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Mold Testing in Jamaica Plain, MA
Stony Brook still runs through Jamaica Plain. It runs inside a masonry conduit now, buried in the late 1800s after it flooded the valley once too often. The old streambed is still the low line of the neighborhood: the ground along Washington Street and Amory Street, past Jackson Square, Stony Brook station and Forest Hills. Cellars on that bottom sit close to a high water table, so a sample taken off a foundation wall down there is answering a groundwater question before it answers anything else.
Uphill it is a different house with a different problem. Sumner Hill and the Pondside blocks around Jamaica Pond hold large wood-frame Victorians from the 1880s and 1890s, with deep wrap porches, slate roofs full of valleys and granite-block cellars cut into the slope. Jamaica Pond is a kettle hole left behind by the ice. The Olmsted parkland around it keeps that ground open. Water reaches those houses mostly from above: off a slate valley whose flashing has gone, out of a gutter a nor'easter overfilled, down a porch column into the sill.
One clarification about this page, because it is trying to help you spend well. We hold no lab and swab nothing. Bay State Mold Inspection sets your description of the house next to an independent inspector who works this stretch of the Emerald Necklace. The sample, the result and the bill are all theirs.
Does it matter which side of the old brook valley you live on?
It decides which sample is worth taking. On the valley floor near Amory Street and toward Forest Hills the moisture is constant and low. A cellar wall never gets under a certain dampness, mineral efflorescence blooms along the mortar joints and the musty note is strongest in warm weather, when humid air meets cold masonry. The useful question there is whether the growth on the wall is live or the dried record of an old wet season.
Up on Sumner Hill the moisture is episodic. It arrives with a storm, soaks a ceiling or a wall cavity, then stops. What you want to know is whether anything took hold inside that cavity while it was wet, which means a different sample taken in a different place.
Why do the Pondside Victorians hide their leaks so well?
Because the decorative parts of the roof are the parts that fail. A house of that era carries dormers, cross gables, a turret and long valleys, so there are dozens of seams where two roof planes meet. Slate sheds water beautifully until the flashing in a valley goes. Then it delivers a whole season of wind-driven rain into one wall cavity while the rest of the house stays perfectly dry.
Old plaster holds a lot of water before it shows a mark. By the time something appears on a ceiling, the framing back there has been wet through several storms already. The porches add a quieter version of the same thing. A porch roof ties into the house wall, the deck has settled to slope back toward the building and snow banks against the sill for weeks at a time. Then it melts into the joint.
When is a lab result worth paying for here?
When the answer would change what you do next. Three cases come up repeatedly in this neighborhood. You are buying on the low ground and the seller calls the cellar dampness normal for the block, which it may honestly be. You have finished part of a Victorian's cellar or attic and want to know whether an earlier repair held. Somebody in the house has been coughing since the heating came on and there is nothing to see anywhere.
Outside cases like those, put the money into finding water rather than naming spores. Growth you can already watch spreading across a wall is coming out either way. The thing you still would not know is where it is being fed from.