Signs of Water Damage in Salt Lake City's Older Homes

Press your hand flat on the plaster under the stain. If the surface gives at all, moisture has been sitting inside that wall for a while. A mark on an older wall is always late news.

We handle water damage restoration in Salt Lake City, and the calls from the older blocks often begin the same way. Somebody finds a soft spot, a musty smell, or a warm patch of flooring. Nobody heard a single thing.

Here is what that pattern often means. Something small has been leaking quietly for weeks, and the finish covering it hid the entire problem.

Galvanized Supply Lines Fail Before the House Does

Galvanized steel was the standard supply pipe in American houses for decades, and it corrodes from the inside out. Zinc wears off the inside of the pipe, and rust builds up in its place.

You notice that as weak pressure at the shower long before any water shows on a floor. Then the pipe wall thins somewhere nobody can see it, and a pinhole opens. A galvanized pipe leak is a slow seep far more often than a spray.

The joints surrender first. A galvanized nipple at the water heater sits in heat and hard water every day, and it fails years ahead of the straight runs above it.

Cast iron drain lines age the same way, from the inside outward. The bottom of the pipe scales and pits until the line cracks or a joint separates, and the damage shows on the lowest floor.

These materials are common enough that federal rules still track them. The EPA Lead and Copper Rule covers old lead and copper plumbing inside drinking water systems. Plenty of that metal is still in walls and still under streets.

None of this depends on the year the house went up. Old house plumbing problems follow the pipe, not the deed. What matters is whether anybody has replaced the original plumbing since.

Nineteen Sixty-Three Is the Middle of Salt Lake City's Housing Stock

Half the homes in Salt Lake City appeared before 1963, and half appeared afterward. Across the rest of the valley that middle number swings by 49 years, finishing at 2012 in Herriman.

The distance is wider than a single number suggests. Count the homes built in 1939 or earlier, and Salt Lake City holds 25,553 of them by itself. That figure alone exceeds the entire housing stock of 19 of the other 25 cities below.

The share of homes finished before 1980 measures the same distance from the opposite direction. That share runs from 69.9 percent in Holladay down to 3.9 percent in Herriman, inside one metro area.

Read the table by row rather than by rank. A citywide middle of 1963 describes what is likely on a given block, never what is under your own floor. Only a record of replacement settles that question.

Salt Lake County holds nearly all of the pre-1940 housing on this list. Seven of its 17 cities carry a middle build year before 1980, against one of the nine Davis County cities further up the Wasatch Front. We take calls in all 26, and the water damage crews we run out of Salt Lake City cover every one of them.

Signs of Water Damage an Old House Shows First

The earliest signs of water damage in an older house are small, dull, and easy to excuse. They show up on the finish, weeks after the leak began. Watch for these.

• A stain that keeps returning through fresh paint.
• A floorboard that cups or lifts along one end.
• A door that binds in one corner and nowhere else.
• A musty odor in one room and no other.
• Paint or plaster bubbling low against a wall.
• A water bill climbing while nothing about the household changed.

A stain can look dry and stay soaked behind the paint. Original plaster and plank subfloor hold moisture for days after the surface hardens off, so we take moisture readings inside the material itself. The visible surface reports almost nothing useful.

Sound helps as well. Tap along the baseboard with a knuckle and listen for the section that answers dull instead of sharp. Soaked wood sounds different from dry wood.

Under Old Plaster, Water Spreads Before It Shows

Under plaster and lath, water travels sideways along the wood framing before it reaches the visible face. That is why the stain almost never sits right under the failure. The wet section can sit several feet away from anything your eye can locate.

Old flooring does the same. Water follows the seam between boards, gets under the finish, and swells those boards from below. By the time a board cups, the subfloor beneath it has been wet for a long while.

Older houses also carry openings that nobody uses anymore. We have opened a 1940s coal chute that somebody had drywalled across, and found the wet sitting behind it where no owner would ever think to look.

Our half of an old-house leak is the water and the drying. We open whatever has to come open, run equipment against the soaked wood, and finish when it reads the same as dry wood elsewhere in the house. On an older house that often means working under a finish rather than through it.

Repiping sits outside the work we perform. Replacing a failed supply line is a separate trade and a separate bill, and book that repair on its own. Keep the invoice, because it is the record of when somebody replaced that line.

Found wet in an older house and no idea how far it travels? Call (801) 903-2904 and tell us what the plaster is doing. We keep that line staffed at any hour, and the age of the house is a useful thing to say early.

If water is still standing on the floor, begin by getting it out of the room and leave everything else until the house stops taking on more. A house that is still filling cannot be dried. If a line has only just let go, what to do when a pipe bursts covers that first hour.

Buying an Older Home Here Puts the Plumbing Question on You

Ask one question before you buy an older house in Salt Lake County. When were the supply lines last replaced, and does paperwork exist for it? A seller who repiped almost always kept the invoice, and missing paperwork means you treat the plumbing as original until you learn otherwise.

The federal government treats aging housing as its own kind of risk. HUD operates the Office of Lead Hazard Control and Healthy Homes for hazards tied to older housing. Age is a fair opening question, and a poor closing one.

Two houses on the same Utah street can sit 40 years apart in pipe. One received new supply lines during the 1990s and the other still runs its original steel. The build year on the county record cannot tell them apart.

So the document you want is not the deed. It is the repipe invoice, the plumbing permit, or a photo of bright new pipe where the meter enters.

We answer water damage restoration calls across Salt Lake City and the rest of the Salt Lake Valley, and most of them come out of houses older than the people living inside them. Found something wet? Call (801) 903-2904 and walk us through it. Somebody picks up day or night.

Stains, Claims, and Old Supply Lines