The ridiculous amount of rainfall seen by much of the country these days has been great for the yard, but terrible for the rest of the house.
From small leaks to full-on flooding, rainfall is responsible for a lot of recent damage to homes, whether the damage is structural or limited to the goods inside your home. Even if it’s just kept in the basement, our things can mean a lot to us, and it can be devastating to have to throw them out because of inclement weather or rain damage.
If your area is particularly flood prone, or has been exposed to a lot more rainfall than normal this summer, it may be worth taking some precautions to keep the things in your basement up off the floor, and away from flood hazards.
Basement Shelving for Preventing Flood Damage
In the majority of cases, most flood damage stems from water getting into the basement and damaging the things kept on the floor. No matter strong your plastic totes may be, water coming in from a floor or a broken pipe will damage anything on the floor first, and it will get worse from there.
As a result, basement shelving can be a quick solution for many of these more vulnerable storage needs. Particularly in the case of heavier-duty shelves such as home wall shelving, these shelves can provide a fairly painless way to get things up off the floor, where the majority of the damage can occur.
The shelves themselves should be chosen for their ability to resist damage while supporting a large amount of weight, in the event that your storage totes get a little on the heavy side (as many of our collections of Blu-ray movies, books, and old video games can wind up downstairs). Additionally, you should make sure to choose basement shelves that offer resistance to rust as well – in the event a flood does occur, this will prevent the shelves themselves from getting damaged.
If you need more space, or if you don’t quite have the room for full-on shelving units, home wall shelves can help too. While not offering the same weight support, meaning they’re not quite as suitable for full-on storage totes, they can be a big help with smaller, more sentimental items – or anything kept in smaller plastic storage bins.
Wall storage can help with larger items, too. If you use your basement to store things like sports equipment (bikes, balls, etc) or other large hobby supplies, you could use wall storage hooks or sports equipment storage to help mount them to the walls. This frees up space on your other shelves, while keeping your most expensive/difficult to replace items safe away from the rain.
However, you wind up doing it, remembering to reorganize your basement – and avoid leaving too much on the floor – can help mitigate the damage caused by flooding going forward.
