Good Neighbor Podcast: Davie
Good Neighbor Podcast: Davie
Good Neighbor Podcast: Davie
Eps #2 - Restoring Lives After Disaster: A Conversation with Davie Property Restoration
Roger Blalock shares insights from his 19-year career in property restoration, explaining how water damage often causes costly secondary issues like hidden mold growth. His Mocksville-based company serves the Triad area with comprehensive restoration services from initial damage assessment through complete rebuilds.
• Family background in construction before specializing in restoration services
• Explains mitigation process for water damage including moisture detection and drying
• Works closely with insurance adjusters as an advocate for homeowners
• Provides complete restoration from tear-out to rebuild with 1-5 year warranties
• Holds specialized certifications in structural drying, mold remediation, and trauma cleanup
• Describes extreme cases including foreclosed homes with rainbow-colored mold requiring complete gutting
• Actively involved in community as church youth leader and coach for multiple school sports
For restoration services including water damage, mold remediation, or trauma cleanup, reach Davie Property Restoration at 336-923-4018 or visit daviepropertyrestoration.com.
Davie Property Restoration - Roger Blalock
Davidson County, NC · Forsyth County, NC · Guilford, NC · Davie County, NC
(336) 923-4018
info@daviepropertyrestoration.com
This is the Good Neighbor Podcast, the place where local businesses and neighbors come together. Here's your host, Karen Wood.
Karen Wood:Well, hello, Roger.
Roger Blalock:Good morning.
Karen Wood:So how's your morning been Been? Great, awesome, awesome. Now this morning I have Roger Blaylock with Davey Property Restorations. Tell me where you're located there, roger.
Roger Blalock:We are located in Mocksville, North Carolina.
Karen Wood:Okay, and what areas do you serve?
Roger Blalock:I serve pretty much the whole triad.
Karen Wood:Okay.
Roger Blalock:I'll go anywhere, depending on the size of the job.
Karen Wood:Okay, so county-wise you would say from Davie County and all the surrounding counties.
Roger Blalock:Yeah, so it would be Davie Davidson, iredell, yakin, forsyth and parts of Guilford.
Karen Wood:Okay, okay, awesome, awesome. So before we get into a little bit more on that, now that our audience knows who we're talking to, just quickly tell me a little bit about yourself and your background and how you ended up creating and starting Davey Property Restoration.
Roger Blalock:So my family has always been in the construction business. My grandpa and dad had their own framing business and then when I graduated high school I started working with them in the early 2000s. And then the economy went bad and I got my first job in restoration working for a company called davy I'm at a disaster restoration services in winston-salem then, and then I got as a helper there, then got promoted pretty quickly and then got to the production manager and the mitigation side, got all my certifications, then went to work for a company called Belfort Property Restoration and then Servpro. So I've been in the restoration for going on 18, 19 years now.
Karen Wood:Oh, wow, okay, I didn't realize it had been that long. Yep, that's awesome. So explain to the audience what mitigation is.
Roger Blalock:Sometimes everybody doesn't quite understand that so sometimes mitigation most times you have your you go in a pipe, say a pipe bust in there, and you go in uh, mitigation is the dry out part, tear out part part. You go in and put demodifiers, air movers, remove what damaged material, it be float to carpet or things of that sort, dry it out, take moisture readings and things of that sort.
Karen Wood:Okay, Okay. And then do you have the ability? So, for example, you go out and you discover the damage or help the person determine you know what exactly is damage, Because sometimes there's more than what meets the eye. Right, Because once you start tearing out and looking at things, you're like, oh wow, you know, you uncover a lot sometimes, right?
Roger Blalock:Correct.
Roger Blalock:OK, you uncover a lot sometimes, right, correct, okay. So I work very close with insurance adjusters. I'll go out there and meet them on the job site and do a walkthrough with them, and a lot of times I'll go because it makes the customer feel at ease whenever they have somebody kind of on their side. That's kind of fighting for them, and because, being in the field for as long as I have, you don't get surprised very often because you've done seen the good, the bad and the ugly. So, um, you know, and I help sometimes determine where the water source is coming from, when, when the homeowners can't determine where it's coming from. Uh, so I mean I've been in there to where they've been five feet in the basement, to little ice maker lines breaking and doing damage in kitchens. You know something big, something small, I've seen all.
