If your house has suffered water damage, you don’t need to take a dump in your Dockers just because of the horror stories you hear about “water damage”.
I’m going to use my last clients house as an example.
Four level with a few suites in a old wood house, water leaked from the top floor bathroom to the basement for about 1.5 hours, the insurance cost is in the 60+ thousand dollar range, but let me tell you how to do it yourself for much less.
1. first step, cut the water supply. Maybe to the whole house , or if you can find the leak, try to shut off the water supply to the affected area.
2. Soak up the water. Mops, towels, etc will help, but you need a carpet extractor (at least a rug doctor, or call a carpet steam cleaning service to get this done quicker) start at the top, sucking up as much water as you can, move down each floor until you reach the bottom. (if you have a subfloor in the basement, it may need to come up)
(you may need to rip out the underlay under your carpet, pull a corner of the carpet and check if the underlay is soaked, if yes, get rid of it.. even if you dry it, it will produce an odor)
3. If there are walls with moisture behind, cut some holes close to the bottom so that the moisture can escape. create air flow so that the place can dry, you can raise any furniture, and put them on styrofoam blocks, get some high powered fans and the key here is air movement with a dehumidifiers. this is where you save money, because insurance companies will load your house with these and charge you 100 bucks per day per machine and they love to put them a lot longer than needed.
** a good plan here is just buy all you need from craigslist, dehumidifiers and fans are cheaper used and you can resell them when you are done.
4. now the waiting game, you will need to wait until everything is bone dry.
My advice is to pick up a humidity sensor from home depot. if you are super cheap you can wait until the end of the project, pick one up to test and return it.
5. all’s dry, now the basic repair maybe time to do some upgrades, if you have an area prone to leaks consider a flooring that cleans easily. any drywalling, basic repair you should be able to do yourself, if you have time youtube is a great place to look if you are trying your hand at tiling or whatever.
