Toilet Overflowing Through Ceiling Onto Hardwood

This question appeared as a comment on how to clean up after a toilet overflows.

Toilet overflowing through ceiling onto hardwood. That s is especially true when the bathroom is located on an upper floor and water drips down to lower levels of the home. Ceilings insulation structures furniture cushions carpeting and more are affected. Class 3 is when virtually all of the area has been saturated with the overflowing water. Class 4 is when low porosity low permeability materials like concrete stone and hardwood are saturated.

And when they do it ain t pretty. If your toilet overflows it can be much more than a mere nuisance if you don t give it immediate attention it can cause extensive and costly damage. And i also feel like after mopping the floor. Dear home ec 101 so twice this has happened lately thanks to little girls who don t always flush when they re supposed to.

Sadly the world is not perfect and toilets do leak. What s worse is that one third of toilet catastrophes started with a clogged or overflowing toilet something that can be easily avoided if proper toilet maintenance. Unless the toilet leaked for a long time the joists are probably not completely rotten and sistering a piece of 2 by 8 inch lumber by screwing it to a rotted joist is usually enough to repair it. Vinyl or tile and cleaning up hardwood is the hardwood is porous.

One of the top 5 causes of home water damage is a toilet overflow. Whether it s a clog in the bowl or the tank malfunctions the damage can be immense. The difference between cleaning up toilet water on your typical bathroom flooring e g. A toilet leak is usually a result of some sort of a break or defect in the seal of the wax ring that adjoins the toilet to the floor.

It also assumes that you are taking action quickly. You may not have realized it but every time you flushed that toilet you d have been causing water to penetrate through the bathroom floor and into your downstairs ceiling. In a perfect world your toilet would never leak. Although serious repairs should be performed by a professional plumber most preventive maintenance and repairs including fixing a toilet overflow problem can typically be performed by the.

I have all the towels to mop up the water and um mess from the toilet overflow itself then i have to wash the towels floor and toilet and then i feel the need to run a bleach cycle in the washing machine just in case. Toilet water damage can cost 5 000 and up and that s on top of the deductible.