First 3 Things To Do When Your Home Is Damaged By Water
ShareIf your home has just been damaged by water, here are the first three things that you are going to want to do to protect yourself and your house.
#1 Deal With The Electricity
The first thing that you should do is find the electrical breaker box and turn off all the breakers for the outlets that lead to the rooms that were affected by water damage. Just to be safe, turn off the power to the nearby rooms as well just in case the water got into the walls and the nearby electrical outlets.
Then go into the water damaged rooms and remove all electrical items that you can and unplug any electronics. For example, if you have a television that is above the water damage line, unplug and move it. You don't want these items to get turned on accidentally and your best chance at saving your expensive electrical items is by removing them as quickly as possible from the water damaged area.
#2 Remove Valuable Items
Second you need to remove any items that are of particular value to you from the room, even if that means fishing them out of the water. Start by removing items that can easily fall apart, such as papers, photos, books and other similar fragile items. Then move onto the bigger and sturdier items that you want to get out of the water or out of the harm of being damaged by water.
You are going to need to clean up these items later; right now, just focus on getting them out of the water and somewhere safe.
#3 Remove The Water
The third thing that you need to do is work on removing the water from the area. You can use buckets to bail out the water if there is a lot of it. You can use a wet/dry vacuum to suck up and remove the water. You can use pumps to pump the water out of the space. You can even use mops and buckets. No matter what you use, the goal is to remove as much water as you possible can.
Do everything that you can to create a safe environment and to remove valuable items out of the water while you wait for a water damage company to show up and assist you with your clean-up project. If possible, you can start trying to get rid of the water as well.