Flooding is one of the most devastating ways to sustain damage to your home. It can destroy memories, belongings, and make the safety of your house debatable. However, ensuring you take the proper steps to recovering from flooding can make all the difference. Save yourself some money and heartache by being proactive in your flood recovery. Here are the 4 steps that will help save your home from permanent ruin.
Assess the Damage
The first step is assessing the damage. This part can be difficult, as it involves coming face to face with the extent of it. Once you’ve salvaged any belongings that fell victim to the flood, it’s time to take stock of what’s happened.
Furniture that has been soaked in flood water needs to be removed from the house and put somewhere to dry. This furniture may be possible to save, with proper drying and decontaminating, but may succumb to mold or rot. It’s best not to use this furniture until it’s successfully recovered.
Find out what areas of the house have gotten water damage. You’ll need to take stock of:
- How high up the damage to the walls goes
- If any areas of the floor feel weak or squishy
- If water has reached any electrical sockets (Do not use any of your home’s electrical until you can confirm it’s not wet)
Get Professional Help
The next step is getting professional help. Recovering from flooding is not a one man – or even one family – job. If there’s still water pooled in your home, you need to have it removed. This is possible to do with a shop-vac, but is easier and more efficient to do with a pool vacuum.
Have someone come out and assess the damage from a professional viewpoint. You know what’s obvious, but a professional will spot the less noticeable things. They’ll also know how to check for moisture in your insulation, how extensive flooring damage is, whether or not your drywall will need to be replaced or simply repaired, and more.
Replace Ruined Flooring
More often than not, recovering from flooding will mean replacing ruined flooring. It’s rare for any floor to survive a serious flood. Carpet gets soaked and cannot be dried enough to prevent mold. Hardwood coating is damaged and the wood underneath can become soggy or rotted through, making it hazardous to walk on.
Premier Group Contractors does flooring replacement for the GTA. If you’re in Toronto, we’ll be happy to help in the flood recovery process by ensuring your floors are safe to traverse. If that means putting down clean carpeting or tearing out old hardwood to replace it, we can make it happen.
The important thing is not minimizing what damage has been done to your floors. These are one of the most important parts of your house structure. Even if the damage is tolerable to look at, if water has made it to your subfloor, it could completely rot the floor structure of your home without you realizing until much later.
Follow Up on Damage
And, lastly, the most important step to recovering from flooding is following up on damage later. Moisture is incredibly insidious. It can get into cracks and begin growing mold and rot in tight spaces without your knowledge.
2-6 months after the flood, have an inspector out to your house to check for any remaining damage. If mold has begun to grow, this will give it enough time to come out into the open, and give you enough time to cut it off at the source. It’s not infrequent that people recover from a flood only for it to come back to haunt them years down the line in the form of structural rot or mold growth. Keep your home safe with some extra cautionary measures.
