Under a white label that reads “We are moving,” @themomchats starts with a chair. In a reel posted on September 14, she talks straight into the camera in front of a wall of white cabinets, wiping her eyes more than once, while captions type themselves across the bottom of the screen. The first ones go back to shopping for her son’s first Christmas, when the family “didn’t have a ton of extra” money and the purchase “Felt like a really big” deal.
She calls it an “uncertain and scary time,” and says “this silly chair popped up.” The caption that follows is complete on screen: “And I knew I needed to get that for his first Christmas.” There was a second chair too, “and one for his sister.”
The chairs ended up in storage. “Chairs were everywhere,” the captions read. “And chairs had been in our” basement. A caption beginning “Last December” leads into the mold, and she names what turned up: “There was stachybotrys,” then “and Aspergillus penicillium.”
“We had it tested,” she says. She goes on, “Can still see the mold on,” then “The high spore counts,” then “Cloth in that area.” After that comes the line the rest of the video hangs on: “and I remember we tossed the chairs.”
By her account that was the moment the decision was made. It was not what had already worn on the family: “Not all the cracking, all the people in and out,” and not “the expensive litigation.” It “Was throwing his first Christmas chair” away. She does not say in the reel who the litigation involves or where it stands.
She then widens from one chair to everything else in the house. “We realized how much of their childhood we were gonna continue to throw” away, she says, “And trying to fight for this house,” and “to try and fix” it.
The sentence she lands on appears whole: “Walking away from this house means that we can actually serve their childhood.” Then: “And so we’re moving.” She is smiling in the final seconds. Her written caption says, “There’s a lot about this next chapter that feels overwhelming, but there’s also something really hopeful about finding some peace. I’m going to have a lot to share along the way.”
If a Mold Test Comes Back on a Basement Full of Keepsakes
Her order of events was find, test, discard. Before anything in an affected area goes out the door, photograph each item where it sits and again up close, and write down what it is and when you got it. She mentions litigation, and a dated photo list of what was thrown away is a record that cannot be rebuilt once the items are gone.
Keep the test report with that list. By her account, hers identified the molds by name and showed high spore counts. Ask whoever does the testing to put in writing which rooms the results cover, and ask about fabric and upholstered pieces by name, since cloth is what her captions point to.
For the few things that matter most, ask one more question before tossing them: can any part that is not fabric be cleaned and kept? If the answer is no, take the best photograph you can, with the child it belonged to if possible. In her telling, the chair was the loss that decided things.
Anything sentimental that has not been affected should come out of the basement the same day the results arrive. Move it to an upper floor, in closed bins and off the ground, and label each bin with the date it was moved.
Her way of deciding whether to keep fighting for a house can be put on paper. She lists three costs: the damage (“the cracking”), the disruption (“all the people in and out”) and the legal bills (“the expensive litigation”). She then adds a fourth, the things the family keeps having to throw away, and for her that fourth line settled it.
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