In article ,
AlexW writes:
Interesting ... how does it get into ones house?

Spores from the fruiting bodies of another infestation,
blowing around as dust. It's probably pointless trying
to avoid the spores as there will be enough infestations
around that the spores will get everywhere anyway. The
trick is not to have the right situation for them to
germinate anywhere.

Bringing infested timber in to the house would be
another route, but that's probably relatively rare.

I have a very old property, damp and previously poorly maintained ... I
was surprised (and err relieved) not to find any when we gutted it a few
years back.

I found only one tiny bit in mine. A small piece of wood
(probably less than 1"x1"x2") screwed to the wall under
the bath had obviously been kept damp by water leaking
between the bath and the wall. It caught dry rot. The
hyphae grew out of it across the wall like a 2-dimentional
tree. However, they are blind and had set off in a direction
where there was no timber for some distance. They had used
up all the cellulose in the small wooden block without
finding another source of cellulose, so the dry rot died
by itself. There was no evidence this growth ever produced
a fruiting body (which would have left the spores around as
a brown dust for a few feet radius).

I saw some large infestations some 25 years ago when I was
first looking to buy a house. I started by looking at houses
which were in a bad state (read cheap). In a poor photo
(there was no photo, but imagine a poor photo), one had what
might have looked like a shag-pile lined celler, but was
actually a dry rot lined celler, with hyphae looking like
small tree trunks coming up through the ground floor and
heading off into the first floor. (I didn't buy it, and
actually I didn't dare walk around much of it. I had this
terrible urge to have a shower as soon as I got back home,
as though it might infest me;-)

--
Andrew Gabriel