Floods are one of the worst calamities anyone can experience. It affects your life both temporarily and permanently. The latter is especially true when it comes to your home, which might never be the same anymore after a flood.
Flood water contains a lot of harmful contaminants that can render your house unlivable unless you’re willing to spend a lot of money for repairs.
This is why selling a house after a flood isn’t easy. It is doable, however, and here’s how:
1. Contact your insurance provider immediately
This is when you’ll be thanking yourself for getting flood damage insurance early on, because your insurance company can and will help you after assessing the damage.
Make sure that you document the damage as instructed before you make any kind of repairs.
2. Get a power washer to clean hard surfaces
Garden hoses will also work, but if possible, use a power washer. They’re much more effective in cleaning the hard surfaces of your home after a flood.
3. Be ready to put in a lot of elbow grease
Cleaning a house after a flood takes a lot of manual labor.
If you’re not able to put in the work for some reason, you can hire other people to do it for you. There are cleaners who specialize in after-flood cleaning. However, their services won’t be cheap, so you might want to heavily consider doing it yourself.
If you do decide to clean your house yourself, you’re going to need to do it as carefully and as meticulously as you can.
Buy quality protection gear, and use a heavy-duty cleaner. Use disinfectants as instructed, and best of all, get ready to put in a lot of work.
4. Disinfect and sterilize everything
Flood water is never clean. If a flood ever hits your home, the last thing that you want to do is to not give it a thorough clean.
Your kitchen, in particular, will need to be disinfected and sterilized properly. Don’t be afraid to apply a strong disinfectant solution to all of your kitchenware liberally.
5. Do not reuse mattresses
Your mattresses are unsalvageable. They might eventually dry up, but they’ll never be as clean anymore.
6. Drain your basement slowly
A lot of homeowners make the mistake of draining water from their basements as quickly as possible. Don’t do it. Doing so will put your floors and walls at risk because of the extreme wall pressure caused by the sudden draining of water.
At best, you should only drain two to three feet of water from your basement every day.
Your home will never be the same after a flood, but you can try to restore it. Keep in mind, however, that restoring a home after a flood can be a time-consuming and expensive process.
If you do decide that it’s no longer worth it to salvage your home, then you might want to heavily consider selling it to a cash buyer instead.
With a cash buyer, you won’t have to worry about making any repairs or renovations at all. They’ll make an offer for your home, and if you think that it’s fair price, the cash buyer will take care of everything and all you have to do is to sign your property off to the cash buyer and that’s it.
In just a few short weeks, a cash buyer can take your flooded house problem off of your hands and give you cash in hand in return.