Sometimes you find an old house, fall in love with it, try to ignore some glaring issues because you want to save for future generations. This happened to us on a 1960's MCM home in Lakewood. Noticing some problems that had been cleverly covered up but not resolved, we decided to call in an expert to see what they could see and what no one else was telling us.
Enter Brian Carr of Advanced Home Comfort. This SME is Incredibly Professional, Very Thorough and Customer Focused. He suited up for protection like an astronaut, shimmied into the dark, dank, and smelly crawlspace and spent over an hour slithering around under a dirty MCM pier and beam home. The crawlspace was actively flooded, with yellow cotton candy mold lining everything, peppered by big yellow mushrooms. A Perfect home for the ticks, fleas, and termites he ran into that day. To top it off he uncovered active signs of rodent infestations (nests, urine, feces, bones, and carcasses). These Rodents had burrowed into the walls and even into AC ducts, polluting the house air quality with their discharge. If that wasn't impressive enough, with a smile, he changed his protective suit again and sprang up into the dirty, damp and cramped attic to uncover more mold, rot, rodent infestations and ingenious coverups and other hazards like loose, ungrounded and revealed wiring.
Not only does Brian Carr of Advanced Home Comfort due to the dirty discovery work he also has a treasure chest of high tech equipment that can detect leaks through the walls and ceiling with thermal imaging, record moisture levels within the structure and even measure the air quality. BTW this old MCM came in at twice the hazardous cutoff levels for air quality at 0.3 um at 590K and 0.5 um at 165K. Brian said that breathing that air for extended periods alone could cause health issues and might even put you in the hospital.
He dumped his hazmat suit and reviewed his initial finding with us before he left (which I will admit made us feel woozy). Later that afternoon he sent an extremely professional presentation identifying all the issues with the actual graphic photo of some really unpleasant things that were happening in this house. His presentation explained in writing with illustrations and pictures of how these issues occur, how to solve each one permanently and a Good ($), Better ($$), Best ($$$) approach to fixing it. On the Best ($$$) solution he came in at about half of what I had calculated it would cost me to fix it.
Digging deeper into this house uncovered many more issues from crispy aluminum wiring, rotting joists to what appeared to be a nice looking new metal roof, that wasn't properly installed causing it to leak at every seam, festering a huge mold issue that seemed cancerous to the integrity of the house, so we decided not to spend anymore time in it. Brian helped us dodge a big bullet and may have saved our lives. Had we taken on that 1960's MCM in Lakewood, there is no doubt we would have engaged Brian because of his professional and thorough approach in identifying and solving home issues at his BEST solution level. When we discover the right MCM home, we will be calling Brian Carr of Advanced Home Comfort. read more