Water Damage Restoration FAQs

Stop the water if you safely can, at the fixture shut-off or the main. Kill power to the affected area at the breaker rather than reaching for a switch in a wet room. Then photograph everything before you move it, because that is the evidence for the claim and it disappears the moment you start tidying. After that, lift what you can off wet flooring and call.

Household fans move air across a surface, which dries the surface and pushes moisture into the air of a closed room where it condenses somewhere else. Lifting soaked rugs and moving furniture off wet floors is genuinely useful. Tearing out flooring before anyone has taken readings is not, because it removes the evidence of how far the water travelled and sometimes removes material that could have been dried.

Given moisture, a food source and Georgia summer humidity, growth can begin within roughly one to two days. That is the reason restoration work is treated as an emergency rather than a scheduled repair — not because the water itself gets worse, but because what follows it does. See mold remediation.

Possibly, and a meter is the only way to know. Surfaces dry first and fastest. Subfloor, the bottom of wall cavities, insulation and framing hold moisture for weeks after a floor looks normal, and in this climate they do not recover unaided. The inspection is free, so there is little reason to guess.

For a clean-water leak in one or two rooms, usually yes, as long as the electrics in the affected area are isolated. For sewage or floodwater it is a different question, because that water is contaminated. If you are unsure, say so when you call and we will tell you plainly what we think.

Extraction should start within hours, and the structure should be under drying equipment inside the first day. The reason is not the water itself but what follows it: given moisture, a food source and Georgia humidity, mould growth can begin within roughly one to two days. Past that point a dry-out turns into a remediation job, which costs more and takes longer.

It depends on how much material is wet, how contaminated the water is, and how many days of equipment the building needs to reach dry standard. Anyone giving you a firm figure over the phone is guessing. What we can do is inspect free, put the scope in writing, and let you compare it against anyone else’s.

Yes. That includes the moisture survey, the thermal camera where it helps, and a written scope of what we would do. There is no obligation and no charge if you decide to do nothing or to use somebody else.

We are not insurance advisers, so the honest answer is that it depends on your policy and the cause. The general pattern is that sudden and accidental water from inside the building — a burst pipe, a failed water heater, an overflowing appliance — is commonly covered, while gradual leaks and water that rises off the ground from outside commonly are not. Ask your carrier specifically about water that rises rather than falls.

To an insurer they are separate things. Water that arrives from inside the building is a homeowners-policy question; water that arrives off the ground from a creek, a storm drain or surface runoff is usually a flood-policy question and often excluded from a standard policy. A single storm can cause both in the same house. Our flood damage page goes through it.

Yes, we bill your insurer directly, and we will confirm how that works with your carrier before work starts rather than after. Either way we document the loss the way a claim needs it: photographs, daily moisture readings, an inventory of anything removed and a written scope.

Generally you are free to choose who does the work, though your policy and your adjuster’s process are the authority on the details, so ask them. Being on a preferred list is a commercial relationship with the insurer rather than a measure of the work.

Most residential jobs run about three to five days on equipment, with monitoring visits in between. Dense materials, plaster, hardwood and anything below grade take longer. The honest version is that the building decides, and the readings tell us when it is finished rather than a schedule.

Because the water you can see is a small fraction of the water in the building. The rest is inside drywall, subfloor, framing and insulation, and it only comes out as the air around it is kept dry enough to pull it. Turning the equipment off early is the single most common reason a job has to be done twice.

It means the affected materials read the same as equivalent unaffected materials elsewhere in the same building. That comparison, rather than how a wall feels, is the definition the industry standard uses, and it is why readings are logged daily rather than judged by eye. See structural drying.

Extraction removes the water you can see — standing water on the floor and water held in carpet and pad — using truck-mounted or portable units. Structural drying removes the water you cannot see: moisture that has already wicked into drywall, subfloor, framing and insulation. Extraction is measured in hours, drying in days, and a building that has been extracted but not dried is the one that cups its floors and grows mold a few weeks later. Most jobs need both, in that order.

Sometimes, and it depends on how long it was wet, what is underneath it and how fast drying started. Hardwood over a slab behaves differently from hardwood over a crawlspace. It is worth attempting to dry rather than replacing on sight, but nobody can promise the outcome before taking readings.

Yes to both. Air movers and dehumidifiers need to run continuously, and they are loud enough to be irritating in a house you are living in. It is temporary, and stopping them mid-job undoes the days already spent.

Keep people and pets out of the affected rooms and avoid tracking it through the rest of the house. If the breaker for that area is safe to reach, switch the power off. Do not run a household wet vac or point a fan at it — both spread contamination through the air. Stop using sinks, showers and toilets on that drain line, photograph what you can from the doorway for the claim, and call so containment can be set up before anything is moved. See sewage cleanup and backup restoration.

Because it is contaminated water rather than dirty water. Porous materials that absorb it — carpet, pad, drywall, insulation — cannot be reliably disinfected once soaked, so they are removed rather than dried. Hard surfaces are cleaned and disinfected, and the area is dried under containment. See sewage cleanup.

No. Mold needs moisture, a food source and time, so the deciding factor is how long the material stayed wet rather than whether it got wet at all. Clean water dried properly within the first day or two usually does not produce a mold problem. Water left in a wall cavity or under flooring for several days usually does, and contaminated water raises the risk further. That is why drying is documented with daily readings instead of judged by touch.

Smell is a reasonable early signal and usually means moisture somewhere you have not looked: a wall cavity, under flooring, in a crawlspace or in attic insulation. It is found with a meter and a camera rather than by opening walls at random, and finding the moisture source matters more than treating the surface, because mold cleaned without drying comes back.

On a small patch of hard, non-porous surface, household cleaning is a reasonable thing to do. On porous material it treats the surface of something whose problem is underneath, and it does nothing at all about the moisture that caused it. If the affected area is large or keeps returning, the moisture source is the actual job.

Yes. Furniture, documents, electronics and personal items can be moved out, cleaned, dried and stored while the property is put back together, and they are inventoried so the insurance side is documented. See contents restoration.

733 Mary St NW in Lilburn, GA 30047, covering nine cities across Gwinnett and DeKalb County: Lilburn, Lawrenceville, Snellville, Norcross, Duluth, Tucker, Stone Mountain, Peachtree Corners and Grayson. The area is deliberately tight, because response time is most of what matters in this trade. See service areas.

Water emergencies do not keep business hours and neither does the phone. Call and you will get a real answer about where the nearest crew is and when they can be with you, rather than a promise made to win the call.

Both the mitigation and the rebuild that follows it — drywall, flooring and finishes. Where a job needs a specialist trade such as roofing, we coordinate the sequence so the interior work does not start before the building is dry and weathertight.

Be careful. Storm chasing is a real problem in this area after big weather. Before signing anything, check for a local address you could actually visit, ask who will be doing the work, and never hand an insurance cheque to someone you met on your doorstep that morning.

Where the water came from, roughly how long it has been there, which rooms are affected, and whether the power in that area is off. Those four answers are enough for us to tell you whether it needs someone tonight or an inspection tomorrow.

Ask us directly and we will tell you exactly what we hold and show you the paperwork before any work starts. That is the answer to expect from any restoration company, including this one. As a general rule, do not accept a verbal yes from anybody: IICRC certification can be checked on the IICRC’s own public register, and a certificate of insurance should arrive from the insurer rather than be printed by the contractor.