STORM FLOODING What To Do After Your Home Floods

Foreign. I'm coming on live. I'm Cheryl Seco, and this is an unplanned live video. But I'm coming on to talk about flooding. And I'm. My heart goes out to all of you that are suffering and being challenged by the recent floods from. I don't know if it's a cyclone, hurricane, whatever. It was Debbie. And it struck me that my sister, one of my sisters, was also affected and her house was flooding. And she reached out to call me right away. And it struck me that I probably should share what I told her with other people because there are some things that you can do and that you should do that I would do in that situation, which is so, so unfortunate. So it can happen anywhere. It can happen to anyone for sure. So. So if your home has been flooded, even if the water has receded, if water has come up and damaged any upholstered furniture, any rugs, if any, anything that is upholstered or carpeting rugs, and it was underwater under flood water, then it needs to get out of your house and it needs. It's not savable. Don't save it. So my, my sister has some really nice leather couches, and it looked like the water didn't go that high. Butter couch is actually wet, so it must have cabinets. The boxes of cabinets are going to need to go in most cases, in every case. I can't think of any cases when they wouldn't. So if they've been underwater physically for any length of time at all, you. Maybe you can reach out to your contractors or installers for things like the countertops and whatnot. Maybe you can ask and see if they can take the countertop off and reinstall it on new boxes. You may be able to reuse the doors if the water wasn't high enough to damage the doors, or maybe there's just some doors you're going to have to replace and some you don't if you feel like you can match them. So that would be the other thing that has to go. So anything that is storing water currently, this could be your mattresses, too. So if your mattress was, you know, even if it was the box spring only, then the box spring only needs to go. But anything that has gotten physically wet from flood water needs to go in the garbage, at least get it out of your house and put it on your driveway or out at the street. So, so those are two things that I told her. And then the other thing that's so important in a flood or post flood is drying things Out. And so she was asking me about her garage that had also gotten flooded, had a lot of stuff in it that was eventually going to be gone through, and decided what to do with it, Whether it was from her kids or other people in her family that had left it at her house. She was asked about opening the garage door or closing garage door. I And I did think that it was probably best to open it, open the garage door in that case. So you're not trapping damp materials, but that the other best thing to do if you're in one of those situations with a ton of stuff in the garage is create as much air movement as you can. So if there's a door in the back and in the garage door in the front, open both. So you get air moving through, create aisles of space between piles, if you have a lot of piles, so that you can get as much air movement as possible. Until you can get around to getting whatever's wet outside, it's probably going to go in a dumpster. If there's anything that you want to save, maybe clothes, possibly, that could be actually washed in a washing machine and dried completely in a machine that maybe you can save. And I definitely would be looking for pictures and special memorabilia. If you're not sure if you can save it. What I usually recommend people do is, or what I did for myself was I put. When we once had a basement flood in a rental house or in a house that we were living in temporarily, and I put some of my drawings that had gotten wet that I wasn't ready to do anything with. I put them in Ziploc bags in the freezer then, so that I could address them later, basically. So that would be what you could do with special things. Until you can figure out if you can find someone, it won't grow below freezing. Now, in my sister's case, her refrigerator was trash, too, because it was underwater. So her refrigerator and freezer, she doesn't have one. The other pieces of equipment that I would recommend people have is a fan. So. And I know by looking at Amazon to try to see if I could buy her some fans that those are going to be in. A lot of people know this trick. Moving air dries faster than stagnant air. So in your house, I would keep. If your air conditioning is still working, I'd keep it on. But you. I would be adding a lot of dehumidifiers, as many as you can. Usually dehumidifiers are sized for a certain square footage, so you would want to pay attention to that figure out what, how many square feet does your dehumidifier work for? Remember that vaulted ceilings are going to count for more square footage. So get some dehumidifiers going. If you have to rent them, they might go very quick, but I would be the first one on the block to get one. And if you have something like that, then this would be the time to use it. In addition to your air conditioning. Don't open the windows in a house. If you have other conditioning that you