All Wet

I’ve found that there’s usually a good and bad to every situation, an upside and downside. The upside to living in The Little House is that there’s little room in the house for anything but daily essentials. The downside is that there’s little room for anything but daily essentials. That brings me to my next good/bad scenario. Remember those holiday decorations we were crawling and climbing all over the metal building looking for one hot day this summer?

Well, the good news is that I found them. The bad news is that I found them at the bottom of a pile of boxes in the basement of The Belle Writer’s Studio, which wouldn’t be bad at all except that the newly poured basement evidently has some water issues. We had the boxes off of the floor, but they were stacked against the wall, that of course, is leaking.

This means humidity and yes, mold all over my decorations.

First things first, I had to find out if I could get mold off of decorations made of fabric. My neighbor said, “No way,” but I found the remedy online. It seems if you mix one part rubbing alcohol with 1 part water (I used about one cup each), and dampen a cloth or paper towel, you can rub the mold off, wait for it to dry (preferably in the sun) and then take a vacuum cleaner to suck the remainder of the mold spores, it should be good. All of this should be done outside, rather than spreading the mold around inside, and you should try not to get the fabric too damp when cleaning.

Luckily, the rain has finally stopped for the moment and we’ve had some really beautiful days. The alcohol/water mixture worked on everything but the stuffed decorations, as I couldn’t rub hard enough to remove the mold stains and unfortunately, they had to be tossed. The good news there is that those decorations weren’t of any sentimental value to me. I did save the Halloween basket my mom made some years ago (pictured at the top of this story).

The next order of business was researching and finding the best deal on a dehumidifier, so all of my articles notes and office supplies will be good stored in the basement. We don’t have many shopping options here: Home Depot, Lowe’s, Wal-Mart and a small Sears satellite store where most everything has to be ordered. I found an energy star rated GE at Wal-Mart that holds 50 pints a day for $188 and will be picking the remaining one up at the end of the week.

The good news is that my husband finally got most of the shelves assembled for the basement for storage and we realized we had a water problem before storing out of season clothes down there this year. The bad news is that now I have to finish cleaning everything that was down there, and organizing the shelves, and as you can see, there’s lots to organize.