Heh, this would have been super helpful last summer as were nearing completion on the construction of our new home. We have an elliptical arch in our front portico that the carpenter was having trouble getting right...
I'm a little surprised that your architect didn't include layout information for the carpenters in their drawings. The whole point of the drawings is to enable the builder to faithfully reproduce the design, after all.
I'm not sure if it applies to the original commenter's situation but in many places, especially in the US, you don't need an architect to build a new home beyond rubber stamping some documents on file with the town, and sometimes that's not even required.
It's one of the reasons a lot of residential development, especially suburban development of the last 40 years, looks as bad as it does. Little to no architectural thought goes into many new homes beyond what's easiest to build.
I was kind of hoping that if you have an elliptical (or false elliptical) arch that there was an architect involved at some point.
I grew up in an area with a lot of corn field subdivisions and McMansions. They tend to have a lot of volume/floor space and incredibly poor detailing. On the one hand, I find it hard to believe that anyone building such a big, cheap (at least in the details sense) home on spec would include an elliptical arch. On the other hand, the kinds of contractors that put them up would likely be the kind that struggled to execute such a design element.
I say this having just been very humbled putting up crown in a bathroom. People tell me it looks great, and I reply that it had sure better considering the two weeks of evenings that went into putting it up!
I've found that absurd, gibberish rooflines, and weird, uneven jutting-out bits everywhere, plus garages shoved way out in front (?WHY?) do make the houses look bigger, which may be desirable for a builder.
I've shopped for houses a lot, and after "training" mostly on typical '80s+ suburban houses, noticed that when looking at older houses with saner, calmer designs, I'd have to add 500-1,000(!)sqft to my first-impression guesses at their size to get close, while I'd gotten pretty good at guessing the "McMansion" and mini-McMansion style. The older designs don't look as big, at the same size.
Machine Learning Mastery (https://machinelearningmastery.com) provides code examples for many of the popular models. For me, seeing and writing code has been helpful in understanding how things work and makes it easier to put new developments in context.
Highly unlikely. 802.11x lives in the 2.4GHz and 5.8GHz ranges which are outside of the stated range of the tinySA mentioned in the article. Occasionally radios will work outside of the stated range with a bit of hacking, but 950MHz to 2.4GHz is pretty far. Software-defined radios (SDRs) like the HackRF One or BladeRF cover the 2.4GHz and 5.8GHz frequency ranges, but at a higher cost.
[edit: clarify the frequencies of the HackRF and BladeRF]
[edit2: Apparently the tinySA Ultra can cover the higher frequencies in certain configurations]
I don't know of anything, but will buy if one exists. Closest thing that is out there are Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) detectors, some of the expensive ones detect particles as small as mold but the IAQ detectors can't tell you that it is mold, only that particulates of a certain size are present.
If you are concerned about mold being a cause, there are couple of urine tests for mycotoxins that were super helpful for us understanding the mysterious illness in our family.
You need to find a functional health practitioner, and be willing to try many different practitioners. It took us several tries to find a practitioner who was willing to test for mold. If you aren't familiar, functional practitioners focus on the root cause of medical issues rather than just symptoms. We found success with a functional nurse practitioner, though they capped out and we have moved on.
You may be able to find ways to get the tests directly (not through a health practitioner) if that ends up being the path you need. They are not cheap and not typically covered by insurance, but we found being mysteriously ill was way more expensive in the long run than paying for tests. May your path to healing be a straight one!
Unfortunately, urine mycotoxin testing is not diagnostically significant.
"Even if we are presented with impeccable lab
results from ELISA and thorough use of
standard differential diagnosis (we aren’t),
based on world-wide control data, and a robust
literature on CIRS, there is no basis to ascribe
any diagnostic significance to urine mycotoxin
testing"
https://www.survivingmold.com/Publications/Urinary_mycotoxin...
I recognize urine mycotoxin tests are potentially controversial, but these tests were very diagnostically significant for us and our mold journey. The mycotoxins that were off the charts in our tests matched the mold that was eventually found in our house (after multiple mold inspectors missed it).
