"I said I'd be happy to do it but that because this was my house, I'd establish the ground rules."
The result is a "mold-safe model home." Completed in September, it was built in conjunction with the Partnership for Advancing Technology in Housing (PATH), which will monitor how the house performs over time. Products and techniques used were chosen based on his research and PATH's input, Perry said. With his approval, PATH brought some manufacturers into the project.
Mold-prevention strategies are considered prohibitively expensive by a lot of builders. Perry begs to disagree, though he declined to put a price tag on the 3,000-square-foot, two-story structure.
"In a house costing a quarter of a million dollars, paperless drywall represents one-half of 1 percent, or $1,250," Perry said.
"I spent $2,500 on a commode and two light fixtures for one of the bathrooms. Is $1,250 too much to invest in an effort to get mold coverage put back into homeowners' insurance policies?"
Mold thrives most often in moist conditions, which - combined with a nutrient source such as soil, dust, and products that, like conventional drywall, contain cellulose or other dead organic matter - provide the ideal environment for colonization.
Though indoor-mold problems have always existed, they were aggravated by changes in home-construction techniques wrought by the energy crisis of the 1970s. Creation of energy-efficient houses in which the air inside is not regularly exchanged has been linked by the American Lung Association to a dramatic increase in asthma cases in the last three decades.