Karen Wood:Okay, okay, so would you say water is the number one source of damage to homeowners' homes.
Roger Blalock:Yes, okay. Source of damage to homeowners homes yes, okay, because I mean, if you, if you don't catch it quick enough, then you worry about the secondary damages, whether you know that's where you get your mold. Uh, can grow in between the walls, where you wouldn't ever.
Karen Wood:OK, are there some things that a homeowner could look for, you know, or if they just might feel something might be off as far as like with water damage Maybe, like your water bill is a little bit higher than usual, or you know things like that.
Roger Blalock:Yeah, so that's the one main thing, I guess, a lot of people is. When they look at a water bill and it's double or, you know, 20 percent higher than usual, then I'll get. I'll get a phone call out there, because a lot of times a pipe will bust in a crawl space and it wouldn't. You wouldn't ever know until you know one. You get a water bill or two, like your refrigerator falls to your floor.
Karen Wood:Or you step in a soft spot and you're like, well, I wasn't there before.
Roger Blalock:Correct Gotcha.
Karen Wood:Gotcha. So you help uncover the source of the problem. So you help uncover the source of the problem and then does your company have the ability to build back and and fix things like they were?
Roger Blalock:Is that something that you do as well? Yeah. So my motto is, yeah, yeah, we can do it, and typically that's a lot of homeowners, like you know. You can go in there and you're able to do it from start to finish. They ain't got to worry about hiring, uh, other contractors to come in and do things and I'll go, I'll tell them. You know, I have a slew of people where, if I can't do it in-house, I have subcontractors that I trust in customers' homes that can put it back together as well.
Karen Wood:Okay. Do you offer a type of warranty with the work that you do?
Roger Blalock:Yeah, depending on what it is, we offer a one to five-year warranty. Okay, okay, awesome, yeah, depending on what it is, we offer one to five year warranty.
Karen Wood:OK, ok, awesome. Something you had mentioned earlier too, when you described your company, what you do and your background is that you have certain certifications.
Roger Blalock:Tell me about some of those.
Roger Blalock:So first I got my first certification doing applied structural drying. So what that is is I can go into our home and what we like to call is a vortex system where I can set air movers up with a dehumidifier in the middle to where it kind of is like the perfect airflow, to where it goes in the same directions and it works out, to where the rotation works, to where the dehumidifier sucks all the moisture up that gets airborne from the air movers. Then I have applied microbial growth, which is I can remediate mold and remove a bit um mold and remove of it. I also have uh. I'm what's called a hygienist so I can test for mold, which is I have an air quality machine that comes in, takes a cultural disc and uh, it tests the air if there's any mold spores in the air or uh, it'll determine things of that sort. And also I am certified in bloodborne pathogens so I can remove any. I do crime scene cleanup and remove any biomatter, whether it be blood, meth labs or heroin or fentanyll, things of that sort.
Karen Wood:I'm certified to remove it as well really yep wow, what is the ugliest job you've ever cleaned up? Uh not being too graphic probably.
Roger Blalock:I mean it had to be a uh. A man had died in his home in a waterbed and his body acid had leaked and went through the lining of the waterbed and the downstairs neighbor had noticed a nasty drippy smell coming in. Water dripping had a nasty smell to it, coming through the duct work and we had to go upstairs and clean it up, where the coroners had to come in there and take the man out in individual bags because it was so bad.
Karen Wood:Oh, my goodness.
Roger Blalock:I've done quite a bit of blood trauma cleanup where it'd be murder-suicide or you know things of that, without being too graphic. Some of them were pretty pretty, her, her, you know pretty graphic. You know brain matter, brain matter and ceilings and walls you have scrape out and things of that sort.
Karen Wood:Oh my gosh. So are there a lot of people I mean, this is really fascinating Are there a lot of people that have the certifications, like in the triad area, to do the type of cleanup that you do for that?
