What Areas of My Lafayette Home Need Cleaning After Water Losses?

7/20/2020 (Permalink)

Did your home experience a water loss event? We’ve got you covered!

Many surfaces and items can show physical damage after a disaster, but our SERVPRO team can offer practical solutions for drying and cleaning. 

Cleaning is one of the vital elements that our professionals provide Lafayette homes after any loss event. With water losses, the damage can spread very quickly to areas beyond where the problem originated. As challenging as this can become for restoration purposes, your home's cleaning and recovery are also made more difficult by these migrating conditions. But the sooner our technicians arrive at a damaged address, the less widespread and devastating loss effects can become. 

Because many tasks make up water cleanup for Lafayette homes, our skilled technicians are involved in every phase of recovery in your house from the initial emergency services when our team first arrives to placing the final touches on a finished product. Dozens of materials and contents can become damaged with even a small water loss incident - and this situation amplifies the more substantial the emergency. Certain materials and areas of the house are more susceptible to damage from migrating water than others, and these include: 

• Flooring Surfaces - Carpeting and hardwood floors are among the most sensitive materials to absorption and water damage. There are specific approaches to recovering saturated flooring, and these vary depending on the type of material affected. 

• Wall Systems - Drywall, wood framing, and insulation are all susceptible to water saturation as well. Because these are common structural elements throughout many homes, our professionals trusted methods of restoring or replacing these materials promptly.

• Contents - Your personal belongings are also in harm's way when migrating water loss effects move through the house. We have multiple strategies for addressing these possessions' restoration and recovery to limit your loss during an already traumatic experience.

How Can Flooring Get Cleaned After a Water Loss? 

Flooring is one of the universally affected materials in homes regardless of the severity of water loss incidents in Lafayette. Because pooling water gathers at the surface of flooring materials first, wood and carpeting absorb standing water to the point of overexposure. This absorption affects the surface layer, but it can also migrate quickly to the underlayment, subflooring, and padding. There are multiple strategies for removing water from these materials, and if that process is successful, these areas of your home still need a thorough cleaning. Carpeting especially can benefit from revitalization to improve the color vibrancy, look, and feel of the fibers. Some of the practices used to accomplish this include: 

• Deluxe Preconditioning & Cleaning 
• Hot Water Extraction 
• Deodorizing Products 

Do Wall Surfaces Need to Get Cleaned as Well? 

Wall systems can absorb water quickly, especially considering that much of your plumbing network is hidden behind drywall and runs along with the framework. Breaches in this plumbing could have disastrous effects for the entirety of this wall structural cavity. While systems like the Injecti-Dry unit can evaporate moisture trapped in these open spaces, the deterioration of drywall and residues left behind from prolonged water exposure must be cleaned and removed. Often, the best approach to complete these efforts are vacuums and cleaning solvents for damaged surfaces not getting removed through controlled demolition. 

How Do Contents in My Home Get Restored? 

Many of your personal belongings can end up in the path of migrating water loss effects. While it is possible to take immediate action when water losses first begin to remove these items from affected areas, there are several instances where this preliminary action is impossible. Restoring and recovering the contents within your home often falls into three potential categories for our responding cleaning technicians. These include: 

• In-House Relocation – Certain circumstances when relocating your belongings can be sufficient to prevent destructive water damage. We choose areas isolated from the path of moving water, such as a garage or second story, to store your possessions until restoration completes safely.

• In-House Recovery Solutions – Cleaning and restoring your belongings on-site is desirable to the alternative but limits the range of corrective actions that we can take with your house's items.

• Pack-Out Procedure – When damage has become too severe for on-site recovery solutions, we can relocate these items to our nearby SERVPRO facility for focused cleaning, deodorization, and a safe storage climate-controlled warehouse. 

Water cleanup can encompass many actions that our technicians must take when we first arrive at your home. Our SERVPRO of Lafayette team can help to provide the most efficient path to make this loss "Like it never even happened." Call us today at (765) 420-0077.

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