can do, even if it's just the air conditioning, I'd probably do that. While I got rid of wet things. Anything that's waterlogged has to go because that's what the dehumidifier is trying to dry. So, and then, so, and then I said fans. And so I would recommend any kind of fan you can get. So if you have tower fans, if you have anything around your house, if you're going to buy something, I would buy things like a 20 inch box fan. Now that I say that probably there's not going to be. They're going to be hard to find. You can put a filter on that, like a furnace filter, MERV 13, 20 by 20. You can actually get that to stick to the, the fan just by the pressure of the air moving in. You put it in on the side of the air moving into the fan before it blows out and you can start collecting dirt and dust in the air that way. But you don't have to. I would just be blowing the fan to dry things, keeping air moving. So it's a little bit windy. So think about when you're trying to dry clothing outside on a line. Even if there's no sun, if there's at least wind, there's a chance it's going to dry a little bit. So that's our goal. Moving air dries faster than no air. Dry is the most important thing. The first thing is anything that's been underwater that could soak up water. That includes your couches, upholstered furniture, carpeting, padding of carpeting, mattresses, clothing, stuff on the floor of your closet. I live, I have that in my closet, so I know there's stuff down there. Some of that you may be able to wash or clean, but just get it out of your house right now. The couches unfortunately are probably not going to be salvageable, nor the mattresses if they're, if they've been underwater. Your cabinets probably not either. So. But you won't put the cabinets out right away. That's kind of A longer term thing. But start, if you have anybody to help you, start having, taking your stuff out of the cabinets because you probably can save that. The goal is to not end up with a moldy mess in addition to having so much wet stuff. So, so we talked about that. I talked about fans to keep air moving. I talked about stuff, stuff in garages could be your tent, it could be your camping supplies, it could be your ski gear. I don't know what people have, but I know I have a ton in my garage too. Whatever. Just get anything soaking wet out of there. Because the garage isn't usually conditioned in a way that it has the ability to dry at all. So we want to keep the door open, get fans in there, get fans in your house so you have as much moving air as possible. In a garage, I would open windows, open doors. And we know he's going to steal your wet stuff probably anyway. Anything valuable, get it out of there right away. Same thing in your closet before someone has to go in there and pull out all the stuff that was on the floor. Your dirty clothes that are now we're under in a flood. Whatever it is, the bottom drawer of whatever you have in there, your shoes. If you have something hidden in there that's valuable, then you want to get that out of there ASAP so that you take care of those important things first. Anything else that's really important to you, whether it's photo albums, pictures, I would try to find someone else, put it in your car, get it out of there so that it can go somewhere where someone else can hang onto it and hopefully not let it get moldy if it wasn't actually wet already because the humidity is going to start to become a problem if it's not already. And this has been a few days. So let me think of what else that I did tell her. Oh, so I use Thieves Cleaner and I did send my, my sister a bunch of product because she's my sister and her birthday's coming up. So I said happy birthday, I'm sending you a bunch of cleaner. I use the Thieves Cleaner and from Young Living, if you put it, if you buy it under my sponsor number, which is, I don't know, maybe there's some way I can put my link in here. But my sponsor number is 3243004. And so if when you sign up you use that sponsor number, I do get a commission on that. The plants that are in Thieves Cleaner and also in the Thieves Oil are rosemary, clove, lemon peat, lemon peel, cinnamon Bark and eucalyptus and mold just doesn't coexist with those. And so when we're, we're struggling with the potential for a moldy situation, that's a good cleaner to use. I would use as little water as possible. So the cleaner that you'll buy, you want it to be in a spray bottle. Now you can use dish soap, you can use some other things. You could use Borax, you could use baking soda if whatever you have that you can get immediately. But long term cleaning, I do recommend using an essential oil based cleaner that has highly concentrated and that can be used with as little water as possible. I did dilute it slightly and put it in a spray bottle. So I do dilute it somewhat, put it in a liter spray bottle and that's kind of your bottle of cleaner you can spray. Because we don't want to dump the bucket on the floor, we don't want to saturate wet things even more. So that is what I sent my sister. I also sent her some of the oil. She has a diffuser, there's a specific diffuser. And if you buy the products under me, I'll tell you about that. You can reach out, you'll have