Water damage can spread quickly throughout a home as moisture seeps into various materials and drips into new areas. Often, when you notice that there’s water damage in your home, you already have some major repair expenses. If the cosmetic damage seems minimal, you might be tempted to simply fix the source of the leak and not seek water removal services in Kansas City. After all, it will dry out eventually, so how bad could it be to leave the water damage where it is? The answer is: a lot worse than you think. Keep reading to learn the potential long-term effects of ignoring water damage in your home.
Mold Growth
Mold should always be at the forefront of your mind when thinking about how to deal with water damage. Where there’s moisture, there’s the potential for mold to grow. In fact, if it took you a while to notice your leak, you might already have a mold problem on your hands—and that’s something that should never be ignored. Mold is more than just an unsightly growth on your home’s building materials; it actually consumes those materials, eating away at them and gradually weakening them over time.
What’s more, mold can spread at an incredible rate. A small mold colony can release thousands upon thousands of tiny spores every day. These spores get into your home’s air and are carried around on tiny breezes to land in new locations. If they can find any moisture, they’ll take hold and grow a new colony. In this way, even a small amount of water damage in an isolated part of your home can lead to a house-wide mold problem.
Weakening Home Structure
As we mentioned, mold degrades and weakens any material it’s growing on. Water has a similar weakening effect, causing many materials to rot and deteriorate over time. Rot can set in, irreparably damaging materials like drywall, carpet padding, wood floors, and even support beams. If you ignore the water damage, there’s a good chance that it won’t simply dry out on its own. Do you really want to ignore water damage until it compromises the structural integrity of your home?
Health Risks
This is another long-term effect that’s tied to mold growth. Those mold spores can impact your family’s health over time, particularly if anyone in your household has existing respiratory health issues. Mold in the air can agitate the lungs and cause difficulties breathing while also aggravating allergy symptoms. In some cases, mold can even be toxic when inhaled and cause nausea, headaches, hallucinations, etc.
Home Value
You might be willing to ignore water damage, but if you plan to sell your home in the future, there’s a good chance that a potential buyer won’t be willing to overlook it. Water damage—especially that that has been ignored long enough to cause the problems mentioned above—will drastically drive down your home’s value. You may struggle to find a buyer at all, and if you do, the offer will be much lower than you hoped due to the amount of work that will need to be done to restore the property.
So, if you’ve fixed a leak and there’s water damage left behind, don’t ignore it! Contact Emergency Mitigation Services right away for rapid water damage cleanup in Kansas City. We’ll extract the water and dry out your home as quickly as possible to minimize the damage and prevent these kinds of long-term side effects.