Does a Wall with Water Damage Need Complete Removal?

7/31/2020 (Permalink)

After your home suffers water damage, you need a team of professionals to assist you with cleanup and restoration efforts. Call us right away!

SERVPRO technicians can perform actions on your structure to save as much as possible from loss in your Frederick home.

A pipe break, supply line leak, or toilet backup all have one thing in common; they need extraction and drying as rapidly as possible to lessen the loss in your Frederick home. When water runs freely in a home, it gets absorbed in a myriad of places such as walls, ceilings, and the subfloor. Instead of taking down an entire wall, the technicians at SERVPRO use their moisture detection equipment to determine how far up into the sheetrock the water wicked. Then they measure several inches above that water line and cut off only the loss portion in a clean, straight line. This enables repairs to occur quickly by fitting in measured and cut sheetrock to fit. 

What Can I Expect to Happen During Water Damage Repair?  

When you need water damage repair in your Frederick home, outsourcing the cleanup and restoration services job is one of the smartest moves you can make. Besides the obvious water extraction and drying of the loss area, there are several actions that the techs perform to assist homeowners in saving more of their property and contents such as:  

• Pack out of articles from the loss area to a secure storage pod, another area of the home or a secure storage unit
• Using flood cuts as needed on walls and ceilings
• Inspection of items for hand cleaning 
• Placement of large, heavy furnishings on blocks for drying in place

Can My Carpet Survive a Water Loss?   

There are several considerations before a carpet undergoes restoration by the SERVPRO techs. The type of water loss and the length of time that passed between the water loss event in the home and the cleanup efforts beginning can make a difference. Not all carpet fibers and backings react to water in the same way, frequently seen issues are:

• Shrinkage
• Bleeding of dyes
• Deterioration of backings and fibers

After extraction of the water, the techs move on to the drying phase. A carpet usually requires more than setting up fans to blow over the tops of the fibers and hope it works. SERVPRO deploys air movers and uses specific drying techniques such as "floating." This involves untacking one side of the carpet and forcing air underneath. This dries the padding and carpet from the bottom up. The techs have comprehensive training and test carpet threads before any cleaning agent or method gets chosen. The testing determines the makeup of the fibers, and this attention to detail always ensures the best outcome.  

In cases where the cleanup begins after 48 hours or the water contains sewage or waste material, the carpet requires disposal as a biohazard. The techs extract the water to make it safer to handle, cut it into strips, and ensure it gets taken away adhering to municipal regulations for handling hazardous waste.

Another commonly seen action during water cleanup is the removal of cabinets and baseboards. Water migrates rapidly, and it can cause a host of issues to the structure if it does not get removed and dried. The technicians remove the toe kicks under cabinets to use their long extractor wands to get to the water. Still, in cases where there is too much, or seepage occurred into the backing wall or the subfloor, the cabinets in bathrooms or kitchens may need a controlled demo to ensure this area gets dried completely. When this happens, many homeowners use the opportunity to upgrade the look of their kitchen or bathroom once the mitigation efforts complete, and the restoration phase moves on to rebuilding. 

Hardwood flooring can have multiple outcomes during water loss restoration. The condition of the boards, as well as if the boards are a composite or actual hardwood, makes a difference. Composite boards can have different cores, including cardboard, which reacts poorly to water and is generally a total loss after exposure to large amounts of moisture. Hardwood floorboards may warp or cup, but that is due to the absorption of moisture. The techs can dry the boards either in place, and if they do not lay flat after drying, in most cases, they can get sanded and refinished, saving the homeowner the cost of replacement. The goal of SERVPRO team members is to save homeowners the cost of replacement through their restoration methods. 

SERVPRO of Frederick County at (301) 662-1747 serves the local community with restorations services for water damage repair. The trained technicians arrive quickly and return your home to its preloss condition.