South Carolina experiences its fair share of hurricanes each season. After experiencing a hurricane or any of its strong weather in your area, you need to examine your home. We are going to go over the key things that you want to be doing below to ensure that you catch any potential damage before it gets worse.
Getting Prepared For a Home Inspection
Before you prepare to inspect your entire property after a hurricane, you will need to gather up some necessary supplies. These include a flashlight, ladder, gloves, and your smartphone for taking pictures of prospective damage. Be sure that you understand the main problems that can occur after a hurricane so that you can thoroughly check your home for potential safety hazards. For example, before you walk on your property, you want to check where your power lines are to ensure they’re still attached to your home and not lying on the ground. Any safety hazards should be left to the professionals and reported as soon as you spot them.
Start With Your Home’s Exterior
The best place to start with your post-hurricane safety check is with the outside of your home. Start by examining all the exterior walls to see if there has been any cracking, gapping, or any other damage. Be sure to check your windows and doors for any damage. Inspect your downspouts and gutters to ensure that they’re still in good condition and not missing. Once you’ve inspected your entire property to ensure it’s still safe, you’ll want to ensure that you remove any debris inside of your gutters so they’re adequately prepared for future weather events.
If you were able to visibly inspect your roof from the ground, look for any missing or displaced shingles or tiles. Next, visually inspect your vents and outside HVAC units for any physical damage. If you have garage doors, you’ll want to inspect those as well and look for any signs of wind damage that have knocked the door out of alignment. Check for major damage near trees, shrubbery, and any other large landscaping on your property.
Move Inside Your Home
Once you’ve completed a thorough inspection of the exterior of your home, it’s time to move indoors. Put your focus on inspecting your main living spaces like your living room, bedrooms, bathrooms, and kitchen. When you walk into each room, inspect the walls for any visible damage like cracks or leakage. Look at both the ceiling and the floor to see if there is any water damage. Don’t forget to inspect hidden areas like inside your cabinets and vanities.
If you notice any damage, be sure to take pictures with your phone so that you can use them for any insurance claims. If there’s any water damage to your floor, such as flooding, be very mindful to inspect everything that is on your floor. This includes things like your furniture, cabinets, and so forth. An accurate record of the overall extent of the damage is essential to make an accurate insurance claim.
Basement or Crawlspace Inspection
Once you thoroughly examined all the rooms in your home, it’s time to head down to your basement or crawl space to further assess the damage. One of the biggest things to look for is any standing water. If there is water in your crawlspace, it can lead to mold and mildew growth. This can be extremely damaging to the wood structure of your home. Standing water needs to be pumped out as soon as possible. If there is no water in your crawlspace, then proceed to check other components like wiring for any signs of damage.
Test Your Appliances
If any of your electrical appliances have come into contact with a lot of water, leave them unplugged and have a professional inspect them. However, if there is no visible damage to your appliances, test each one to ensure they are still fully operational. Even though they may not be damaged due to flooding, they could’ve experienced electrical damage if they were left plugged into the wall. Test every single appliance including your dryer, washer, refrigerator, stove, freezer, water heater, microwave, dishwasher, HVAC system, and any other appliances that you may have in your home.
Check Over Doors and Windows
Pay particular attention to the doors and windows throughout your home. While some damage may be fairly obvious, like a missing pane of glass, other damage may not be so prominent. For example, the glass pane may simply have come loose in the window or it might have a slight crack in one of its corners that’s easy to miss at first glance. Be sure to open and shut all your doors and windows to ensure that they’re operating smoothly. If your door or window has been bent, you’ll notice right away when you try to use it.
Roof Inspection
One of the last things to inspect is your roof. We recommend hiring a roofing professional to handle this inspection, especially if you know there is damage to your roof. They can look for any missing or damaged roofing materials. They’ll also inspect all of your flashing and gutters to ensure that everything is in good condition.
One thing that you can do before getting that roof inspection is examine your home’s roof decking from your attic. Look for any areas where there is water damage or where you can visibly see the sunlight. These are areas that you want to have your roofer address to prevent further damage to your home.
Fully Documenting Damage
Apart from simply inspecting your home for overall safety and just to see what is damaged, it’s important to document any issues for your insurance claim. Whenever you notice that there is damage to any component of your home, be sure to take multiple pictures. Even if the damage is electrical, such as in the event of your refrigerator, be sure to take a picture of the appliance and its model number for reference.
If any downed trees or similar issues require a professional service to come out and clean up, be sure to take pictures of them. This can help streamline the process especially when multiple homes in your area are experiencing similar storm damage problems.
Take a notepad along with you as you inspect your home to note any specific damage you find. This will help you better reconcile the damage later on and ensure that you don’t forget about things. Take specific notes about the extent of the damage to every item. This will be particularly helpful if an inspector walks through your home so you can successfully discuss all the damage.
Expert Emergency Plumbing Service
Viper Services offers expert emergency plumbing service to the Taylor, SC area. We can also assist with all your heating, air conditioning, electrical, and plumbing needs. Simply call our office today and we’ll book your next service appointment.
