Flood Damage to Your Home After You Just Got New Flooring Is Devastating, Let Us Help!

6/19/2020 (Permalink)

SERVPRO of East Central Austin Professionals are available 24 hours/7 days a week and will respond quickly to a restoration emergency.

Restoring New Hardwood Floors After A Flood

You probably spent many hours deciding upon just the perfect hardwood and spent a pretty penny on its purchase and installation when remodeling your home. Now, flooding from a severe storm has saturated the newly laid flooring!! You are probably panicking, wondering what is going to happen next. Well, SERVPRO of East Central Austin can assess the damage and do our best to dry out the flooring. Once the floor and its support are dried properly, under the watchful eyes of our highly qualified technicians we will assess any damage to the integrity of the wood and take steps to restore it to its preloss condition, including refinishing if necessary, or we might have to replace it.

Hardwood can be restored if moisture is found, as long as standing water is removed quickly. We pride ourselves on a fast reply time and a quick damage assessment depending on the extent of the damage once on site. Industrial strength water extractors will make removing the obvious moisture a fairly quick process. Then our technicians will set up a proper balance of air movers and dehumidifiers to dry the wood, based upon training received upon employment and renewed at regular intervals.

Careful attention must be paid to any vapor barriers, including those on subfloors and the actual finish of the hardwood. SERVPRO technicians are trained to identify these as barriers to proper drying. Air movers may be placed so that the flow is at least partially under the planks to perform efficient drying. In some cases, we may strategically pierce the finish to dry from the top. Only after the moisture content of the hardwood, properly measured by our staff, is down to 12 percent and the subflooring is 10 percent it is safe to assume the floor is dry enough to refinish. As the wood continues to dry, we will look for cupping, a result of too much water on the top, or crowning, a more serious problem when the subflooring was too wet for too long. Cupping can be sanded out in many cases, but crowning may require the replacement of affected pieces of wood. Once repairs are completed, we will refinish the wood to match the surrounding areas.

Contact SERVPRO of East Central Austin at (512) 420-9886 to arrange for a flooring water damage specialist to visit and design an effective restoration plan.