A Few Guaranteed Ways To Prevent Water Damage

Water damage occurs to your home in a number of different ways and the truth is, most of them are entirely preventable. The only cases that water damage is unpreventable are when it is caused by a natural disaster such as a flood or a hurricane or when a water leak is hidden inside a wall.

There are two rooms in your home that are particularly at risk for water damage and these are the kitchen and the bathroom, since there is a large amount of water that passes through these rooms every day, especially if you have a number of family members living with you. The bathroom is the most at risk of these two rooms, though, and you should make taking care of it a priority.

The grout and caulking around your bathroom floor should be completely sealed. This means it should not be loose or have any parts missing at all if you are going to have a waterproof bathroom floor. If you can jump in the center of your bathroom and the whole room shakes or the floor feels weak, then you might want to consider taking a look at the joists underneath the house in this area to see if they are weak. If they are, then replacing them is the only real option that you have if you do not want the whole room to fall through the floor.

Another problem with water damage concerns the ceiling. Steam from your bath or shower floats upward and has nowhere to go, so it becomes absorbed by the drywall. Eventually, the tape that hides the seams of the drywall will start to loose its adhesive properties and start to detach itself from the walls. The drywall starts to crack after this happens, sometimes toward the edges and sometimes in the middle. This can happen in the kitchen or bathroom, but especially the bathroom, since kitchens usually have exhaust fans installed to help with this problem. Have an exhaust vent installed in your bathroom, since this is usually required by most building codes, especially if the room does not have a window. It is not very expensive and it might take you half a day to install by yourself.

Try to keep spills of water in the kitchen and bathroom cleaned up as much as possible and keep the plumbing underneath the sinks inspected regularly for drips. The bottom of the cabinet under the sink should be covered in a plastic material to keep any dripping water from rotting the wood.

Killing black Mold While Going Green

While there are a large number of commercial chemicals that are on the market and advertised to kill mold, there are not too many options for those of us who are interested in “going green”. Many people are jumping onto the going green band wagon recently, exchanging the chemical cleaners and pesticide treated foods for something more natural and un-tampered with. There are natural ways to kill mold, though, that will not harm human beings, even if they are few and far between. You can find these in health food stores or even just your local grocery store, but be prepared to pay more than you would for the chemical alternatives.

The first one is the least expensive of the three ways, but you may not be pleased with the way your house smells immediately after you treat it. This calls for distilled white vinegar for a number of reasons. It is colorless and will not stain anything that you put it on and it will kill somewhere around 82 percent of molds that can live in your house. Even though it does not kill all kinds of mold, it will kill most that grows indoors. Pour the vinegar into a spray bottle, spray it on the mold and do not rinse. The smell will go away in a while and the mold should be dead.

Another way that you can kill mold is to use tea tree oil. This is a little bit expensive, but if you are bent on going green, this is one of the only 3 known ways to go. It will kill more types of mold than vinegar and leaves no odor. Take about two teaspoons of tea tree oil and mix it with two cups of water. Put this in a spray bottle, mix the two by shaking it up, and spray areas of mold with it. Again, do not rinse. This has an indefinite shelf life.

Grapefruit seed extract works in a similar way and you need to mix around 20 drops of this with two cups of water in the same way that you mixed up the tea tree oil. Spray it on molded areas and like the other two methods, do not rinse it off.

None of these methods should pose any health threat to you or the people in your home, unless you or they have an allergy to one of these items.