About the firm

What is actually wrong with this trade

It is not that restoration contractors are worse people than plumbers. It is the timing. Every other trade meets a customer who is shopping — comparing quotes on a kitchen, deciding whether to do the roof this year. This one meets a customer standing in two inches of water at half past two in the morning, or in a hallway that smells of smoke, on what is very possibly the worst day of their year.

Everything this industry is criticised for follows from that single fact. The open-ended authorisation signed at the kerb. The assignment of benefits produced at midnight. The confident assurance that the insurance will cover it, from the one party in the room with no authority to decide it. The offer to make the deductible disappear. None of those would survive twenty minutes of daylight and a second opinion, which is precisely why they are put in front of people who have neither.

So this company is built to slow that moment down rather than to exploit it. The emergency authorisation is one page and it ends when the emergency does. The scope comes in daylight. Nobody here is measured on conversion. And the pages on this website that argue against our own sales interest are linked from the front page rather than buried in a footer.

How it started

Terrence Baptiste started on a truck-mount extractor in 1998 and opened the yard on 61st Street in 2007, after a decade of being sent to jobs where somebody had already promised the customer something nobody could deliver. That is the whole origin story and there is not a more flattering version of it.

The work is western and central Queens: pre-war brick two-families and walk-ups, finished basements that were never meant to be finished, supply lines run through unheated voids, and a housing stock old enough that an asbestos investigation is a normal part of a job rather than an exotic one. We know these buildings because we work in the same six or seven of them over and over.

What we will not do

We will not tell you your claim is covered, because your insurer's adjuster decides that and we do not. We will not negotiate your settlement, because in New York that requires a public adjuster's licence from the Department of Financial Services and we do not hold one. We will not touch your deductible, because the invoice that makes it work has to be false. We will not write the mould assessment for a job we want to remediate, because Labor Law Article 32 forbids it and because it would be a bad idea even where it is allowed. We will not certify your home dry, safe or free of anything. And we will not tell you that everything can be saved.

Each of those costs us work. They are on the front page anyway, because a restoration contractor who only says the comfortable half of the truth is not much use to somebody at two in the morning. Read the long version of each: insurance and your claim, what you are signing, mould testing and the law, and how drying actually works.