my contact information and that's youngliving.com my sponsor number is 3243004 and I'll do my best to help. We have some recorded information that would be access we give people on that. So it's really efficient. So but otherwise it's clean, clean, clean, dry, dry, dry. Probably dry, dry, dry first before you clean and stay calm. It's going to be okay. Now the other thing I told her about her walls was she doesn't know how high the water went up. She couldn't really see. But she knows that her couches and maybe her mattresses, but definitely her couches that had legs and they were up off the ground actually were wet. So. And she could kind of tell how high the water went up in the cabinets. And so with that information I would say that you want to remove your baseboards if they can be removed. Any wall baseboards that have been underwater, I would remove the baseboards if they see seem like they're in good condition. And I'm not sure if they could be or not, but maybe there's some reasons why they could be. I would get those outside up off the ground and protected somewhere because you may be able to reuse them. If it's going to be a big project anyway, then I wouldn't bother trying to reuse them. And then you're going to need to do a flood cut of the drywall. They call it a flood cut. So you're going to need to go at least 18 inches to 2ft above where the water line went. And oftentimes on wood, especially if you have wood framing over a concrete block, for instance, which is what my sister's case is, then there'll be some staining on the wood. Usually you can tell where the flood line is on wood, especially if it's been underwater. So I would do a flood cut of the drywall and remove all the wet insulation and an additional 18 inches to 2ft above. Then every situation is going to be different. But you, the wood framing, especially if it's not structural, may not be something you want to save. Say you have concrete block and it's just kind of furring to hold up the, the drywall and let electric run through. If you have a wood structure, then that gets a little bit more tricky. And I would say you're going to need a lot more advice on that. And probably not just a remediator. You may need a builder who has a license, an architect, structural engineer to help figure out what, what should be removed and what could be saved. So. But I know there's a lot of homes that were in the flooding zones that are concrete block on slabs. But know that the slab is a giant sponge. It's going to take, you know what they say is something like a slab of concrete or a concrete foundation dries about an inch in 30 days. So if you had a 4 inch slab and it was underwater for any length of time and really soaked in a ton of water, then that could be like four months. It's a four inch slab. It could be four months before the thing is completely, completely dried out. So be patient. But carpeting, padding over that, laminate flooring, any kind of engineered flooring, all that has to go ceramic tile that is in grout attached to the concrete slab might be okay. You're just gonna have to see if it's gonna start to come up on its own, it might be okay. My sister does have that and I wouldn't worry about that right now. So that's not a priority. If you have wood furniture and the legs got wet and those kinds of things, anything you can do to dry that stuff out, the sun is your friend. Of course, after a storm, we often have more storms and more rain. But if you have moments of sun, mold doesn't like sun. So I would be drying my furniture off that I'm going to try to save, say it's simple wood furniture or something that just the legs were wet. I would take that outside in the sun and try to prop it up somehow safely so that. And turn it upside down so that the sun could give a suntan to whatever was exposed and really try to help it. Dry Wood is going to be the same way as concrete and it's going to take a while if it's been underwater for it to dry. And it may not even be salvageable. But know sometimes like with couches, say if you had a table, some kinds of tables, you can unscrew the legs, take the legs off and you can throw away the legs and the top, you might be able to put, put new legs on. So that's another idea. Let's see. Okay. Robin saying I thought oil and water don't mix. They don't. Robin, you're super smart. They don't mix. So we're not putting. You can't. So I'm suggesting Thieves Cleaner. And the reason why I'm suggesting. And that's a different product. There's Thieves Oil and there's Thieves Cleaner. Now you can put Thieves Oil into Thieves Cleaner and make it even more robust. But the reason why you use the Thieves Cleaner is because Thieves Oil is already in it and it has an emulsifier. So it has a component in the cleaning solution. Highly, highly concentrated. Like I said. Although I did buy my sister several bottles of the. It's like a 96 ounce bottle. It's a big bottle. There is a 28 ounce bottle too. But I so it has an emulsifier so that the oil and water do mix with the emulsifier. Now say you have eucalyptus oil or I honestly don't know that tea tree works that well. But you could use it and you put it in dish soap. It'll also emulsify and spread it out. But you still don't want to