Before anything else, a plain statement of scope. H&H Construction is a remodelling and general contracting company. We do not perform mold remediation and we do not treat termites. Both are licensed specialist trades with their own testing, containment and treatment requirements, and we will tell you to call one rather than pretend otherwise.
What we do is the part that comes after: rebuilding what had to come out. Anastasiia Schwab of Total Home Rescue works the whole chain, and her account of it is worth a homeowner’s time.
A System Is The Most Important Thing You Can Have
Asked what she wished every business owner knew, Schwab did not talk about marketing:
“a system is the most important thing that you can have in your business. You should not rely on yourself only. You should rely on your documents, on instructions that you have for your employees and on numbers.”
— Anastasiia Schwab, Total Home Rescue
In disaster work that is not an abstraction. The sequence after water is the same every time, and the only reason it gets done properly under pressure is that somebody wrote it down before the pressure arrived.
The First Forty-Eight Hours After Water
Schwab describes her side of it directly:
“We can remove all the water and dry everything out again to avoid mold as well.”
— Anastasiia Schwab
The rest is our guidance as builders. Stop the source. Photograph everything before you move anything. Extract standing water. Then dry the structure, not the surface — the subfloor, the wall cavity and the insulation are where the water goes to wait.
Do not close anything back up until something has measured that the substrate is dry. A floor that feels dry in a Cookeville August is telling you about the air, not the joists.
Where Mold Takes Hold In A Tennessee Home
Schwab’s own market is Washington DC, Virginia and Maryland, so the Tennessee specifics here are ours rather than hers.
Locally the recurring spots are the crawlspace, bathroom walls behind valves and vanities, the cavity under a dishwasher or refrigerator line, and the junction where an older addition meets the original structure — which, in the houses we open up, is very often where the water has been going for years.
To repeat: identifying moisture damage during a remodel is part of our work. Treating mold is not. If we find it, we stop and tell you to bring in a licensed remediation contractor, and we schedule our rebuild around theirs.
Working With Insurance Without Losing
Schwab is candid about this part of the job:
“We also help homeowners to talk to the insurance because you know insurance, they don’t really like paying out to people.”
— Anastasiia Schwab
She describes one case where “before we started, the insurance did not want to cover anything” — a 4,000 square foot house where the mold was in “personal belongings, walls, floors, ceilings, everywhere,” and where the eventual cost ran to “about $200,000.”
Our advice: report immediately, document before you clean, keep damaged material until it has been seen, and get moisture readings in writing from whoever takes them.
When Remediation Becomes A Remodel
It becomes a remodel at the point where the material that had to come out was structural, or where what is behind the wall turns out to be a problem of its own age rather than of this week’s leak.
That is the handoff where we come in — rebuilding the room properly rather than patching back to how it was, and often taking the opportunity to fix the detail that caused the leak in the first place.
Read our full conversation with Ana in Water Damage, Mold, Oh My, and see our renovations page.
See also handyman services in Cookeville.