Water Damage

Shut the water off to the whole house. Shut off power to the affected areas if you can do it safely. Then call us.

While you wait, take your own photos and video for your records, and move anything valuable out of the wet areas. Stay safe doing it — nothing in the house is worth a shock or a fall.

The most expensive mistake we see is waiting to decide. Water damage is about speed: every hour it sits raises the chance of bacterial growth and mold taking hold, and raises what the job ends up costing.

We start by documenting the damage on site with Encircle. Every photograph is time-stamped and location-stamped, so if a claim is made the original condition of the property is on record and cannot be argued about later.

Our technicians then trace the water with moisture meters and thermal cameras to find where it has migrated, which is almost never only where you can see it.

Then we write a scope of work and a preliminary estimate on the spot. That is the part most restoration companies do not do: you see what needs doing and what it costs before anything starts, rather than finding out afterwards. Once you have signed it off, we set equipment and begin.

We come back every day, take fresh readings, photograph the progress into the same record, and move equipment to where it is doing the most good.

Drying finishes when the structure reaches its dry standard — and that number is specific to your property and to each material in it, not a figure out of a book. A technician takes a reading on drywall the water never reached; if that reads 50, then 50 is the target for the drywall that did get wet. We dry until it gets there. If a material stops making progress toward it, that material comes out.

A straightforward single-room loss is often dry in about four days. A larger one takes longer, and the readings decide it rather than the calendar.

This is a good climate to dry a building in. Our humidity is low enough that outside air is rarely working against us, which is not true in most of the country.

Winter is the harder season, and it is temperature rather than damp that makes it so. We bring in extra heat — including thermal heat exchangers — to raise the surface temperature of wet materials, because warm materials give up water far faster than cold ones.

Even through monsoon weeks the humidity indoors stays manageable, with extra dehumidification where a particular property needs it.

One local thing worth knowing: a swamp cooler works against a drying job, because it puts moisture into the house by design. If your home is drying out, run it on vent only or leave it off until we are finished. It is an easy fix, and it is the single most common reason a Four Corners house dries more slowly than it should.

It depends on the category of the water, how far it traveled and how much of the structure it reached. A single room can run from a few hundred dollars to around five thousand.

The estimate you sign is built for your situation rather than taken off a price list, so you are paying for the work your house actually needs and nothing else.

We document the damage, write the preliminary scope and price, and submit it to your adjuster when you give us their details. From there we handle whatever the carrier needs from our side and keep you in the loop.

Two things worth knowing, because they are the ones people get wrong most often. You choose who does the work on your home — a carrier can recommend a company, and it cannot withhold your payment because you picked someone else. And it is the coverage written in your policy that governs your claim, not a guideline or a preference.

Claims move at the pace of the adjuster handling them, and that varies by person and by carrier. The way to stay ahead of it is to let the mitigation work start straight away so the damage stops growing while the paperwork catches up.

We work for you. We work with your carrier, but you are the client.

What happens to contents depends on the loss and on what you are comfortable with. Sometimes we bring portable storage to the property and pack things into it; sometimes we clean them where they are. Those are conversations between you, your adjuster and the technician doing the work.

You can often stay in the house. When the whole home is affected we usually suggest a couple of nights elsewhere so we can get a large part of the work done at once, and when the kitchen is involved we normally recommend relocating until it is remediated.

Cory Eddy is an owner of M&R and a second-generation restoration professional who grew up in the trade, certified by the IICRC in Water Damage Restoration, Applied Structural Drying and Applied Microbial Remediation. Brendon Charley is certified in Water Damage Restoration and Applied Structural Drying.

Behind them is equipment we own rather than rent: more than 200 air movers, 50 dehumidifiers, 30 air scrubbers, thermal imaging cameras and moisture meters, thermal heat exchangers, mat systems for drying hardwood and tile in place, insulation vacuums, a truck-mounted extraction system, and access to a septic truck for crawlspace work.

The phone is staffed around the clock, with water damage technicians on call for emergency extraction and stabilization.

Once the structure is dry, we hand you to a contractor we trust to put the building back.