MOLD!!!

As I mentioned in the previous post, when we got back from our vacation in July, we were greeted with a house full of mold.  Hurrican Alex came through Monterrey and hit pretty hard.  There was about 40 inches of rain that fell within 3 days!  The houses here are made without gutters and the roofs are flat and slightly slanted, so the rain is supposed to run down and fall onto the cement walkway that we have on the side of our house and then run out into the street.  Well, when the wind is blowing really hard, the water doesn't just fall off the roof straight down onto the walkway, it blows the rain back at the sides of our house.  So after a few days of this ridiculous amount of rain and wild wind, our walls started leaking and the rain was seeping through in all the rooms upstairs.

The problem was, we were leaving for vacation the day after we saw a little bit of leakage on our walls.  We didn't think much of it (it really wasn't much when we left).  But when we got back, the rain had stopped, but since our house had been closed up for 1 week without any airing out, there was mold everywhere!  And it had rained even more when we were gone, so the walls were soaked!  One of the walls in our bedroom was completely wet!  This was one of the few times that we've been thankful that our house is made of cement and not out of wood.  The mold was only on the surface of the walls, growing on the paint, so it was easy to clean off with a bleach and water combo. 
I'm going to post a few picture here, but they really don't show how bad it was.  It was hard to capture the mold with the camera.

This is one of the walls in our bedroom

This carseat was inside Sammy's bedroom.  It had crumbs from Emma eating crackers in the car in it, so the mold loved this one!  It was really thriving on the carseat.

The backyard became the dumping area for everything moldy, we did loads and loads of laundry.  We had to scrub everything from toys to wicker laundry baskets with beach!

All I can say is I sure am glad my mom was here to help!  Between Checo, my mom, and I, it took almost a full week to get everything mold free.  That was of course with 2 toddlers needing attention and getting into things too.  So it probably could have been done a lot faster, but that's the joy of having kids!