At Restoration Now! we specialize in helping you restore your flood-soaked books, as well as handle everything from smoke, fire, and water restoration to mold cleanup and extraction. While several of our services can get pretty technical with the processes and procedures we perform, mainly due to safety, there are a few things you can handle in your home if you experience a severe flood or a busted pipe.

One of the household items most likely to receive irreparable damage in a flood is your book collection, and that can be very expensive to replace depending on how many you have. The good news is that often there are techniques you can use yourself to save and restore water-damaged books before they’re completely destroyed. Take a look at the following tips from our flood damage mitigation team at Restoration Now! Omaha, and get to work preserving your flood-damaged books!

Experience a Flood? You’ll Need Just a Few Simple Things

To start restoring your books, you’ll need just a few household items—a table fan, baby diapers, premium paper towels (you’ll need them to be really absorbent), a wooden board, and some sort of heavy item like bricks or soup cans. This may start off sounding like an episode of MacGyver, but trust us, it’ll all become clear.

A Step-by-Step Process to Book Restoring

As it turns out, the process for restoring water-damaged books is fairly simple, although it does require some time and care to do it successfully. If you have a lot of books that are easily replaceable, it might make more sense to simply replace them, but for those that have special value or are irreplaceable for other reasons, this simple process can restore them.

• First, determine the kind of book you’re trying to restore. Those with glossy pages or special coatings should only be restored by a professional. For this process to work successfully, it’s best for the book to have a hard cover with standard paper pages.
• Figure out the extent of the damage. If the book’s been floating for days, it’s likely that the book can’t be restored. If it’s started growing mold, our Restoration Now! Omaha team recommends not restoring it at home and instead having our mold restoration professionals take a look at it to see what can be done. If the book’s been recently soaked and promptly recovered, you stand a very good chance of restoring it successfully.
• Here’s where the fun starts—lay a single sheet of paper towel into the book every ten pages or so, making sure it covers the entire page. You should be careful in handling the wet book and turning its pages as they’ll tear very easily when saturated. Once the towels are in place, carefully close the book.
• Take a diaper and wrap it around the outside of the book, making sure that the inside of the diaper contacts all sides of the cover. Baby diapers are very absorbent, much more so than paper towels, and they do a great job of soaking up moisture from the cover of the book.

Now We Apply Some Pressure…

Lay the wrapped book flat and place your wooden board on top. Since you’re essentially squeezing water out of the book, you need to put some pressure on it, which is where your bricks come in. Stack the bricks or cans on the board to weigh everything down, and be prepared to wait. After two hours or so, replace the paper towels with fresh ones and replace the board and bricks. You may have to do this step multiple times depending on how saturated the book is.
When the book’s pages feel only slightly damp, remove the diaper and paper towels and stand it up in front of the fan with the pages fanned open. Test every two hours for dryness, and when the pages feel dry to the touch, turn off the fan but leave the book upright for a few days to make sure the spine has a chance to dry out completely.

Contact Your Restoration Now! Today at (402) 502-7277!

There are some things you can do to restore your property after a flood, but in the case of delicate items like books you can see that it’s an intensive process that requires a lot of time to perform. If you need help handling the bigger mess like furniture or structure of your home, look no further than your friendly Restoration Now! Omaha team of water damage restoration experts! We have the tools and knowledge to get your home back to normal quickly after a flood. We offer 24/7 emergency services, so give Restoration Now! Omaha a call today at (402) 502-7277!