use a lot of water. Which is like why I like the cleaner. Because it's designed to be highly concentrated. I for dirty situations, it's recommended to dilute it 15 to 1. That means 1 ounce of cleaner to 15 ounces of water and you can do less. So when I do my spray bottle, my leader spray bottle, I'm usually using like a cap full of cleaner in the spray bottle. The cleaner, highly concentrated is a little amber. So I can, I can just tell that the, the spray bottle is more amber than my bucket of water. If you're just doing routine cleaning or something, you know you're cleaning a second time or something. You can dilute 30 to 1. But again we want to, if we, if we're going to mop the floors, for instance, even the concrete floors, then you want to use a damp, you know, squeeze the excess water out of the mop and just do a damp washing. And then I would have bag of rags or all of the towels that you're never going to use again. And I would be like trying to soak up the water as much as possible because we don't want to add to what the air conditioning or the dehumidifiers need to do. So. Yeah, really good question. Oil and water doesn't mix. So don't take thieves oil, don't take eucalyptus oil. Or there's another blend called purification. You can't add that to the thieves cleaner, but it has to go to a cleaner. So if you have, I mean all those oils that I mentioned, clove, eucalyptus, cinnamon bark, lemon peel and rosemary, you could add it to dish soap if you wanted to and it will emulsify it. That's why we can clean like greasy pans and stuff with dish soap is really helpful because there's an emulsifier in every kind of soap that kind of breaks up the oils. Maybe in our shampoos and stuff too. Probably. I'm gonna guess so anyway. So that's, that's how oil and water mix. They don't mix. Let's see if I can see if there's any other questions here. I don't see any other questions and I know I didn't advertise this, but how, how long does thieves last for mold if we suspect more somewhere. So Dr. Close did a test and I did the same test and you can do the same test. So he took some. So what I did. I'll just tell you what I did. He did the same thing. So I was copying him. And people have on concrete like in the shade. So you have a place on your patio that's in the shade and it's kind of black there. The concrete does never doesn't look clean there. And it's in the. Because it's in the shade, sun doesn't hit it. So it's possible that looks a little moldy. So what you do is you get a bucket of soapy water with the thieves cleaner and a bucket of rinse water. And then I use a stiff scrub brush and I scrubbed a square. So I had it on some limestone. It was like on a half height wall that had a limestone top. To it that was under, under cover. So it was, it was in shade and it just never. But it started look kind of nasty. So I scrubbed it with a stiff scrub brush with the cleaner. Then I, every time I rinsed my scrub brush, I rinsed it in clean water and then got new soap with a clean brush. And I made a square, you know, I made a square about this big in the dirty stuff and, and it was in my front porch but it wasn't right by the front door. So I kind of let it be and I, it stayed for a year that, that square stayed clean for a year with the rest of it kind of black around it. And then eventually some of the stuff started growing into it. So we don't know for sure how long. I mean the goal is always to remove the source. If we have water damage somewhere else in our house that we didn't realize and it didn't get removed, it didn't get dried quickly, then mold's going to grow there. And if there's more mold than other things to fight mold then, and the conditions are right, then you can clean the mold and it'll come right back. And that's what we want to avoid. So I think the other thing that I haven't mentioned that I would mention for flooding I is be monitoring your humidity. If you never did before, that's okay. Start now. Get these. I have one here on my desk. Little thing. So my humidity right now is 30, 33% and it's been raining where I am all day. So you want to keep track of this humidity but don't rely on your air conditioning thermostat. Some of us have those really fancy thermostats that tell you the humidity and everything about your house. But it's in one central location. We don't want to rely on that. We want to measure our humidity on the perimeter of our home where the water came in. We can measure it in the middle of a room, but I would keep a diagram or a log or make a Excel spreadsheet, whatever it is that works for you of what you're finding in different locations. So I would measure the middle of the room. Surely you're on a desk or a table. But then I would go measure again in the outside corner on the floor. And, and, and these little ones, these are. They need a few hours to really acclimate. So you have to leave it there for a while. On my website, avoidingmold.com so that's my website, there is a free tools list with links that are the tools that I personally own or have used personally. And I either bought it before and would buy it again or I have it in my. One of my cabinets here. And I have a bunch of different brands of these. But I also have a point one that