If your home is in dire need of some restoration work after being damaged during a recent flood, you might find the advice below to be quite helpful.

Replace your home's saturated insulation materials.

If your house has been flooded, one of the most important things you will need to do is hire a contractor that carries out insulation installation and arrange for them to replace your water-logged insulation as soon as possible. The reason for this is that insulation materials are usually highly absorbent. Because of this, when they are saturated with water after a flood, they will retain that water for a long period of time, and they will not fulfill their purposes sufficiently. If you choose not to replace the wet insulation materials, it could take at least a few months for them to dry out. This could be problematic for two reasons. Firstly, during this time, these wet materials will not be able to insulate your home; this, in turn, could lead to a huge increase in your energy bills, as you would have to use your HVAC system far more frequently to compensate for the ineffective insulation.

Secondly, the wet insulation could encourage the formation of damp and mould in your home. The damp issue could be costly to resolve and may damage any cosmetic updates you make during the restoration process (such as new wallpaper or paint), and the mould could put you and other household members at risk of respiratory problems. Given this, it is essential to replace the wet insulation materials when you are repairing your property.

Dry out the wall cavity before you begin plastering and painting.

Before you replace any flood-damaged wall plaster and start repainting the walls, you should first dry out the wall cavities. This can be done by tearing down the old, saturated wall plaster and then running a large dehumidifier next to the exposed wall cavities. The reason you need to do this is that the wooden structural components inside the wall cavities will probably be wet after the flood. If they are not dried out quickly and thoroughly, they could rot and then collapse, in which case your home could, over the course of the coming months, develop a wide range of serious structural problems.

As such, it is vital to ensure that the wall cavities, and all of the critical structural components housed inside them, are completely dry before you cover them up with plaster and paint.

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