Why We Only Test

We do mold and indoor air quality testing. We do not perform remediation, we do not subcontract it, we do not take referral fees from the companies that do, and we do not keep a paid vendor list. Testing is the entire business.

If you are asking whether you should hire a mold company that also does the cleanup, the honest answer is that you can, plenty of them are competent, and you should understand what you are buying. You are buying an opinion from someone whose revenue depends on that opinion. That does not make the opinion wrong. It makes it unverifiable, which is a different problem and in a dispute it is a worse one.

We chose the other side of that line. This page explains why, and what the law in Washington and Idaho does and does not do about it.

Nobody licenses this work in Washington or Idaho

Start with the fact that most people find surprising.

The Washington State Department of Health states plainly that there are no certification requirements for mold work in Washington, and that anyone can call themselves a mold specialist without training or credentials. Not a loophole, not an oversight anyone is arguing about. That is the published state position. Idaho is the same, and Idaho does not license home inspection either.

So the letters after somebody's name in this market are voluntary. Some are meaningful, awarded by organizations with real coursework and real exams. Some are a weekend and a payment. There is no state board checking, no license to suspend, and no complaint process that ends in anything. Credibility here has to come from three things: whether the person has a financial stake in the finding, what method they use, and whether the report holds up when somebody reads it who was not in the room.

Add one more piece. WAC 308-408C-030 excludes environmental hazards including mold from the Washington home inspection standards of practice, and WAC 308-408C-050 requires every pre-inspection contract to state that the inspection does not investigate mold unless separately agreed in writing. That is why your home inspector wrote "possible microbial growth, recommend further evaluation" and kept walking. It is not evasion. It is the standard they work to.

New York decided this was structural. Washington and Idaho did not.

New York's Labor Law Article 32 makes it illegal for a company that performs a mold assessment on a property to also perform the remediation on that same property. One company cannot sit on both sides of the transaction. Contractors, assessors and remediation workers all have to be licensed, and the assessor writes the remediation plan that somebody else has to execute.

The reasoning behind that statute is worth understanding, because it is not an accusation of fraud. New York concluded that the conflict is structural rather than personal. Structural means no amount of individual honesty resolves it. An assessor who also remediates is not lying when he recommends the work. He genuinely believes it. The trouble is that he was never going to be the person to talk himself out of a job, and neither would you, and neither would we. That is why the law removed the choice instead of trusting the judgment.

Washington and Idaho have no equivalent rule. Here, the same company can inspect your house, tell you it needs six thousand dollars of containment and demolition, perform that work, and then certify its own results as clean. All of that is legal. None of it requires disclosure.

Which means in this market the independence has to be chosen. There is no state making anyone do it, so the only question worth asking a mold company is a simple one: if my samples come back clean, what do you make? For most of them the answer is the inspection fee. For us the answer is the inspection fee, and there is nothing else it could be.

What conflicted testing actually looks like

It is rarely dramatic. Nobody plants spores. What happens is subtler, and it happens in the interpretation, which is the part of a mold report with no fixed rules.

A borderline count becomes "elevated." A single genus at modest levels becomes a whole house concern. A crawlspace that needs a vapor barrier and a dehumidifier becomes one that needs full encapsulation and subfloor demolition. Samples get taken in the four rooms most likely to produce a number and not in the room that would have provided context. The outdoor control gets skipped, so there is no baseline, and every indoor number looks like a finding because there is nothing to compare it to.

And the report ends with a proposal. That is the tell. When the last section of a diagnostic document is a bid, the document was written to produce the bid.

Our reports contain no remediation bid, because we have nothing to bid. You get the problem described in terms any qualified remediator can price, plus what IICRC S520, the industry standard for professional mold remediation, expects for that kind of work. Then you take three bids from whoever you like and can tell whether they match the findings, because the findings came from somebody who is not bidding.

What we will not claim about your health

Independence cuts both directions. It also means we do not get to scare you.

CDC has never established a causal link between Stachybotrys and serious illness. There is no diagnostic test that connects a specific mold in a specific building to a specific person's symptoms. Anyone offering you one is selling something.

What the evidence does support is real and worth acting on: allergic reaction, asthma triggering, and upper respiratory irritation in people who are sensitive, plus serious fungal infection in the severely immunocompromised. If someone in your household is reacting and gets better when they leave the house, that is a legitimate reason to test. If you have read that a mold is going to give you a neurological disease, we are not going to confirm that for you, and we would rather lose the job than pretend.

We also tell people not to test. If you are looking at three square feet of visible growth on a wall you already know is wet, a lab will not tell you anything your eyes have not.

Who runs the company

Jesse Futia owns and operates Spokane Mold Inspection. He does the inspections, he pulls the samples, and he writes the reports. There is no rotating crew and no call center.

The way the work runs is deliberate: a written plan before anyone touches anything, measurements recorded as measured, a report that says what was found and what was not, and a habit of showing up inside the window that was given.

He also owns Spokane Boat Repair, and has spent years in a trade where water gets into places it was not supposed to and the customer wants to know exactly how far it went. That turns out to be most of this job.

Why testing only is a harder business

Worth saying plainly, because someone will assume there is an angle: this model makes less money.

Remediation is where the revenue is. A mold job for a remediation company is a few hundred dollars of inspection and several thousand dollars of work. A mold job for us is $425 and it is over. We make the same amount whether the crawlspace is pristine or catastrophic, and the ceiling on any single job is the sample count.

The tradeoff is that the report is worth something. When a buyer's agent, an adjuster, an attorney or a judge asks who produced this document and what they stood to gain, the answer is a testing company that does not sell cleanup and takes no referral fees from anyone who does. That answer holds up. A report from a company that priced the remediation in the same document does not, no matter how good the fieldwork was.

Frequently asked questions

Do you get paid if I hire a remediation company you mention? No. We take no referral fees in either direction. Ask who does good work here and we will tell you what we have seen, and we make nothing either way.

Are you certified? Neither Washington nor Idaho licenses mold inspection or assessment, so any certification is voluntary and none is state recognized. Ask instead whether every job includes an outdoor control, whether the report includes raw lab data, and what the company makes if your results are clean.

Will you tell a remediation contractor their work failed? Yes, in writing, with the specific reason, and we re-test after correction at the same price. No incentive of ours makes a fail more profitable than a pass, and contractors are right to ask.

Can you also do the cleanup if it turns out to be small? No. Not even the easy ones. The moment we take that work, everything on this page stops being true.

Book an inspection

If you want a number you can defend and an interpretation from someone with no stake in it, that is what this is. Call and describe the situation, and we will tell you honestly whether testing helps.