is in that list and that one's more instantaneous. It still takes a couple minutes, like two, two minutes to read what the humidity is. But you can point it in a corner and get the humidity reading in the corner. You can do it in the middle of the room, you can do it in a different room. And I can tell you that I've been in situations with clients where you go down in a basement is what I'm going to tell you about. Go down in the basement. That's why they're calling me in, because they feel like they might have mold, but they, their dehumidifier turns off at 40% relative humidity. And it all seems good dry down there. Now when I was walking up to this house, I noticed that they had a downspout problem at an outside corner. So I go in the basement. I'm looking around, the basement's finished and this other area isn't in the middle of the rec room in the basement, it was 40% relative humidity. But when I took my point meter and I looked at the corner down by the floor at that location, it was 80. So remember that dehumidifiers are going to take an average of wherever they are. Furnaces, air conditioning systems, with the thermostat in on a wall in the middle of the house. That's an average of what's. That's only right there where it's measuring. So it ends up being kind of an average of the house. And we really want to know what the humidity is in isolated areas. So. And if it's off by like 2 or 3 degree percentage points or even 5, I would say 4. 3 is usually the number where I'd say it doesn't matter. If you start to have see 10, 15, 20, 30% points off from the middle of the room, then there is some stored water there that is drying and can be measured there. But you can't feel yourself personally and you can't see possibly. And so that would be a clue. You can do this in your bathrooms. For those of you having had a flood, this is, I do this because I. It happened to me. So we had a leak in. This is my story anyway, so this is how I do why I do this work. So we had about 20 years ago, one of My children got really sick. We had mold in the ductwork. So keep that in mind. If you're having high humidity in your home, you probably need to get your ducts cleaned and flex. Duct are really hard, if not impossible to clean. And what else can I say about that? So that was like 20 years ago. Then fast forward. My husband got Lyme disease, and so did I, but my husband was way sicker. And then. So we were doing numbers to monitor our health and our blood work, I think it was. And noticed that some numbers were going up that were indicative of bad things and probably mold. And the only place we both lived was our house. So I started investigating our house that I built, and I didn't see anything. I hired people, spent a lot of money on people to come and tell me there was nothing there, and that they did mold testing and they found nothing. And I did ermi and I did air and I hired people look for the damage and whatever, and nobody found anything. And then it just dawned on me, what am I doing? I built the house. I'm an architect. I should be doing this myself. I know more than all these people about this particular house, for sure. And so then I started buying equipment and testing a few things. But I didn't need expensive equipment to figure out that in my bathroom, one of our bathrooms, the door was sticking in the winter. So that was odd. It means because wood expands when it gets wet just ever so slightly. And so I measured that bathroom, and that bathroom was 70% relative humidity. And the rest of the house was 30. So this was significant. But I want to tell you that I didn't walk in the bathroom and feel like, oh, it's really humid in here. I didn't feel anything different. But the reason it was higher in there is we did have a leak that had traveled and soaked into some insulation and a lot of insulation. Actually, we had more than one leak. And. And so there was a giant wet blanket that was drying into that bathroom for probably a long period of time. So that's. That's the significance of isolated areas of high humidity and why we want to look for that. So I'm going to have to get going because. Let's see if there's any other questions here. I don't see any other questions. Is it okay to drain a dehumidifier into the basement floor drain? Yeah, you can go into the basement. Forgery. That would be fine. I'm assuming your basement floor drain goes somewhere. But, yeah, you can go into the floor drain in the basement you can go into a, you can go into a sink. Sometimes we put ours, at least on our second floor bathroom. We put it up on a, on a counter in the bathroom so that we could drain into the sink or drain into a tub. They do make dehumidifiers, if you're buying one, that have pumps for that drain. And so that could be helpful. What about fogging with straight thieves into air ducts? How long does that last? You know, it's all gonna. How long anything lasts depends on how bad your mold situation is. Air ducts getting moldy is always, always because one, there's dirt and dust in the ducts. I mean, that's a food source. But two, that there's a big mold source somewhere. And it's probably somewhere else in your house or there's high humidity that's calling causing condensation in