People ask about price first and this second, but the second question is usually the one keeping them up. You have had sewage in your basement already. Now you are being asked to let a crew walk through the house for a day or two, and you want to know what state it will be in afterwards.
Fair question. Here is exactly what happens.
Runners go down before anyone carries a tool in
The first thing that comes off the truck is floor protection. Runners go down from the outside door, along every route the crew walks, all the way to the work area. Not just the stairs. The whole path.
That is deliberate, and it is the part most people notice. Boots that have been in a trench do not touch your carpet.
The work area gets contained
Around the work itself we cover the floor and plastic the walls.
Containment is not only about mess. It keeps what we disturb inside a defined area rather than letting it drift through the rest of the basement, which matters when the work involves an open sewer line.
At the end it is vacuumed and wiped down
When the job is finished the area is vacuumed and wiped down before we leave. The standard we work to is that there is no residue left behind.
This is not us being unusually fussy. Contour sits alongside a disaster cleanup company in the same family of businesses, and our crews were taught containment and cleanup by the same people who do that for a living. It is the same materials and the same method, applied to a smaller job.
If you want to know whether it holds up, read the reviews. Cleanliness comes up in them more than anything else, and not because we ask anyone to mention it.
The moisture question
A common worry, especially from anyone with a finished basement, instruments, or a damp problem already.
There is not much water involved. We are not flooding anything. The nearest comparison is mopping a laundry room floor and running a vacuum. That is the scale of moisture you are adding to the room, and it is gone the same day.
A lined sewer is a sealed sewer, so if your basement has been damp because the line has been leaking, the work makes that better rather than worse.
What we do need from you
Honest about this part, because it is where the disruption really lands.
Access to the work area. If the cleanout or the line is behind storage, it needs clearing before the crew arrives. We will move things if we have to, but we would rather you decided where your belongings go.
A route in. Somewhere for the runners to run, and ideally a door we can use without going through the middle of the house.
Noise, for part of it. Cleaning a line with a chain is not quiet. It is not all day, but there will be a stretch of it.
Water off for a window during some jobs. We tell you beforehand how long.
What you should not have to deal with
You should not be cleaning up after us, finding tracked dirt two rooms away, or smelling the job for a week afterwards. If any of that happens, the job was not finished properly and we would want to hear about it the same day.
Most of this comes up on the free camera inspection, before anything is scheduled. We walk the route, see where the access is, and tell you what the day will look like. That part costs nothing and it is usually when the worry goes away.