Water damage in an old Denver home

Imagine a beautiful old home in Denver, built over 120 years ago with a toilet supply line leaking on the third floor.

PuroClean Disaster Response was called to this home in Denver.   The leak started on the top floor in a bathroom.  The toilet supply line ruptured and started spraying water all over that top floor bath. Since no one was home the water ran unchecked for some time. The water flooded the bathroom, ran down through the bathroom floor to the kitchen ceiling below.  It then flooded the kitchen and ran through the kitchen floor to the basement rooms below.  All 3 floors of the home were affected, and, given the age of this home was no ordinary water damage job.  As you can imagine, the house has been updated and remodeled over time, so there were a variety of materials to deal with in order to properly dry out this house!  Drying this home would be a challenge.

We had carpet and hardwood floors that were saturated, walls both plaster on lathe and drywall were soaked, ceilings again plaster and some drywall were collapsing and soaked.  Trim work was wet, cabinets and countertops; all wet.   When we arrive on site the water was still running so first priority was to get a plumber out to shut off the water and replace the supply line to the toilet.  Once the plumber stopped the flow of water we could start drying the home. We had to remove the toilet and the bath vanity and sink, basically the entire bathroom needed to be demolished, floors, walls and cabinets were all saturated and needed to be dried.

Before we could remove any of the collapsed ceilings or cut into the walls we had to have the entire home tested for asbestos and lead.  We got lucky in that the testing found no asbestos in the areas we were working so we could get to work removing the collapsed drywall and ceilings and drying all that remained.  As it turned out, the walls were very difficult to dry walls in the kitchen were layers of drywall over plaster and the plaster would not dry.  The walls had to be taken out down to the studs in order to ensure that mold did not have an opportunity to grow in the walls.

As the bathroom was taken apart, it became obvious that the supply line had been leaking for a quite a while before fully rupturing and mold had grown in the bathroom.  We set up containment and started HEPA air scrubbers to contain the mold to the bath area while we completed the mold remediation.  We want to ensure that as the homeowners put their house back together, they could do so knowing that their home was safe from further mold growth.  We used air movers to dry what we could in place and air scrubbers to keep any mold spores from moving through the home.  We took out the drywall/plaster that we needed to, and dried what we could to dry standard.  Some carpet and flooring was removed as well.

This home was tricky due to the multiple levels affected and some of the materials we ran into as we mitigated the water damage.  It took several days to get the home to dry out and to keep as much as we could of the home intact.  As it was a historic house, we wanted to ensure that what we did would make the home livable and safe, but keep the integrity of the structure and heritage of the house intact.

Another interesting job for Puroclean Disaster Response