Water damage restoration in Park Slope

The housing stock here is late 1800s and early 1900s row houses, most three or four stories with a garden level, plus apartment buildings along Fourth Avenue and the wider streets. The Park Slope Historic District protects a large share of the row house stock, which matters after a loss because exterior and visible interior changes can require review. Inside, the assemblies are plaster on wood lath over brick, with rubble fill in the wall cavities.

Water in a rubble-fill wall behaves nothing like water in a modern cavity wall. The fill holds moisture, releases it slowly, and wicks laterally into adjacent rooms. A supply line failure on the parlor floor often shows up as a damp patch two rooms away and one floor down, and the visible patch is the end of the path rather than the start.

The repeat failures are galvanised supply lines that have never been replaced, cast iron drains at the stack, radiator valves that weep through the winter, and roof or parapet flashing at the rear extension. Garden-level kitchens and bathrooms are the most common loss origin, because that is where the oldest plumbing in the building tends to be.

Street parking is the constraint on most jobs. Equipment trucks stage on the avenue and hose runs go through the garden level where possible rather than through the parlor floor. Landmark rules affect what can be changed on the exterior, not what we remove and dry inside, but we photograph exterior conditions before work in case review is needed later.

Two things surprise out-of-town contractors here. First, the garden level is often a separate rentable unit, so a single loss becomes two households and sometimes two policies. Second, the rear extension roofs and parapets drain toward the party wall, so a chronic leak on one side of the wall is frequently a loss on both.