How to clean and remove mold from carpet and wood shelves?

Question

Our water heater was leaking and and man of the house took a bit to long to get it looked at. ;) Now our office closet carpet is soaking wet and mold is all throughout the carpet and on the walls and soaked in our shelving.

Please provide any cleaning and remove methods you know along with any helpful product names and even where they can we purchased.

Thank you for your help!

Answer 1

Clean your carpet with bleach water, being careful not to use too much as it can cause bleached spots. Make sure the room is ventilated properly before doing so. Do the same with your shelves and wall. Hopefully, you replaced the water heater. Use a good name brand. I use only Clorox, it is by far better than store/generic brands.

Answer 2

In addition to the correct advise for bleaching. If you are able to pull up the carpet and get it outside into the sun... I KNOW IT IS A LOT OF WORK! If you are willing to do this, I would get a Rug Doctor to shampoo/steam it, then take it up while damp and THEN set it into the sunshine. The sunshine will kill a lot of the mold after one good sunny afternoon. It will destroy the odors quite well also. You could avoid too much bleach this way so you don't wreck the color. This will work for the shelves also. If you have mold growing on walls.... PLEASE get some KILZ paint at any home improvement store. Wash down the walls with strong Clorox solution, and then air out the room and paint with the KILZ. They used to only have white, but you can get colors now. It stops the mold from coming back! This is important because the mold will wreak havoc on your body systems! One other thing! There are these fabulous little buckets that you can get at hardware and home improvement stores called DampRid. They are intersting little things that draw water out of the room... chemical dehumidifiers. I would use an electric one first, but these are handy in small spaces or if funds are too short for an electric one.

Hope this helps !!!

Answer 3

Oh dear.

If I were you, I would ditch the carpet and scrub the walls and shelves HARD with bleach. In fact, you might want to just plain open the walls to make sure the mold hasn't gotten in them too. And keep fans blowing on the wet area so hopefully new mold won't start growing.

Good luck!

Answer 4

If you research it on the internet, like I did, you will find that the only method of cleaning is bleach.  The mould can be very dangerous, my personal opinion, ditch the carpet, clean the shelves with bleach.  You could probably claim it in your insurance.. check into it.