Fast, professional water damage restoration and mold remediation for Mill Valley homes and businesses.
Mill Valley splits into two water problems depending on where you sit.
On the hillsides above town, the water comes from outside the house. Steep lots shed rain fast, and if a drain is plugged or a foundation seal has failed, it ends up in the crawl space. Crawl spaces are the part of the house nobody looks at, so the wood down there can stay damp for months and start to rot before anyone notices a smell in the floor above.
Down in Tam Valley and the low ground along Richardson Bay, it works the other way. King tides back up through the storm drains, and a big tide during a storm week puts water into garages and ground floors that have never taken water before.
Both start the same way, which is finding out how wet the framing actually is rather than how wet it looks. We check it with meters and keep checking as we dry. Sausalito is right down the hill and deals with the same combination of hillside runoff and bay water.
Mold remediation is one of the calls we get most often out of Mill Valley, and the crawl space is almost always where it starts. Hillside lots shed water toward the foundation, and once a seal fails or a drain backs up, water sits under the floor where nobody is looking. Wood down there can stay damp for weeks, and mold doesn't need standing water to take hold, just consistent moisture and something to feed on, which a crawl space provides by default. By the time anyone smells something in the room above, the growth has usually been established for a while. We treat any water event under a Mill Valley house as a mold risk from day one rather than waiting to see if a smell shows up later, because catching it during the drying phase is a fraction of the cost and disruption of a full remediation after the fact.
Once mold is confirmed, the first step isn't cleaning, it's containment. We seal off the affected area with plastic sheeting and run a negative air machine that pulls air out through a HEPA filter, which keeps spores from spreading into the rest of the house while the work happens. Everyone working inside the containment wears respiratory protection, and nothing comes out of that space until it's been cleaned or bagged. Only after containment is up do we start removing the affected material and treating what stays. Skipping straight to cleaning without containment is how a problem in one crawl space corner ends up as spores in the HVAC system and the upstairs bedrooms. Tiburon sees a similar amount of crawl-space mold work, mostly for the same hillside drainage reasons.
