Flood Damage Destroys Some, But Not All Wood Flooring Types in Rifle Homes

2/25/2019 (Permalink)

Our team is here for you and your wood floors if a natural disaster has damaged your home.

SERVPRO Explains Residential Flood Damage Restoration Process

There are many variables in the restoration business affecting the methods chosen by SERVPRO technicians when working on a Rifle property. One of these involves the most affected portion of a flooded home, the floor.

When your home in Rifle sustains flood damage, much of your home can become ruined. The flooring that you and your family walk on every day needs to be sturdy, secure, and not suffer any weaknesses. Homes with slab foundations do not suffer the same damage as houses with crawlspaces sustain. The structural integrity of the support framework can weaken when submerged in water. A flood's forcefulness and turbulence can cause additional weakening to not only the floor's support but also other parts of your home's framework.

Carpeting, of course, becomes so saturated with Category 3 water during a flood that both it and its pad require removal. Wood flooring often makes homeowners feel their floors can somehow survive a flooding incident, with little or no lingering effects. However, there are different kinds of wood flooring, and they do not fare equally during a disaster.

Solid wood flooring made of traditional long planks or boards is most likely to survive with relatively little restorative work. We can pull a few boards up and get all of the water removed. Then we can flush it out with an antimicrobial wash which thoroughly eliminates pathogens and keeps your family safe. Drying the area helps keep cupping and crowning of individual boards minimal when done correctly.

Not all wood floors survive because of the way the manufacturer makes them. Solid wood floors are more natural than laminate floors. These not only have glue holding them in place, much like tiles, but glue also holds their patterned pieces together. This glue disintegrates after being saturated for more than a few hours. The same turbulence that can twist a house's frame creates a mess of such pieced-wood flooring.

When our SERVPRO technicians pump water out of a house that contains such flooring, we often find a jumble of different pieces, some completely taken apart like a jigsaw puzzle with a few intact tiles here and there. Putting a floor in such condition back together costs more than it would to replace it with new flooring.

SERVPRO of Garfield & Pitkin Counties wants to get your Parachute, Aspen, or Redstone home restored, so flood damage becomes a thing of the past. Call us at (970) 618-1516, which is our 24-hour emergency services line. We are always ready to help you.

For more on Rifle, click here.