Accidents happen as a part of our daily lives. We forget to turn the stove off, or the oven. Sometimes you turn the sink on, and run off to do a quick task and come to find that your sink has overflowed. CMS Restoration got a call recently that an accidental overflow happened. The homeowners were not sure how much water overflowed and called us to see how much damaged occurred. We arrived on site to find most of the laundry floor and closet adjoining was affected. We went downstairs to inspect how much of the ceiling got wet, and found 3 different rooms were affected but not severely.
When the ceiling is wet, the first thing we check and ask if the ceiling are insulated. If it is uninsulated, we can dry the ceiling in place with setting our drying equipment pointed upwards. We cut a 1 foot by 1 foot access hole in the ceiling, and directed plastic into it. Now we can direct our equipment straight into the ceiling to where it’s wet. In the utility room, we found that it was directly underneath the laundry room. We put drying equipment pointed upwards to the laundry room to dry the tile above.
Tile flooring is difficult to dry, airflow does not travel through the tile and the cement backerboard. If we are able to get heated airflow beneath the tile and above it, we might be able to dry it. But there is no guarantee that we will be able to dry the tile before mold growth starts. We monitored the tile floor for a couple days and we were not able to make any progress despite all the equipment we had on it. The only option now was to demo the tile floor in order to dry the subfloor. The ceiling in the basement were all able to get dried up without any extra demolition.
With the tile torn up, we found wet subflooring and we were able to dry the subfloor the next day. There was no concern of mold growth anywhere, and we confirmed that all the affected areas are now dry. We turned it over to the rebuild portion of our company to patch in the drywall we had taken, and to put al new flooring in the laundry room. We work closely with the homeowners to pick and choose what materials they want and schedule our subcontractors to come in and do the work.