Water Damage Restoration · Sandy Springs, GA
Earning a senior-living facility's repeat business
A senior-living high-rise in Sandy Springs has called us for multiple water emergencies since last fall. Here's how we have earned their repeat business and what it looks like to be the company a property manager can count on.
How we handle each call
A direct line to our owner
Since last October we've been back to this Sandy Springs high-rise again and again. The problems come in all shapes and sizes: a nicked supply line, a washing machine that let go, a kitchen sink that overflowed, a sewage backup, you name it. When something lets go, the building engineer calls our owner Andrew directly and we're on the way.
Multi-unit workflow
In a high-rise, a small leak up top becomes everyone's problem below it. One of the first calls was a sixth-floor copper line nicked by a screw, a pinhole under pressure that ran down through four units, floors six to three. We've chased the same pattern since: a dishwasher pinhole on the ninth floor reaching three units, a sink overflow that traveled from nine down to six. Each time we map every affected unit floor by floor, then dry the wall and ceiling cavities with directed airflow and injection drying instead of tearing them open, which keeps the demolition, and the disruption, to a minimum.
After hours calls
A lot of these emergencies come at night. One night we got a call about a toilet overflowing brown water through a unit floor and into the unit below, and arrived to a Category 3 sewage loss. We stopped the source, extracted the standing water, disinfected the affected surfaces, and set a dehumidifier and a HEPA air scrubber, coming back the next day to finish the less urgent parts of the job. Earlier that winter a hard freeze sent a kitchen sink overflowing through four floors, and that one got the same fast response.
Thorough and honest scoping
The visible damage is usually the smaller part. Behind an ice-maker leak in one unit we found hidden mold in the firewall between the unit and the hallway, and a washing-machine overflow turned up mold behind a second-floor baseboard. We document what we find, put any change in scope and price in writing before we do the work, and when it's small enough for the building's own maintenance team to handle, we tell them that instead of turning it into a project.
Working with the staff, around the residents
This is an occupied senior-living building, so the work bends around the people in it. We coordinate access through the building engineer, keep exits and hallways clear, protect what isn't damaged, and save materials like baseboards when asked so they can be reused.
Documentation that holds up
Some of the work is paid directly by the building, but any time a loss needs to go through insurance we build the file into unit-by-unit insurance estimates with moisture logs, equipment reports and photo documentation. We're fast in an emergency and clean on paper afterward.
