Colorado is a dry climate. It might rain for a couple of hours in the afternoon but we generally don’t get long periods of rain. Until my mold-avoiding family moves into our renovated Airstream, of course. Last week Colorado decided to rain more in a week than it has in the last couple of months. We moved in and it pretty much started raining. Day 1 we noticed the front windows were leaking a tiny bit. Day 3 the rain was intense, the leaks were now causing moisture on our floors. Our flooring is Marmoleum and it’s not flush up against the walls so there are a few places we can see the sub-floor. We had wet sub-floor in 4 different places. This is pretty much a nightmare for us.
You have about 48 hours to get things dried out before mold sets-in. Now, not only do we have leaks coming in from 4 different spots in the windows, we found 9 spots total that were wet.
And the rain continued.
We’re doing all our laundry and dishes outside. Doing dishes out in the rain was interesting. Laundry? We did a load one morning that it was “supposed” to be dry out. We have to dry our clothes outside so we don’t get excess moisture indoors. It rained and our clothes took 2 days to dry out. We have small wardrobes (hoping to grow them as we have more financial ability) and virtually no cold-weather clothing yet. My son ran out of clothes before the rain-streak was over and was wearing shorts & a t-shirt in 40-degree weather. I was left wearing a dress. We’ve had quite the start.
The encouraging part about all this cold and rain is that I only have had one Raynaud’s flare in the grocery store in the produce area.
The rain was frustrating. It was frustrating from a life needs to go on standpoint and from a mold avoidance standpoint. I also feel awful if I don’t get enough sun and the rain was making all the outdoor molds bloom.
However, the rain also helped us realize how incredible God’s timing has been for everything.
As we were heat blasting & fanning everything to dry it out (we got it up to about 95 degrees in this little place and dried it up! If you can dry it out within 48 hours you won’t usually get mold) we started seeing the bigger picture.
All summer we tried to move in. We’d decided a while ago we would only move in the absolute bare minimum necessities to make sure there weren’t any major issues. It was a DRY summer. In fact, there has been more rain in the last week than we had almost the entire summer. If we’d have moved in any earlier, we would have assumed everything was ok, moved everything in and let our guards down thinking we were a-ok. Then the rain would have come and we would have had all our stuff in so we probably wouldn’t have noticed the leaks on the flooring and had mold within a week.
While it felt dreary, scary and frustrating to have rain and leaks, we are so beyond grateful God moved us in when He did. The timing seemed like a struggle and it was a rough way to start out, but it’s perfect in the end!
The last few days have been dry and warm. We do a load of laundry every morning and it’s dry shortly after lunch. It will be a few more weeks before we move the rest of our things in. We are seeking a long-term place to park & will wait to move things in until we get settled somewhere. We need to be sure all the sealing jobs my hubby did last week will hold ok after we move again. We think the leaks happened in the first place because the seals on the windows came loose after driving to the first campground. He’s sealed them from the inside and outside so we should be good & really can’t be too safe at this point.
If you are local and have a lead on somewhere we can park please let us know.
We’ve been trying to relocate out of this area since I feel so lousy here. For some reason, God is keeping us here for the time being. We can’t afford campground fees so we need to find something soon. Just as the timing for moving in and rain was perfect, we trust we’ll get a long-term parking solution in perfect timing too.
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