Racine Sun

Ashley Rutkowski laments the way her family’s dream home turned into a nightmare.

“I’m struggling on a daily basis to cook and do laundry and raise a family,” Rutkowski told WTMJ.com. “Some days I can’t get out of bed.”

She said the family’s struggles stem from the black mold now consuming much of their Racine County family home, leaving them in a fight for their health and financial stability.

“The mold was everywhere,” Rutkowski said. “We had to demolish our floors. It was in layers of plywood, sandwiched there. We never would have even known it was in there.”

Rutkowski remembers things weren’t always this way for her husband and two young children. Eight years ago, the family purchased the home as a fixer-upper, she told WTMJ. The home was on a quiet street lined with blossoming trees. With the home in foreclosure, the bank did not require a formal home inspection, only a cursory inspection that deemed the home ‘livable.’

A few years later, Rutkowski became ill, followed by her husband, Mike, WTMJ reported.

As the full body pains and chronic fatigue persisted, doctors struggled to diagnose Rutkowski’s condition, she said.

“Initially doctors couldn’t find anything,” she said. “We did CTs, scans and every test imaginable. I thought I was going crazy.”

Over time, doctors diagnosed her with acute mold toxicity, Rutkowski said. Around the same time, her kids came down with raging fevers, unrelenting nausea, and debilitating fatigue. Their 5-year-old son, Nolan, has Down Syndrome. He is so sick that he’s been pulled from school.

“When he had his mold testing done, his levels were higher than any of ours,” Rutkowski said. “I felt hopeless.”

With the family on the hook for at least $30,000 in medical bills, Rutkowski now worries about the growing debt, she said. They still owe at least $217,000 on their mortgage, despite the home being claimed as a total loss, with nothing covered by the family’s homeowner’s insurance. They now live in a small camper looking out a concrete slab where their dream home once stood.

“We have nowhere else to go,” Rutkowski said. “I feel like we are taking a part of kid’s childhood away.”

According to WTMJ, mold toxicity thrives on stress, and Rutkowski insists she feels it every day as the stress and worries pile up.

“All the work we put into that house, watching it get torn down and thrown into the dumpster, all that money we spent to fix up the house of our dreams; it’s just gone,” she said.

A GoFundMe page has been set up to help the family rebuild their home, according to the report. Contractors who would like to help the Rutkowski’s can email John Mercure at john.mercure@wtmj.com.