This area is definitely more "gray" than implied by your comment. I have tremendous respect for Shoemaker, but there are some gaps in that paper that did not appear to address how our practitioner used those tests for us. Many of the studies mentioned in the meta-review focus on the presence or absence of mycotoxins not the measured amount. Also, our practitioner used the test "backwards" compared to procedure outlines in the review paper. Our practitioner used the test before we had any evidence that we lived in a water-damaged building, whereas the paper is specifically focused on determining cause of illness after exposure to a water-damaged building.
I thought the tests were controversial because mycotoxins is also contained in some foods. Most research papers don’t use a reference group that isn’t affected by mold.
This! One of the best solutions to prevent mold is to improve energy efficiency. There are an increasing number of grant programs and Housing improvement initiatives available, but still those improvements are out of reach for a lot of people. We live in the Southeast US which is incredibly humid and so many houses have issues.
> Afaik mold is only a big topic because of lawyers seeing a nice liability and the media a spooky story.
Unfortunately, mold is also a growing health concern for a sizable portion of the population. My family got severely ill from a moldy house, and it is taking us years to fully recover. The longer we have been aware the more and more folks we find are dealing with something similar.
The EPA Guide is a great start, but in our experience lacks some situational nuance that might increase its helpfulness. Each person reacts differently mold, some folks are just more sensitive than others. There are no federal standards for mold, either for allowable amounts in your home or guidelines for construction. So depending on your health response you may in fact need to go crazy tearing apart your house to hunt for mold.
After talking with ~30 different mold remediators, inspectors, remodeling contractors, etc. We got ~30 different responses for possible causes for mold in our our home. Ultimately, the cost to fix the true sources of mold in our home (due the sources being related to construction practices around the foundation) was equivalent to new construction. We ended up tearing down the moldy house. We're hoping to move into our new house late next spring!
I have a similar story, but in our case it was a rental house in the Bay Area. It's been 3 years and who knows how many temporary places to live, and we're still not even close to recovery.
We ended up with the realization that the rental housing stock in the Bay Area are all very old, usually not well maintained and depending on the area, very likely to have or have had water damage, the only thing we could do to get into newly built housing, was to rent an apartment.
The amount of bad information and advise is pretty staggering – if you're adversely reacting to the environment you're in, the best thing you can do is remove yourself from it, then accept that you may never be able to return to it.
Anyway, this all sounds very familiar and you're welcome to reach out to me at <hn-name>@icloud.com – and that goes for anyone else dealing with similar stuff.
If you're living in a house without active water issues (roof leak, foundation leak, etc), proper filtration/ventilation/de-humidification, and are still having reactions to mold; it's probably best to just move (like you found out). No need to tear apart the current house.
If you need supreme indoor air quality, that'd take the following:
- A fairly air tight building envelope
- Proper WRB and insulation strategy (exterior+interior in many places) for your climate (including basement) to prevent condensation
- Adequate continuous ventilation/filtration
Which is not feasible for most housing stock in the USA. You might be able to keep the framing, plumping/electrical, and foundation (if you're lucky). Framing is relatively cheap compared to the rest of the house.
What kind of issues did you have with the foundation?
There’s many individual damage symptoms, but typically humidity somehow enters through the walls of the basement, making them damp/wet and thereby leading to mould infestation.
The expensive but thorough solution is to dig around the foundation and install a vertical damp-proof course around the outside walls. The walls would additionally require drying and depending on building material removing the old plaster and re-plastering.
If a concrete floor is damp, the culprit would be a crack which can be sealed with special injected sealants.
If it’s an older type of floor, it may need to be replaced with concrete.
How did the basement infest the rest of the house, just regular air transfer or did humidity rise through the walls and caused infestation in the above-ground rooms?
Some people charge insane prices. I can't believe a foundation issue would cost as much as new construction. It's not that hard to put in a French drain, even if the house needs to be cribbed up due to structural issues.
I know, seems crazy from the outside looking in, but nothing was particularly outrageously priced (and we did get several estimates from all sorts of people). To be fair, it wasn't just the foundation. Because of the mold in the basement the rest of the house also became contaminated and needed to be remediated (and my family is now super sensitive). I will also note that this during COVID so prices were somewhat higher than they are now. Believe me we did not set out to tear down our house, but that ended up being the best way to address the issues with the old house.
I have a Ph.D. and am not in academia. The higher degree opens up opportunities for challenging positions, but you will probably need to show basic SWE capabilities also
