Maintenance No One Knows They Need: Home Restoration Summarized
Home restoration may seem, on the surface, to be fairly simple. You do maintenance on the air ducts, vents, furnace, maybe some plumbing, etc. A lot of services individually start there and end there, but home restoration as a whole is so much more. You may be hiring someone to do just one service, or many different unique and fundamentally unrelated maintenance actions that are each equally complicated.
Home restoration is a holistic service for tuning up your home. Maybe you’re planning on selling, or just want the home to feel good as new again. Let’s talk about some of the services that a company specializing in restoration might offer, as well as some examples of when home restoration is a valid avenue for repair, as well as the opposite.
Water Damage
Repairing water degradation or damage is an intimidating prospect for many. This isn’t necessarily due to the logical complexity of such a process. But, try entering a carpeted room that’s been soaked for days and try to stay in for an hour without the smell affecting you. That isn’t recommended though, since the smell of mold could point toward harmful molds (black mold) that can have serious effects on one’s health.
So, water damage restoration is an extremely important part of restoring a house. A lot of the time, doing it right can involve tearing out, replacing, or sanitizing carpet, walls, ceilings, and any furniture that is moldy. For more specifics, click here to see a great summary of water damage and how to deal with it. Leave these processes to the professionals for the most part though, as doing it wrong could end with one or more rooms with permanent damage.
Air Ducts and Filtration
Most people, other than changing out the furnace filter, have no clue how air enters and exits their home. This is understandable since systems like this can weave through the entire home and never need any significant maintenance not connected to another system. That isn’t to say, though, that you can’t improve quality of life and air quality by having this serviced. Dust isn’t just on surfaces, it is also airborne and where there’s air it’s bound to follow, sticking to ducts and vents.
A lot of home restoration involves checking up on and cleaning fringe systems like this. If you’re not fully remodeling but need someone to come in and clean up a mess in one or two rooms, then restoration is likely for you.
The Big Question and Examples
Other than long-term maintenance, home restoration occupies a very niche market. This is more than a deep clean but less than a total remodeling. So, this raises a very important question: when do you need a service like this one? Let’s go over a few situations where service on this scale might be necessary, as well as some examples where it is not.
Bob discovers after buying his home that the basement floods, and it floods badly. He thinks the previous owners may have known but can’t verify that so he doesn’t have an avenue to make them pay. Yet, he still needs to find a way to fix the flooding problem and thinks a crack in a window well might be the cause. In addition to this, he knows definitively there is mold, or perhaps mildew of some kind, in the carpet all around the basement.
This is a serious problem and worthy of home restoration, especially if the entire basement is suspect for water damage or mold. The type of mold, the procedures for cleaning, as well as anything else that is distinctly necessary for safety reasons are all possible reasons to call someone. The nature of the problem makes it perfect for this service. It is big, specific, but hard to pin down.
Services For You
In the summer, the American south gets dreadfully hot. Not as hot as a genuinely tropical country, but depending on your area it can be genuinely sweltering and so humid you feel like you could wear the air around you. Unfortunately for the example customer, their air conditioning has stopped running.
Also unfortunately for them, potentially, full-on restoration isn’t really a valid option here. Though calling someone may lead you down the line to a specialist, what you need is in the end someone who works specifically with AC units. Most Southern restoration services know the pain of summer, though, and will work to make sure you’re properly taken care of in the end.
Really, these types of services are generalists that can make arrangements for all manner of different services to fix whatever it is you need. Don’t go calling for them to fix something you know they don’t or won’t, but for many people starting the call can lead directly, though slowly, to the proper fix.
Abbreviated Conclusions
For those who don’t want to read the entire article or the full number of services a home restoration company can provide (which you can probably find on their website or by calling), here’s a brief summary. If you have a set of different problems, maybe interlinked but maybe not, that you need to be done in a concise but non-intrusive manner, maybe try these services. They are generalists by their nature, calling people with experts on hand that can arrange for whatever you need to be done.
Really, a lot of companies have lost the idea that when someone calls, you should give them recommendations on where to go even if you don’t perform that specific service. This is sales, but sales are performed by someone who knows what they’re talking about. If you want to revive that sort of phone call, or just get right to the point, maybe call one of these companies. If you have a single problem, specific leak, or damage that you want to be fixed at minimum cost and with the minimum possible level of intrusion on other areas of the house, it’s probably best if you stayed away from this type of service (though consider them should the problem broaden).
