Water Is Coming In. Here Is What To Do.
Call 239-414-9100. Then read the rest of this page while you wait — the first few minutes matter more than most people realize.
Limited time offer 4 point home inspection or wind mitigation with any new roof See what is includedAn active leak is one of the few building problems that gets worse by the hour. This page is written to be useful before anyone arrives.
First: electricity, then the ceiling
Before anything else: if water is anywhere near a light fitting, a ceiling fan or an outlet, switch off the breaker for that room at the panel. Do not touch a fixture that is wet, and if water is running out of one, treat the whole circuit as live and stay out of the room until the power is off. Water travels along wiring, and the fitting several feet from the leak can be the dangerous one. Then the ceiling itself. Soaked drywall holds a surprising amount of weight and then lets go of all of it at once, so keep people out from under it. And do not go up on a wet roof or up a ladder in wind — more people are hurt inspecting storm damage than by the storm.
Second: move what water ruins, and catch the rest
Electronics, documents, photographs, anything upholstered. Move them out of the room rather than to the side of it. Then put a bucket under the drip and a towel under the bucket. If the ceiling is bulging and you are confident it is safe to reach — power off, nothing wet overhead — a small hole at the lowest point of the bulge will drain it into your bucket instead of bringing the whole sheet down. If you are not confident, leave it and tell us when we arrive.
Third: photograph everything, before anyone tidies
This is the step people skip and regret. Photograph the water, the stain, the ceiling, the ruined items, and the room as a whole so the pictures can be placed later. Get the date on them if your phone does that. An insurance claim is decided on evidence of what the damage was before it was cleaned up, and once you have mopped the floor that evidence does not exist. Fourteen years of claim work says this is the single most valuable ten minutes you will spend.
When we can be there
During business hours — Monday to Saturday, eight until six — we respond the same day. Outside those hours the phone takes a message and we return it the next working day. We would rather tell you that plainly than advertise a twenty-four-hour promise and leave you waiting on a Sunday night wondering whether anyone is coming.
What we do when we get there
The immediate job is stopping more water getting in: temporary protection over the opening, secured properly rather than weighted down, so it survives the next squall instead of becoming a sail. Then we find where the water is actually entering, which is regularly not where it is coming out — water runs along battens and trusses and appears somewhere else entirely. Then we tell you what the permanent repair is.
The documentation, if this is going to be a claim
Emergency work and insurance work are the same visit here. While the temporary protection goes on, the damage is documented the way a claim needs it: what failed, where, how far the water traveled, and what it reached. That record is what stops a claim being argued down three weeks later, and it cannot be reconstructed once the roof is dry and repaired.
If it is not an emergency after all
Sometimes a ceiling stain is an air-conditioning condensate line, not a roof. We will tell you that, and we will not sell you a roof to fix a plumbing problem. The visit costs nothing either way.
Want to talk it through?
Let our experts look over your property—no cost, no obligation.