24H Mold Inspection of Laguna Beach

The blocks around Forest and Ocean avenues and up into North Laguna hold the city's oldest housing — 1920s and 1930s board-and-batten and Craftsman beach cottages on small, tightly packed lots, many carrying historic designation and remodeled repeatedly rather than replaced. Original single-wall construction, shallow crawl spaces, and additions layered on across ninety years leave a lot of concealed roof-to-wall and deck-to-wall transitions. Because the marine layer sits over the village through much of late spring and summer, north-facing walls and the narrow gaps between houses barely dry between fogs, so wood siding, sills, and the underside of low decks stay damp far longer than they would a few miles inland.

Bluebird Canyon is the neighborhood that failed twice — in 1978 and again in June 2005 — when saturated ground moved and took homes with it. These slopes sit on old landslide material over marine sedimentary bedrock, and the fixes that followed, including dewatering wells, horizontal drains, subdrains, and tiered retaining walls, exist to keep groundwater from building up inside the hillside. That same perched water is what turns up indoors: in below-grade rooms and garages cut into the slope, along uphill-facing walls, and at the joints where an addition meets original construction. When a drain silts up or a wall's waterproofing ages out, the moisture arrives from uphill rather than from the roof.

The canyon running inland along the 133 is a narrow, steep-walled corridor with a creek down the middle, a floor that has flooded repeatedly — in 1998 and again in December 2010, when water closed the road and ran through canyon properties — and a mix of artist studios, live-work buildings, older cottages, and outbuildings never built to modern envelope standards. The canyon walls cut direct sun to a few hours a day and hold cool, damp air near the floor, so slabs, crawl spaces, and detached structures dry slowly year-round. Workshops, converted garages, and storage buildings are usually where growth turns up here, more often than the main house.

The ridge neighborhoods — Top of the World, Mystic Hills, and Arch Beach Heights — took the worst of the October 1993 firestorm, which destroyed more than four hundred homes in the city. Much of what stands there now was rebuilt in the mid-1990s: stucco over tight, well-sealed framing on steep graded pads, which traps interior humidity whenever bath and kitchen ventilation is undersized or vents into the attic. The ridge also catches the full force of wind-driven rain off the ocean, pushing water at stucco cracks, window flanges, and skylights from angles a calm-weather roof never sees, while the graded slopes below send runoff toward the downhill homes.

Emerald Bay, Irvine Cove, Three Arch Bay, Victoria Beach, and the bluff-top blocks of South Laguna sit in constant salt spray and near-permanent humidity, and the houses are built to open toward it — walls of glass, sliding door tracks, and waterproof-coated decks laid directly over living space. Salt shortens the life of flashing, fasteners, and door hardware far faster than it does inland, and a deck coating at the end of its service life leaks into the ceiling below long before it looks worn out. Many of these are second homes closed up for months at a stretch, so a slow leak or stagnant humid air can run unwatched through a whole season.