in 2021

Finding Mold

It began with my wife cleaning behind the heavy dark blackout curtains in our bedroom and finding dark patches of mildew/mold. She called a mold abatement specialist to have the house evaluated. She has lots of auto-immune health problems, and recently has had lots of days with migraines, causing her to spend the day in bed in a darkened bedroom.

The consultant found a severe, acute problem: There was lots of wetness, damp soils, dripping wet load-bearing girders and dry rot underneath the bathroom. There were also mold spores and even dark patches on walls and floors behind and under furniture such as book cases along the un-insulated exterior walls in every room. And light mildew on the back of the canvas of our beautiful landscape paintings. The only good news was that none of it was "the dreaded black mold".

Their recommendations were:

Finding a Contractor

Clearly, this was a big project requiring the skills of multiple trades, which had to be coordinated. As we are aging (I am 76 years old, my wife only slightly younger) the contracors and tradespeople we have relied on in the past are no longer here, and the ones we find by "looking in the yellow pages" are of highly variable quality. For a multi-trade project, we would need a general contractor to manage the project, and of the two we have used in the past, one is retired, and his replacement left town, because he could not find a workshop space he could afford.

But we were lucky. I serve on the Board of Trustees for my church congregation, and my Board president had recently performed a bathroom renovation. He had nothing but praise for the contractor he had used. The work was of the highest quality, and he had had excellent communication negotiating scope and budget. If anything, he had worried that the contractor wanted to do a job of higher quality than he and his wife could afford, but in the end he was very satisfied with how the project had gone.

So we found a prime contractor with a sterling reputation for quality work and outstanding project management skills. He actually has a degree in construction management. We put him on retainer to develop a project plan, schedule and budget. And we explained that because we had booked and paid for a European vacation and hired a dog sitter to live in our house and take care of our two dogs while we were away, we had a firm deadline, 3 months hence. So most people would say that this would be impossible, but the contractor said he would find a way to do it.

Root Cause Analysis

The exploration determined that there were five causes for our mold problem:

A french drain would need to be installed along the south exterior wall to ensure rainwater cannot pool in the area. And at least along the south wall, the exterior stucco had to be cut and partly replaced in order to install a "weep screed" to prevent moisture from being wicked up into the wall.

Making a Plan

Abating current and future mold

Our contractor knew a "healthy homes" subcontractor, who lived just a half mile up the street from us, and who specializes in creating "healthy homes" with fresh, clean air fulfilling the European guidelines for indoor climate, which are also slowly being incorporated in building code in California and some other US states. He figured our house needed:

Structural Carpentry

The mold consultant's first item was "fix the leakage and replace rotted wood as needed". Noting that the damage included dry rot in subfloors, floor joists, major girders under load bearing walls and a section of the sill beam on which the exterior wall rests, this was clearly a major project.

The summary was that the bathroom had to be stripped to the studs, all floor joists under the bathroom had to be replaced. A portion of the sill beam under the exterior wall had to be replaced. The exterior wall of the bathroom had to be torn out and rebuilt. The interior wall between the bathroom and my wife's office (originally the guest bedroom) had to be taken out and rebuilt. Possibly the interior wall to the master bedroom. Some girders under load bearing interior walls had to be replaced.

To be able to replace load bearing wood beams, some temporary load bearing fixtures would have to be installed.

Electrical Wiring

In preparing for the work, we needed to map out which circuit breakers connected where, so that we could de-energize electricity to the walls that were going away. We found that outlets and switches in the bathroom were supplied from at least 4 different circuit breakers, each of which also supplied outlets and lights in other rooms. In other words, it wad a total mess, grown haphazardly whenever new appliances and outlets were added over the years. As the electrician began to unravel the mess, we found that 70% of all electrical wiring in the house was "knob and tube", so we decided that now was the time to replace all electrical wiring with "romex" cable and organize the circuits in a logical manner.

So it seemed reasonable to replace all light fixtures with modern LED lights. This afforded the opportunity to optimize the lighting on each of our large landscape paintings.

Painting and Floor Refinishing

Since were were cutting so many holes in walls and ceiling, we needed to paint the entire inside of the house after repairing the plaster. So why not refinish all the hardwood floors, since we had to empty the house anyway?

Financing

And all this had to be finished in 3 months. No time to arrange financing. In my experience, it takes at least two months to get a loan of this size, even when backed by a property with a good equity multiplier. But I do have a pre-tax retirement investment account. Because I am still working, I have held off converting it from to a regular brokerage account; I have wanted to wait until I was truly retired and in a lower income tax bracket. But it was there and full of mutual funds that can be liquidated from one day to the next. In other words, I had the money, but every dollar spent would be taxable income.

Good, fast, cheap - pick two! This is expensive. As I looked at the estimate, I thought that it would have been cheaper to raze the house and build a new one, but that could not be done in 3 months!!

We think we can meet the deadline, of being back in the house by June 20th. We are leaving for a vacation in Europe, and a dogsitter needs to live in the house while we are gone. But it is VERY tight.

History of the House and the Problems

My house was built in 1951. Being in California, there are no bricks anywhere; the foundation walls are concrete, cast in situ, and everything else is hung on a skeleton of wooden sticks.

It was one of the first large housing tract developments in Santa Barbara. About 300 small three- and four-bedroom "starter homes" built for World War II veterans. They sold for about $20,000 and with a modest down payment, a 30-year mortgage would cost about $200 per month. When I moved in, there were still some of the original owners living there.

Project Timeline

More pages

These blog pages are found at http://www.beagle-ears.com/lars/pages/

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