Water Damage Tips For the Bathroom and Kitchen

Something most homeowners are aware of is the fact that preventing a kind of damage to the home often takes a lot less effort and money than repairing the damage after it has already been done. It might take some purchased materials and a little bit of diligence on our part to make sure that the rest of the household follows the rules, but in the end it will end up saving you hours of time and hundreds, if not thousands of dollars.

Water damage is one of the most preventable kinds of damage that can occur to a home, unless it is caused by some natural disaster like a hurricane or a flood. There are a number of different areas of your home that you will need to pay attention to in order to keep the cost of repairing this damage down. The areas of the home that are the most exposed to moisture are the ones that you have to go into usually at least twice a day: the kitchen and the bathroom.

A precaution that applies to both areas is simply to make sure that sinks and other water receptacles do not overflow. You may forget the water is running while you are on the phone or doing another household chore, but letting this happen over and over can cause some serious damage to your floor. Another way to prevent floor damage is to make sure that tiles on your bathroom or kitchen floor are not cracked or that the floor is completely water tight.

Installing an exhaust fan in both of these rooms in your home will help prevent damage to the ceiling and upper walls, since the steam will have somewhere to escape to instead of just clinging to the ceiling. If your ceiling becomes discolored from water stains, the only real option here is to paint over it. If a slab of drywall on the ceiling becomes cracked due to absorbing water over a long period of time, you can usually repair this with joint compound and some time repainting it, but if the crack is in the middle and is sizeable, the whole slab needs to be replaced.

Carpet should not be installed in either of these rooms, since there are so many water junctions in both of them. Carpet loves to soak up water and get moldy and when the carpet padding underneath becomes molded, it needs to be taken up and thrown out. Even if you clean the mold from the carpet, if you do not take up the padding underneath, the growth will return.

Dror Klar is a writer and promoter of
Queens Water Removal
and
Elizabeth NJ Wet Basement Flooding Emergency Service Which are Certified IICRC Water damage and mold remediation contractors.