Thirty-three inches. That's how much water one Nassau Bay homeowner had inside his house after Hurricane Ike's surge came up through Clear Lake in September 2008, according to a Community Impact story on the city's elevation program. He was out of the house for eight months. The city started applying for grants in 2013 to raise homes out of the floodplain, and his was lifted ten feet before the next big storm came through.
Nassau Bay is like that. It's small (1.75 square miles, close to a third of it water, 5,347 people at the 2020 census), it sits right across NASA Parkway from the Johnson Space Center, and almost every house in it has a story about the lake. The city was planned in 1962, the first families moved in by 1964, and it incorporated in 1970.
What that means for the floors
When a house here gets rebuilt after water, the downstairs usually comes back as tile or wood-look plank, and the carpet moves upstairs, onto the stairs and into the bedrooms. The raised homes have a lot more stairs than they used to. Stair carpet takes more abuse per square foot than anything else in a house, and it's the part people forget to have cleaned.
So a typical Nassau Bay job for us is some mix of stairs, bedroom carpet, a rug or two over tile, and the grout underneath those rugs. The grout gets a buffer machine that scrubs the dirt out of the lines, which is a lot faster than you on your knees with a brush. Rugs are cleaned right there in the room. Sofas, chairs and hardwood are on the list too, and pet stains get an enzyme treatment that reaches the pad.
The carpet itself gets the usual routine. The technician walks it with you and quotes the price, treats the stairs and the bad spots first, then cleans with a carbonated solution and very little water. Most rooms are dry not long after the van pulls away, which matters more than usual in a house this close to the lake: the less water you put into carpet here, the happier you'll be with it a month later.
Where our job stops: if water is coming into the house right now, you need a restoration crew with industrial dryers and moisture meters, and you need them today. We're who you call afterward, once the floors are dry and you want them clean again. That's 281-786-4379, any time of day, or book online after a look at the coupons.
We work all through the city, in Swan Lagoon, Harbour Martinique, Clippers Mooring, Queens Court and Bal Harbor Cove, and on the streets around Lake Nassau. Kids here mostly go to Robinson Elementary, Space Center Intermediate and Clear Creek High, so if you've got a teenager hauling sports gear through the front hall, we've seen that carpet before.