Do I Have Black Mold Or Just Some Sort Of Black Stain?
So I’m a 20 year old college guy. I used to live with 2 other roommates, until I forced them to move out because of how messy they were. Our kitchen and living room are connected and covered with some (crappy) thin carpet. I mean it’s about an inch thick, maybe. Anyways, there are stains all over the carpet. Some are from before we moved in, some are there by our own means. It was clean when we moved in, but it turned out that it was just “barely” clean. After a week, the carpet looked absolutely awful in the areas that had the most traffic. Anyways, I’m about to move out of town and so the landlord decides to lay some new carpet and tile in the kitchen. He asked me to pull up this old crummy carpet for him and he’d cut my rent the last month I was here, so of course I did. In doing so, I’ve discovered two different spots that I believe is essentially a colony of black mold. Both spots lay underneath one of the stains that was in the carpet.
My main inquiry here is this: does it make sense for black mold to grow under carpet, even in a location that has had plenty of foot traffic? The stain was, admittedly, never properly cleaned…ever. It may have been kind of wiped up, but when people are drunk (idiots) they tend to not do a thorough job at cleaning up their messes. The stain (on the carpet) is probably about…4 months old (both.) Maybe more.
Should I be concerned? I’ve sprayed both 409 and Glass cleaner w/ ammonia on it, because I freaked out. I don’t really feel like dying because my landlord and idiot roommates. What should I look for in black mold, even the symptoms black mold may cause?