Winter can be a tough time for homeowners, there are a lot of things that can go wrong when the weather goes below freezing. There are several preventative maintenance that homeowners can do to help pipes from freezing. One of the more common freeze breaks that we find is the water spigot. In the winter time, always make sure that the garden hose is not attached, and having a cover on it. Sometimes you can do all the right things to prevent pipes from freezing and they’ll break due to poor insulation, or other situations. One of our recent jobs, flooded due to the above explanation. They had water spraying all over their office in the basement.
We inspected the damage and found that the water had travelled to the hallway and to the bathroom that shared the wall with the office. The entire floor on the office was soaked, so we lifted the carpet up, and pulled all the wet pad to be trashed. We were worried about the drywall being damaged on the bathroom side since we found water on the floor. We pulled baseboards all around that room to be able to dry any wet drywall. Once the baseboard was pulled, we saw that it was a floating wall. Floating walls are where they hang the framing from the floor joist and anchor it to the foundation so it does not sit on the foundation. The drywall typically do not go all the way to the ground and have an inch of space .
We found the floating wall, and did not find any wet drywall on the shared wall with the bathroom. We finished the drywall demo on the exterior wall, and part of the soffit ceiling that was already partially falling down. We set the drying equipment down for another couple of days and dried them out, and turned it over to our rebuild side to put them back together.