06/02/2026
When a South Florida homeowner calls about a wet garage, they usually describe a small problem: a leak from the water heater, a slow drip from above, water tracking in from a storm. What they don't realize is that the garage is connected to the rest of the home in a way that turns small water events into bigger ones than they look.
The garage shares one continuous slab with the interior, shares a single-stud wall with conditioned living space, and shares attic framing with the rest of the house. Water from the garage floor wicks laterally through the porous concrete, reaches the bottom plate of the shared wall, and travels up the drywall into adjacent rooms. By the time you see staining on the interior side, the wall cavity has been wet for days or weeks and mold has germinated.
The 6 garage moisture warning signs: water staining on the lower 6 inches of the interior side of the garage wall, soft drywall or baseboards on adjacent rooms, musty smell with no obvious source, visible mold inside storage closets along that wall, a cool wet spot on the slab opposite the garage event, and soft or rotted bottom plate when you pull off baseboards. Any of these means proper moisture mapping is required on both sides of the wall β not just a mop-up.
π https://www.restoflo.com/blog/garage-water-damage-south-florida