your ducts. Either one of those, though, there's, there's gotta be mold spores. And, and usually if when people have mold in their, in their ducts, it's because they have mold in their house somewhere could be completely concealed like mine. There was absolutely nothing to see. Took me about. It took me several months to find it. I'll be truthful. So if you. It's just a symptom. If you've mold in your ducks, that's a. Largely a symptom of another problem. And so let's see. So anyway, you can do the doctor close protocol in your ducks. How close, how long is it going to last? It's going to depend on if you fix the cause, if you fix the reason why you had mold in your ducks in the first place, it will help. I have used it in. At least it's helped for me. We've used it in apartments and stuff that we rented. My kids used it in their college dorm rooms. I will not say that they completely felt great, but they, they were able to stay for longer than they would have if they didn't use it. And so sometimes we do that and we alternate peer purifiers and opening windows. Dilute, dilute, dilute when you can. So if the temperatures drop and the humidity's dropped outside, open all your windows in your entire house and air it out. Start over. My basement floor drains into gravel underneath. Whoa, that's bad. So don't put it there, don't put it in the floor drain. If your floor drain isn't going to the sewer. I'm. I'm pretty sure my, my condensate drain. I've my furnace for air conditioning. Is in the basement. And the condensate drain goes. I'm very. It's near a bathroom, so I'm fairly certain it goes into the sewer. It should go in the sewer. Freya is saying. New here. Do you travel? I work virtually. So I do do individual consults virtually. And I have a lot of online courses. On my website, avoiding mold.com there's one called Found Mold now what which is just what to do. That's like the first steps when you find mold. But that is part of a bundle that's called the Mold Experts Bundle. It's honestly one of the most affordable 5 hours of content you will ever find on the Internet. And I don't say that lightly. I bought courses and I'm always buying other people's courses and thinking, oh, mine is so much better. It has. It has what you need. So Mold experts bundle@avidingmold.com you'll be able to listen to me talk like this, only I'll be recorded. So you can do it at any time. You can stop and start. You can start over. And I share links and I share pictures of what you're supposed to be doing. I have how to remove your carpeting in there. And those pictures are actually my daughter removing her carpeting in an apartment. So after they realized they had termites. So what's my opinion on a specific air purifier? I would say air purifiers are covering up symptoms. And I have had clients with every kind of air purifier. So I, I am not going to say that that's going to solve anything except maybe temporarily giving you some relief. But there's a root cause and eventually the mold will overtake any air purifier. And think about it, too. If it's in the exterior walls and you have the air purifier running, the mold has to fly by somebody to get to the air purifier. And eventually the mold, which is multiplying thousands of bores an hour, especially if it's being fed, will overtake any air purifier, especially one that's sitting in the middle of the room. But they all will. So that's all for today. I hope this is helpful. Check out my Mold experts bundle@avidingmold.com My Moisture Basics is a mini course if you want to get started looking for defects. And my master course is how to build a safe home. And that is like everything you need to know if you're building or doing major renovations. And if you had a flood, you're going to be doing a major renovation. That is my best value, best course with over 50 hours of content in there. Plus you get access to me do live Q and as in to those students for those students. And I also have some separate chats not on Facebook, but I do have one on Facebook that's private that I keep a close eye on to answer people's questions who are in those in that VIP course, which is the Build a Safe Home. I did a recent video on that. If you can find where to sign up for that, you might still be able to get an email with the recordings for what I just did. I answered my three common defects. So thanks again for coming on and good luck to you again. My heart goes out to everybody that's been struggling with the floods and my prayers are with you and I do always recommend for all of us struggling with mold that prayer is a really good idea. It's something that I do regularly and sometimes we need the help of a higher power and know that we can get through all these things. We can. We don't necessarily have to know how it's going to happen, but we have to believe that we're going to be okay and we're going to figure out our situation and it's all going to be okay. So keep that belief in mind. We don't have to know the path or how long it's going to take. Just keep that belief in mind and hang in there everyone. And I will see you on the next time I come on. Or you can see me@avidingworld.com on my recorded content there or schedule a consult there. Thanks for watching. Bye.