Hello everyone hope you are all well, here is a brief overview,I am recent graduate and have very little experience in home repair but am handy and willing to learn and follow instructions! My parents are getting older and unable to handle some problems so they fall on me. I have called a remodeling company for an estimate but they want over 10k to demo/treat the mold/install a new shower and we simply cannot afford that. I will speak to a mold remediation specialist and see how much their estimate is. We are from So Cal if it matters.Well two years ago the master shower was remodeled and a new prefab shower was installed. To our knowledge the plumbing was left alone and not upgraded. A couple days ago my brother told us about some water damage that appeared on the bottom corners on the outside of the shower. The moulding trim and dry wall around the area swelled and was black along the crevice. I decided to open up one of the mouldings and tear up some of the dry wall only to confirm the damage had been done and it was quite seriously? MOIST and MOLDY. The pictures included show the interior of the wall behind the drywall the studs are soaked!After frantically searching the web, I decided to spray the area with Lysol and use plastic sheeting and duct tape to seal the immediate area I opened. I then placed a box fan blowing air out of a window and sealed the room with the same plastic sheeting and duct tape from the outside to hopefully create a negative airflow. It appears to work nicely, the outside sheet was semi loose and is now being pulled inward taut by the airflow.Imgur Album (Sorry for the bad pictures, this was after covering everything) : http://bit.ly/2GsZN61 can I self treat this mold? I am uncertain of what to do moving forward, I fear that I will have to tear out the shower to see the extent of the damage. If I must tear out the shower how can I do so without spreading the spores?What SHOULD I do moving forward?My plan is to knock down the dry wall surrounding the shower and remove the screws in the flange to see if I can pull apart the shower to see how bad the mold is. Treat the said mold, replace? any wood and pretreat the wood with bora care or kilz? to prevent this from happening again. Then when I lay the shower tray, I intend to use something like a Kerdi system to waterproof the bottom. After that, the plumbing seems easy enough to upgrade from copper to PEX with sharkbite but I don't know if I can trust that behind the walls, should I just hire a plumber to upgrade this plumbing? Is it even necessary? After that I would like to lay drywall and coat it with redgard behind the new prefab shower I will be installing.Is this plan okay? Any recommendations for products or if I am clearly missing a step or doing something wrong?Would love any help or guidance in this matter, thank you all kindly. via /r/DIY http://bit.ly/2TRNHqa
