Fast, professional water damage restoration and mold remediation for Novato homes and businesses.
Novato is mostly flat, and flat is its own problem. Water that gets into a single-story ranch does not run off anywhere. It spreads.
Most of the housing stock here is post-war ranch on a slab, so when a supply line fails, the water runs sideways under the flooring and wicks up into the bottom of the drywall and the base of the studs. By the time you notice a soft baseboard in the hallway, it has usually traveled well past the room you found it in. We map how far it actually went before setting a single fan, because drying three rooms when the water reached five is how mold problems start.
Out toward Novato Creek and the low ground near the bay, the other risk is the creek backing up in a heavy winter. That water is dirty, and it gets handled differently than a clean break under a sink.
Call us and we will come look at it. San Rafael is fifteen minutes down 101 and we cover the same problems there.
A lot of Novato's post-war ranch houses sit on a slab, and the instinct when water gets under the flooring is to assume the whole floor has to come up. It usually doesn't. For most floor coverings we can run mat drying or injection drying, which pulls air or a vacuum directly against the slab through the existing floor rather than removing it first. That only works if we get to it early enough and the covering itself wasn't damaged beyond saving, which is part of why speed matters more than people expect on a slab job. We check moisture in the slab itself over several days rather than pulling equipment the moment the surface feels dry, since a slab can hold water well after everything on top of it tests dry. Structural drying readings from that process go straight into the documentation for your claim.
Baseboard and drywall don't dry the way structural lumber does, and once they've wicked water up from a wet slab, there's a point past which drying them in place stops making sense. We measure how high the water traveled up the wall, and if drywall has been wet long enough to lose its structural integrity or shows swelling, we make a flood cut, removing material a few inches above the highest point the water reached rather than guessing at a round number like two feet. That keeps the repair to what actually needs replacing instead of over-demoing a wall that only got wet at the bottom. Baseboard almost always comes off regardless, since it traps water against the wall and floor even after everything else reads dry.
