Emergency Board Up Services in Boston & the South Shore

Emergency Board Up Services in Boston That Stop the Loss From Growing

Emergency board up services are the first billable hours of a storm claim: securing every breached window, door, wall, and roof section so weather and intruders stay out while the claim and the repairs get organized. Studio 24 Restoration Group runs board up and tarping crews 24 hours a day across Boston and the South Shore, and we treat the work as evidence handling as much as carpentry.

There is also a policy reason to move fast. Standard homeowner policies require you to take reasonable steps to protect the property from further damage after a loss, and the Insurance Information Institute notes that reasonable emergency measures, with receipts, are generally reimbursable on covered claims. The flip side matters more: damage that grows because an opening sat exposed for days can be carved out of the settlement as a failure to mitigate. In other words, the tarp is not just protecting your ceiling, it is protecting your payout.

Because make-safe and evidence live together, sequence is everything. Our crews photograph and video every breach before a single sheet of plywood covers it: the opening itself, the debris line, the water path inside. Only then does the drill come out. That documented-then-protected sequence is the backbone of the whole storm damage restoration process, and it is why a board up done by the restoration company that will also handle your claim beats a board up done by whoever answered the phone first.

Consequently, one crew visit produces three things: a weathertight building, a time-stamped photo set establishing cause of loss, and an itemized make-safe invoice your carrier recognizes. From there, our insurance claims team folds those costs into the Xactimate scope, so the emergency work and the permanent repairs travel on one claim instead of two arguments.

Shrink Wrap or Storm Tarp: Which Emergency Tarping System Holds?

Emergency tarping is not one product, it is a decision. A heavy poly tarp battened into sound framing is fast, cheap, and right for a roof that will be repaired within a few weeks. Heat-welded shrink wrap costs more and takes longer to install, but it becomes a continuous membrane that cannot flap, cannot pool water at a fold, and routinely protects a roof for months while a claim, an engineer, or a rebuild schedule catches up.

The deciding question in this region is blunt: will the covering meet another storm before the roof is fixed? Boston winters answer that regularly. The back-to-back nor’easters of March 2018 arrived roughly a week apart, which meant every loose or poorly battened tarp installed after the first system became airborne debris in the second. A tarp that is stapled or weighted with bricks is a one-front covering. A battened tarp is a two-front covering. Shrink wrap, properly welded and vented, is a whole-season covering.

Either way, the covering is temporary by definition, and we say so on the invoice. The permanent fix for lifted shingles, torn flashing, and punctured decking is its own scoped trade, which our storm damage roof repair crews handle under the same claim, usually within days of the make-safe.

A Board Up Company for Fire Scenes, Not Just Storms

Storms are not the only event that leaves a building open to the sky. According to the NFPA, United States fire departments respond to more than 340,000 home structure fires a year, and nearly every serious one ends with openings that firefighting itself created: roof sections cut for vertical ventilation, doors forced, windows broken for access or vented by heat. The fire is out, the crews leave, and the building stands open, wet, and unsecured, often at 3 in the morning.

Fire scene board up is its own discipline. Openings get covered only after the department releases the scene, and coverings must not seal in the moisture that hose streams left behind, so we vent tarped roof cuts rather than wrapping them airtight. Security carries extra weight here too: a fire-damaged home is visibly empty, its contents are exposed, and most policies expect the insured to secure the premises promptly after a loss. The same documented-then-protected sequence applies, with the photo set capturing char patterns and firefighting damage separately, because both belong on the claim under different line items.

“The board up is the first thing the adjuster sees, so it is the first impression of how the whole loss was handled,” says owner Ansy Chevalier, IICRC certified restorer number 70268689, who meets carriers on site across Boston and the South Shore. A clean, bolted, documented make-safe tells the carrier the rest of the file will hold up the same way, whether the cause was a chimney fire in Milton or splashover wind at the Scituate seawall.