Nearly every mold removal job we take in Cedar Park traces back to a leak that never announced itself. The oldest streets here, through Buttercup Creek and off Cypress Creek Road, went in around the late 1980s and early 1990s, and the supply piping in that generation of house has had thirty-odd years to corrode from the inside out. Where galvanized line is still in service it rarely bursts. It weeps, a few ounces an hour, into the cavity behind a vanity or a laundry wall.
That is the worst way a house can leak. Nothing reaches the floor to alarm anyone, the painted face of the drywall stays dry to the touch, and behind it the paper on the board and the facing on the batt stay wet straight through a Central Texas summer. Growth needs a wet surface, something organic to feed on, and time. A slow weep inside a closed-up, air-conditioned slab house hands it all three, and the first sign most homeowners get is a smell that follows them from room to room.
Containment in a house you are still living in
Nobody moves out for this. We seal the affected room in poly, run a negative air machine ducted out a window so the work zone stops sharing air with the rest of the house, and get HEPA scrubbers running before a blade touches drywall. Everything porous the growth has colonized leaves bagged, through a step-off at the doorway, instead of being carried down your hallway. Studs and plates that are still solid get vacuumed with a HEPA unit and treated rather than replaced. Then the cavity itself gets air movers and a dehumidifier and a reading every day until the wood matches a wall the water never reached. We work one zone at a time, so a kitchen and a bathroom stay in service while the remediation runs.
- Meter and thermal camera first, so the cut line follows the water
- Poly containment under negative air, exhausted outside, HEPA scrubbers throughout
- Colonized drywall, batt, and pad bagged out through a step-off at the door
- The weeping line behind it dried to a reading, not to the touch

Carriers generally treat the weep and what grew behind it as a single loss on a single claim. Before the poly goes up we shoot the wall as we found it, and every room we touch gets a dated reading, so the file your adjuster opens matches the house. Which parts of that the policy pays for is not something we get a vote on. Call (512) 271-5099 and describe what you are smelling before anybody opens that wall.