Roger Blalock:So most, most of your restoration companies, whether it be the firm or individual you know, have certifications in that yeah um, because that this is a disaster. It's, you know, one of your forms of disaster, uh. And then I've been to new york. When hurricane sandy hit up in new york and uh was working on a building and I watched the corners take out multiple bodies out of a basement that had gotten flooded and they had nowhere to escape.
Karen Wood:Oh sad.
Roger Blalock:Yeah, I mean most, most of all circumstances. They are all pretty sad, you know, because there's not much. Most times you don't deal with insurance companies on that.
Roger Blalock:You do what you do a lot with, um, the homeowners or family members that's got to pay out of pocket for that gotcha so you know you got to hear the backstory about how all things went wrong and and what and what went bad and kind of um, you know you get an emotional attachment to it, which which it's hard not to, and you and you're you're taught not to do that. But we're all human.
Karen Wood:So you know you always feel for the individual where things of that sort has happened to them yes, wow, I had no idea what's the ugliest job you've done as far as um, just like a damage, as far as not on like that, but like just to the home from either water or these storms and things that we've been having the past couple of years or anything like that it won um in clemens one time.
Roger Blalock:It was a foreclosed home and I guess the water company never turned the water off and a pipe had burst and I had, and the mold in there was pretty much every color of the rainbow oh my we had some some of them that looked like crystals growing in walls and on joists. We had to remove everything in the home except for the floor, joists, the trusses, of course, the roof and the two-by-fours on outside the house. There was nothing left.
Karen Wood:Just a shell, oh my gosh.
Roger Blalock:The plywood was all rotten out out. We had to remove bathtubs. I mean that that probably was the worst mold damage I've ever done as far as the amount, because it was a hundred percent covered that we I mean we had to clean all the wood materials but, um, like two befores and, and you know things of that, you can clean them if it's within time. What mold, what mold does really? You know it eats, eats it from the inside, I mean outside in, so you get surface mold. Then it'll get so bad It'll. It'll, you know, multiply and grow into something more than you know.
Roger Blalock:Typical you're, you're in your mold cases. Your aspergillus penicillium is your most common. That's outside. You know, all that needs is a, is a feeding source, and a lot of times people don't realize, like if you go sell a home and you don't winterize your home and you have moisture still sitting in your toilets, that's all it needs for mold to be grown, because you don't have no change of air, it's all locked up and it and it and it has that one source and then it just multiplies.
Karen Wood:Yeah, wow.
Roger Blalock:People don't. People don't realize that.
Karen Wood:I can see that, well, this has been fascinating. Again, I knew what you did, but again, well, this has been fascinating. Again, I knew what you did, but again, hadn't heard some of the in-depth conversation or in-depth information that you shared Before I let you go quickly. I know that you do a lot here in our community. I want the listeners to hear some of the things that you do in addition to running your business, so tell me a little bit about that to running your business.
Roger Blalock:So tell me a little bit about that. Okay, so first you know I'm a follower of Christ, so I love children. Me and my wife are youth leaders at our church. We support the kids. I do a prison ministry with our church. In addition to that I have six kids all ages and I also do a lot for in Davie I am a coach in middle school. I do middle school football, varsity boys basketball, jv girls basketball, and now I just had a new thing put on that I also do is JV and varsity girls volleyball.
Karen Wood:Outstanding. Well, I know I appreciate everything you do for our youth here in Davie County, as well as the community. Tell our listeners how they can get in touch with you if they need your services.
Roger Blalock:So there's multiple ways. You can go on my website at daviepropertyrestoration. com, or you can look us up on Facebook, instagram and TikTok at Davie Property Restoration. Or you can always feel free to do the old school way and give us a call at 336-923-4018. 223-4018.
Karen Wood:Awesome. Well, Roger, thanks for talking with me for a few minutes today, and I hope the listeners have learned a lot about you, your business and, of course, how to reach you, and I look forward to the next time that we get together and chat.
Roger Blalock:Thank you so much and thanks for having me.
:Yes, thank you for listening to the Good Neighbor Podcast. To nominate your favorite local businesses to be featured on the show, go to gnpdaveycom. That's gnpdaveycom, or call 336-559-3044.