Mold

On Friday, I was in the mood to bake. So I decided to make some chocolate chip cookies. This was an adventure on its own because finding chocolate chips is IMPOSSIBLE. So I bought a few chocolate candy bars and chopped them up to make the cookies. As I was getting other ingredients I needed from the pantry, I realized we had some water damage. Several of the shelves were damp and a few even had mold growing in the corners. So I pulled everything out of the cabinet to clean. I bleached every surface of the pantry. It was quite disgusting. I assumed that the damage was from the excessive rain we've been getting. I figured we had a slight leak that was aggravated by the storms.

The next day, after everything was cleaned and replaced, I go to pull out some cereal and step in a puddle of water. Only, it hadn’t rained in 48 hours! The best thing we can figure out is that one of our upstairs neighbors must have some leaking pipes (none of our pipes go through that part of the wall). The walls in the pantry are wet to the touch and there are drip marks in various places. We dont think the water is coming from the roof.

The horrible part is that we have a fan running 24/7 to help dry out the moisture, and it’s not working. Less than 24 hours after the bleach, our mold has returned, and we wake up to a small puddle every morning!

I've put everything in plastic bags or on Pyrex dishes to prevent them from touching the shelves. There is NO other option for food storage. We only have two other cabinets (one under the sink with cleaners and one beside the stove with all the dishes). So living with this problem and the process of getting it fixed is not going to be fun. And to make things harder, the city shuts down at Christmas time. This is summer vacation for most people. They leave the city and go visit family. So there may not be anyone available to find and repair the problem until after the New Year! Pray that God will send a miracle in one form or another to help us with our leak.

The only good thing that came from this was the batch of cookies I made. And they were very good if I do say so myself!