Ordinary Water Damage Prevention Tips

The majority of water damage to your home can be avoided if you just take a few simple steps. They are not as hard as you might think and you will be safeguarding the value of your home for years to come. Repairs for water damage do not typically come cheap unless you do it yourself and use less than ideal building materials, so why not do your best to avoid the problem altogether?

You might not be thinking about the structural integrity of your home when the washing machine or the bath tub overflows, but you probably should be. If you are a forgetful person that allows this to happen a lot more than it probably should, you could actually be doing quite a bit of damage to the floor of your home. Overflows like this should be avoided at all costs, but we are all a little forgetful sometimes.

Something that we also do not typically think about most of the time is whether or not the steam that exists in our kitchens and bathrooms actually has anywhere to go while we are bathing or cooking dinner. The sad fact is that if the steam does not have anywhere to go, it will stick to your walls, ceiling, and cabinets and be completely absorbed by them. When drywall absorbs too much water, the paper on the outside of it can start to sag and eventually, the entire board becomes weakened by it. Combine that with the unsightly appearance of water stains and you have a fair sized problem on your hands. The solution is to install a steam vent into both of these rooms near the source of the steam.

Keep your rain gutters cleaned out every fall. The purpose of the gutters is to collect the water that slides off of your roof when it rains, channel it to downspouts, and eventually down to the ground and away from the foundation of the home. Water that settles around the foundation of your home can be a real problem if you let it happen over years of time, because it can cause the home to start sinking into the ground.

Any leaks that you find in your roof need to be fixed as often as necessary, because a roof leak can ruin not only ceiling drywall, but also the fiberglass insulation that you might have in your attic. This insulation becomes completely useless and heavy when it gets wet and can eventually cause the drywall underneath it to collapse.

Jim Corkern is a writer and promoter of quality
water damage restoration companies and
Dallas Residential Water Damage Restoration Contractors.