Water Damage Restoration · Chamblee, GA
Drying a Chamblee dental office without closing its doors
A failed supply line flooded much of this Chamblee dental office, from the treatment rooms to the front desk. Here's how we dried it on a schedule built around the practice's hours, so they kept seeing patients while the work got done.
How the job went
A plan built around the practice's hours
The water had reached almost everything: the treatment rooms, the x-ray and sterilization rooms, the front and back offices, the restrooms, and the hallways tying them together. A practice can't just close for a week, so before anything else we built the drying around their hours. Each morning by 6:00 we stacked the air movers out of sight so the office could see patients, set them back out at 4:30 once the doors closed, and let the dehumidifiers run through the day to keep pulling moisture from the air. The office stayed open the whole time.
Two layers of floor to pull up
In the main office we pulled up the vinyl plank flooring and found commercial carpet underneath it. The water had broken down the adhesive and left it soft and sticky, so that came out too. We laid board over the floor to give a safe, clean walking surface over the glue residue while the practice kept operating, and pulled the base trim in several rooms to open the walls up for drying.
Mold, found and handled
In the main office and the small office at the end of the hall we found mold, with water that had worked its way behind the drywall in the end office. We cleaned, sanitized and HEPA-vacuumed those areas to the mold-remediation standard and ran air scrubbers where the growth was, so nothing spread through a building full of patients and staff.
Working the scope with the adjuster
We walked the damage with the insurance adjuster and got the added work approved: removing the water-damaged cabinetry in the main office and the private room, and a small flood cut on the saturated drywall in the end office. Because every hour of demolition affects a working practice, we set the timing with the owner first, so the disruptive work landed when it cost them the least.
Demolition closed off, drying pushed when the doors were shut
The flood-cut demolition in the end office was done behind a sealed containment barrier under negative air, so dust and debris stayed out of the rest of the office. In the x-ray room we pulled the baseboards to get airflow into the lower walls. On the days the office was closed we let it dry uninterrupted and raised the interior temperature to around 85 degrees to speed evaporation. A few of the cabinets along the walls were MDF that had soaked up water in spots we couldn't reach and wasn't drying, so those were scheduled to come out during reconstruction, when the wall behind them could be opened, checked and treated.
Dried to standard, handed off for reconstruction
Room by room the building came back to dry: the treatment rooms, the x-ray and sterilization rooms, the restrooms and the front offices all cleared. The last holdouts were a few isolated spots of moisture under the tile in the sterilization room and a couple of treatment rooms, so we pulled most of the equipment and left a smaller setup running on just those areas until they came down too. Once the readings confirmed dry, we gathered the final measurements and photos for the reconstruction estimate and set the handoff so the rebuild could move forward. Through all of it, the practice never stopped seeing patients.
