Fast, professional water damage restoration and mold remediation for Fairfax homes and businesses.
Fairfax sits at the top of the Ross Valley watershed, which means the water that floods San Anselmo comes through here first.
The homes are part of the story. Much of Fairfax was built in the twenties and thirties on narrow hillside lots, and those houses tend to have crawl spaces, original framing, and drainage designed for a different amount of rain than we get now. Mt. Tam pulls down around 56 inches a year and a good share of it runs through this valley.
The tree canopy makes it worse in a way people underestimate. Shade means things stay wet. A crawl space under a Fairfax house can hold damp for weeks after the rain stops, and damp wood in the dark is how you get rot and mold without ever seeing a drop of water inside the house.
We check crawl spaces here as a matter of course, not as an upsell, because that is usually where the problem actually is. Ross is a couple of miles downstream and we work on the same kind of older homes there.
Most of our Fairfax calls fall into three shapes. The first is storm intrusion: heavy rain overwhelms drainage that was designed for a different century, and water comes in at grade or through the crawl space, usually overnight. The second is a plumbing failure in a house where the supply lines are about as old as the additions built around them, and the water finds its way down through the framing. The third, and the one people call about latest, is a slow leak nobody noticed until a musty smell turned up months later. That third one usually has the most damage behind it, because the wood has been wet the entire time.
We approach all three the same way. Find the water, stop the source, then measure what it actually reached before deciding what has to come out. On a Fairfax hillside house that almost always means going under the floor before touching anything upstairs. Downstream in San Anselmo, the same storm produces a different job, because water that has traveled the length of the valley arrives dirtier and carries more of what it picked up along the way.
Drying a 1920s hillside cabin is not the same job as drying a slab house in Novato. Original framing is often full-dimension lumber, which holds more water and gives it up more slowly than modern studs. Additions built across different decades mean the wall cavities are not consistent, so a reading in one room tells you very little about the next. And a narrow lot on a one-lane road makes equipment access a real constraint, which is worth knowing before someone quotes you a two-day timeline.
We meter every affected cavity instead of assuming, run equipment longer where older framing calls for it, and log readings daily so there is a record showing the structure actually reached a dry standard, rather than just feeling dry when the fans came off. If mold has already started, containment goes up before any drying equipment moves air through the house.
