Floor Water Damage
While indoor flooring is meant to resist all manner of outside forces, open thing that can be incredibly damaging to most floor types is water. While wood and carpet both do a decent job at water resistance, they are both susceptible to heavy water damage. If water is soaking underneath your floor, it can cause floorboards to push up, warp or detonate. In carpeted flooring, it can wear out the glue underneath your carpet and, if it sits for too long, it can lead to mold growth in the fibers. For this reason, preventing water damage is very important. However, if you have water damage, we can have!
Prevention
If you have wooden flooring, the best prevention option os to make sure that your floors are treated with a polyurethane coating. This finish is specifically meant to make sure that your wood floors are protected against water. Keeping this finish in a good state is paramount to water damage prevention. If you have carpet installed, there isn’t much you can do to protect against water leaks. Artificial carpet will handle water better, but unfortunately, carpet is harder to protect against water than wooden flooring is.
Signs of Damage
If you have carpeted flooring, it will be easy to tell if you have some sort of water damage, because, when you step down on the carpet, you will most likely be able to feel water sitting underneath it. With wooden floors, this can be a bit harder. Wood floors usually don’t show water damage right away and, for this reason, water damage slowly build ups. If you do notice that your floorboards are starting to crown in certain places, or that bubbled in your hardwood are forming, this can be a really good sign that something is hurting your floors in a big way.
Stop Water Leaks
Before we do any sort of replacement or refinishing, the number one thing to do is to figure out where water is coming from. There are three main types of water leaks that could be happening. The first is that water is dripping from your ceiling, into your floor below. Another type of leak is water coming in through the walls of your house, which is usually related to improper grading of your property. The third water leak can be attributed to appliances leaking or weather lines that are not properly connected.
Repair Options
Once we’ve found the leak and fixed it, the next step is to actually have your floors fixed. With carpeting, this usually means bringing in heavy duty dryers to try and get the water out. If we can’t dry the carpets, whole sections may need to be torn up and replace. In wood flooring, there are usually more options. We can try and dry them out as well, however, if that doesn’t work we can talk about refinishing or replacing. No matter which option you choose, we promise that we can get your floors looking and functioning like new.
