Monday, April 21
 
WESTMINSTER -- Lisa Taylor knows how lucky she was to have her house burn down this weekend.
For more than a year, she and her family have been sick due to a very bad case of black mold inside the walls of her house off Pine Banks Road in Westminster.
Most of that time was spent visiting various doctors, who could not figure out why Taylor and her children were sick.
After discovering the mold, the family moved out.
And after weighing the option of cleaning the mold or rebuilding from the ground up, the family donated the house to the Westminster Fire Department, which burned the structure to the ground this weekend.
"It's been a huge scary time. If we never found it, we all could have gotten very sick," Taylor, 39, said earlier this week, while the empty, toxic structure stood waiting for the weekend fire exercise. "At least now I feel vindicated. I was so sick for so long, and they all thought I was crazy. I'm not nuts. There was a reason I was sick. And it's real."
The small, former hunting camp that the Taylors bought in 2001 would never be considered an mansion, but for the small family, it was a dream come true.
Taylor, who owns a consignment clothes store in Putney, worked with the Rockingham Area Community Trust to help finance the purchase.
"We loved that house," she said. "Physically. Emotionally. Financially. It was an incredible dream."
She first felt sick early in 2007 while she was pregnant.
The doctors thought she was just run down and told her to rest.
But the symptoms got worse, and as the weather warmed up, she felt a heavy pressure in her chest.
She was disoriented, had trouble with her memory and felt dizzy all of the time.
On Memorial Day, she was rushed to the emergency room.
At the same time her children were also becoming ill.
"My youngest would hold his head with both hands and shake his head around," she said. "That's exactly how I felt."
For months, she was on various antibiotics and medicine.
Her child was born in January this year, and the couple decided it was time to think about adding on to the small house.
One day her husband tore into a piece of sheet rock to start the renovations. He was shocked to find thick, black mold throughout the walls.
Everywhere he poked, he found more.
She called her insurance agent, who sent in an environmental air service company to check the house.
They determined that the air and home were dangerous for human habitation.
She moved out with her children the next day and has not been inside since.
The Taylors looked at their insurance policy, and there was a $10,000 cap on mold cleanup.
The environmental air testers and cleaning service already used up about half of that.
"We fell into just about every crack we could," Taylor said.
Once construction workers started looking into the mold issue, it became apparent that the house had more problems.
The subfloor was constructed with particle board and the roof was leaking, allowing water to flow into the walls.
It would have cost almost the same amount of money to attempt to fix it as it would to rebuild, and the family would never know for certain if all of the mold was gone if the house was not destroyed.
So the family instead donated it to the fire department, which used it for a training exercise on Saturday.
She did not watch the fire department burn the house down.
"I didn't want to see it. And I didn't want the kids there," she said.
The Taylors and their three children have been living in a small, two-bedroom apartment in Putney.
The family still has a long way to go.
Their new house is going to be built with a good amount of sweat equity, she said.
They hope to be moved in sometime this summer.
"We're going to try to put it all back together as soon as we can," she said. "It's going to be small, and it's not going to be all finished, but at least maybe we'll be able to go home."
http://www.reformer.com/ci_8999182?source=most_viewed
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