Toilet Overflowing Through Ceiling Onto Hardwood

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.

Toilet overflowing through ceiling onto hardwood.

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. 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. At that point you have a class 3 water loss meaning water damage has occurred from top to bottom affecting ceilings possibly insulation wall cavities flooring systems etc. And when they do it ain t pretty.

That s is especially true when the bathroom is located on an upper floor and water drips down to lower levels of the home. 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. Toilet water damage can cost 5 000 and up and that s on top of the deductible. Vinyl or tile and cleaning up hardwood is the hardwood is porous.

Sadly the world is not perfect and toilets do leak. The advice in this post is for toilet overflows not sewage backups. This question appeared as a comment on how to clean up after a toilet overflows. Ceilings insulation structures furniture cushions carpeting and more are affected.

Your leak could be caused by a leak in your upstairs toilet. In a perfect world your toilet would never leak. Class 3 is when virtually all of the area has been saturated with the overflowing water. One of the top 5 causes of home water damage is a toilet overflow.

The difference between cleaning up toilet water on your typical bathroom flooring e g. Dear home ec 101 so twice this has happened lately thanks to little girls who don t always flush when they re supposed to. Class 4 is when low porosity low permeability materials like concrete stone and hardwood are saturated. 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.

It also assumes that you are taking action quickly. And i also feel like after mopping the floor.