Water Damage Recovery By Fxyourwaterdamage.com

When Hurricane Irene hit our house in Vermont we were stunned at the speed and severity of the storm. We spent the next two years doing water damage recovery. Actually, it is an ongoing process because we keep discovering more damaged household items.

Some items, such as photo albums and heirloom linens can never be replaced. We tried all kinds of things to salvage family photos, but the process is extremely time consuming and not very effective. In the end, many pictures were simply lost forever.

It was similar with old needlepoint works done by grandmothers in decades past. These were labors of love and carefully passed down from mother to daughter; now they are in the landfill or turned into ash from one of the many bonfires.

Getting started is difficult, especially if you have suffered extensive damage. The first thing to consider is safety: water, propane, fuel oil and electrical lines are top priority. Once these are safe and secure you can begin the next step: clean up.

Clean up needs to happen quickly to avoid excessive mold and mildew. Once things start growing where they shouldn’t it is difficult to remedy. Black mold in particular can cause serious health problems and every effort should be made to avoid letting it start growing.

 In the initial stages of cleanup people tend to be careful and work cautiously, but after a few days of pulling things out of the mud you become a little hardened and more things end up in the scrap heap than you would expect.

This tendency to be over protective is understandable, but can become a real hindrance to the clean up effort. Everyone involved should have a similar standard to help determine what stays and what goes. For example: “Have I used this in the past year?” “Does this thing bring me joy, or is it a burdensome thing that only sits around collecting dust?” These can be difficult questions, but they must be asked.

Once the site is safe and cleaned up you can begin assessing the actual damage. It may be a simple matter of replacing some sheetrock, or maybe some flooring needs replacing. Or it may be that the house is a total loss and needs to be demolished and rebuilt.

In our case we decided to keep the main structure of the house and renovate it with flood proofing in mind. This was a huge undertaking, and quite expensive.

The original house had a dirt cellar, rank with mildew and full of old varmint bones. Nasty place that only served as a place to keep the old fuel oil tank. This was completely redone.

Now the basement has a poured concrete floor, proper lighting and ventilation. It is warm in the winter and cool in the summer, never has that nasty basement odor and no varmints live there!

Add this basement required raising the house up 4 feet, which also serves as a safety feature in the event of another catastrophic flood such as Irene. We added a huge stone wall on two sides of the house and planted shrubs to break up the water flow, if it ever reached high enough.

In the end, it was a successful water damage recovery operation, but I would not wish this on anyone. The amount of work was staggering and had it not been for the commun would never happened.