Water Damage Restoration in Campanil, Santa Barbara, CA

Campanil is an upscale hillside neighborhood near the Santa Barbara Mission, known for its 1920s-40s Spanish Colonial homes and historic red-tile roofs. From 434 State Street, we are there in about 10 minutes. These are irreplaceable houses, and we treat them that way. We answer around the clock and come ready to address a roof leak before it reaches the plaster below.

A red-tile roof is beautiful and durable. It is also unforgiving when a single cracked tile or a patch of failed underlayment lets winter rain through.

Our IICRC-certified crew has dried a lot of Spanish plaster, and we know the difference between water you can see and water hiding in the lath behind it. That distinction is much of the job in a house like this.

Spanish Colonial homes from the 1920s and 1940s were built with plaster and lath walls, wood framing, and clay-tile roofs over underlayment that is now decades old. When water gets behind the tile, it does not announce itself. It travels along the framing and surfaces as a stain on a hand-troweled ceiling weeks later. Original galvanized supply lines add another failure point, and when one bursts inside a wall, it corrodes out of sight until it goes.

Drying a plaster-and-lath home takes patience. Push too hard with heat and you crack the plaster; too little and moisture stays trapped in the lath and rots the framing. We meter and adjust as we go, using low, steady drying that the original materials can take. A ceiling of hand-troweled plaster is not a sheet of drywall you can replace in an afternoon, so we work to dry and keep it rather than tear it out.

We work the streets below the Mission and the Rose Garden, up toward the Riviera and Franceschi Park. When rain finds its way under the tile of a historic roof, water pools above a ceiling and threatens original plaster. We handle the ceiling water damage repair with care, draining the water, drying the cavity, and preserving the historic finish wherever it can be saved. Across the home, careful structural drying protects the plaster and lath the house depends on. We treat a red-tile roof the same way, saving and resetting sound tiles wherever the repair allows.

We photograph the damage and work directly with your adjuster, and we understand what it means to restore, not simply replace, a historic Santa Barbara home.