Water Mitigation in The Lakes, Las Vegas: When a September Storm Came Through the Balcony

The Short Version

Las Vegas doesn’t get rain often. When it does, it rains hard. In late September, storms pulled up moisture from the remnants of Hurricane Odalys and swept across the valley. The west side got more than the airport did: the Review-Journal reported 0.59 inches in South Summerlin and 0.31 inches in Spring Valley, with The Lakes sitting right between them.

At a two-story home in The Lakes, that rain found its way through the second-floor balcony and into the front room underneath. After the storm, there were brown spots on the ceiling and paint lifting at the top of the windows.

This was a small job. The mitigation came to about $3,000, and the crew finished it quickly. Small jobs are worth writing about because they’re the ones most homeowners actually face. Nobody had a flooded house here. They had a few stains after a storm. The same home also had a separate roof leak over the upstairs hallway, so you’ll see both areas in the photos below.

The Neighborhood: Why The Lakes Sees This

The Lakes is the master-planned community built around Lake Sahara, between Sahara Avenue and Desert Inn Road. A lot of its homes date to the late 1980s and 1990s. You see a lot of stucco two-stories with tile roofs, and plenty of them have a front balcony sitting directly over a living room or bedroom.

That design looks great. It also means there is a waterproofed deck over finished living space. If water gets through that deck, it has nowhere to go but down into the room below.

Most days, that deck just sees sun. Then a storm drops a lot of water in a short time, and it runs across the deck, into the corners and along the edges where the deck meets the wall. If there’s any gap for it to get through, it will find it.

Step 1: Finding Out How Far the Water Went

Before cutting anything, the technician scanned the stained areas with a thermal imaging moisture meter. Wet drywall reads cooler than dry drywall, so the camera shows the shape of the wet area, not just the stain you can see.

Upstairs, the wet area followed a drywall seam that had started to crack. Downstairs, the readings lined up with stains on the ceiling and with the tops of the front windows.

A thermal camera doesn’t confirm moisture on its own, so every cool spot got checked with a moisture meter too. Those readings went into the job file along with room measurements. That record is what the insurance adjuster and the repair estimate are built on. More on how this works on our thermal imaging water detection page.

Step 2: Sealing Off the Work Area

Opening a wet ceiling throws insulation fibers and drywall dust into the air. So before demolition, the crew built plastic containment with zipper doors. They also covered the floors and taped a filter over the return air vent so the HVAC system wouldn’t pull dust through the rest of the house.

Step 3: Taking Out What Couldn’t Be Saved

Wet drywall sometimes dries in place. Wet ceiling drywall with soaked insulation sitting on top of it usually doesn’t. The weight sags the ceiling, and the insulation holds water against the board for days. On this home, the crew cut out the stained sections and pulled the wet insulation.

Downstairs, once the ceiling and the wall above the windows came open, the framing showed where the water had traveled.

Step 4: Drying the Structure

With the wet materials out, the crew set dehumidifiers and air movers in both areas, plus an air scrubber to filter the air while the work was going on. Air scrubber use is included at no extra charge on our jobs, even when insurance won’t pay for it.

The goal isn’t “it feels dry.” It’s moisture readings that match the dry, unaffected wood elsewhere in the house. The meter goes back on the same spots until the framing gets there. Our structural drying page walks through how that is measured.

The Source: The Balcony Deck

Drying a room doesn’t help much if the next storm sends more water in. The stains downstairs sat right under the balcony, so that’s where we looked next.

From the top, the deck coating looked mostly intact. When we cut into it, the plywood underneath was soaked.

This is the part homeowners should hear: a balcony can look fine from the top and still let a hard rain through. The coating is the only part you see. The wood that gets wet is underneath it, and the first sign usually shows up on the ceiling of the room below.

The damaged decking came off down to the joists so the framing could dry from above as well as below. Then the opening was covered with plastic to keep weather out until the repair crew rebuilt and recoated the deck.

Watch More From This Job

We cut three short videos from this job: pulling down the wet ceiling, scanning before we cut and the back side of the ceiling. The rest of our clips are on the water damage videos page.

What a Lakes Homeowner Can Take From This

If your home has a balcony over a living space, a few things are worth checking:

• Stains on the ceiling under the balcony, even small ones.
• Peeling paint or bubbling at the top of the windows below the deck.
• Cracks or soft spots in the balcony’s walking surface.
• Rust or dark staining where the railing posts meet the deck.

None of these guarantee a leak. If you notice any of them, and especially if you notice them right after a storm, have someone take a moisture reading. Catching it after one rain costs far less than opening up a deck.

If you’re seeing a stain right now, our ceiling water damage and roof leak water damage pages explain what usually comes next. Or call us. An IICRC-certified technician will come out, check the readings with you, and give you a free estimate before anything gets cut.