Serving Patchogue

Patchogue is an incorporated village with a real downtown, and the housing around it reflects a much longer history than the tract developments further inland. Streets a few blocks off Main Street hold homes from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many of them with original windows, original trim, and paint layers going back further than anyone can document. That is lead paint territory, and in houses of that age it is usually on the friction surfaces that matter most.

The downtown revival of the past two decades has added a second pattern: renovation. Older village buildings have been converted, subdivided and refreshed, and apartments above Main Street businesses have been brought back into use. Renovation in buildings of that vintage is precisely when asbestos and lead get disturbed, which is why we get called by contractors and owners partway through projects more often here than anywhere else we work.

Then there is the water. Patchogue sits on the Great South Bay, and proximity to the bay means damp. Basements in the older village housing were not built with modern waterproofing, and a serious nor'easter puts water where it does not belong. Mold follows, usually in a finished basement that was never designed to get wet.