Fast, professional water damage restoration and mold remediation for Ross homes and businesses.
Ross has the oldest and most valuable homes in the Ross Valley, and it sits in the same flood zone as San Anselmo and Fairfax.
That combination is the whole job here. When water gets into a house with original woodwork, wide plank floors, plaster walls, and finishes nobody makes anymore, drying it fast is not the goal. Drying it fast is what cracks paneling and splits trim. We slow the schedule down, run lower heat, and monitor over more days, because the point is to bring the material back rather than replace it.
Plaster is worth calling out specifically. It holds water far longer than drywall and it reads dry on the surface long before it actually is. We meter it rather than trust it.
The other thing we do here is document heavily. On a house like this the insurance conversation is a real conversation, and photographs and daily moisture readings are what keep it from becoming an argument. San Anselmo is right next door and shares the same creek.
Ross houses have floors worth saving, and speed is how they get lost. Water swells wood across the width of each board, so the edges rise and the centers sit low. That is cupping, and it looks permanent when it is not. Left alone under proper drying, most of it relaxes back over a period of weeks as the wood releases what it took on. The mistake is refinishing during that window, because a floor sanded while it is still moving will not stay flat once it finishes moving. Specialty mats that draw moisture up through the surface shorten the wait. Nothing eliminates it. We dry, we log readings, and we hand the floor off to whoever refinishes it with a number rather than an opinion about whether it is ready. On original wide plank and inlay work, that is what decides between restoration and replacement. Downstream in Larkspur the same sequence applies to newer floors.
On a Ross job the contents are often worth more than the building repair, and they need their own plan rather than being moved aside. Wet items come first, since paper, textiles and finished furniture degrade on a faster clock than the structure does. Dry items in the work zone get inventoried, photographed and moved out before equipment arrives, because a dehumidifier running for a week in a room of antique furniture is its own kind of damage. Rapid humidity drops crack old wood and loosen joints. So in some rooms we deliberately hold the drying rate below what the structure alone could take. Fine art, instruments and anything genuinely irreplaceable go to a conservator, and we will say so rather than take it on. Mold remediation in a contents-heavy house runs the same order.
