Water, fire and mold damage restoration in Collierville, Tennessee

Work at Collierville falls under Shelby County, which is where the codes and licensing questions get settled. Incorporated town, chartered 1850 and rechartered 17 February 1870, with a 2020 population of 51,324 on 36.45 square miles.

Twenty-five road miles southeast of downtown by Poplar Avenue or by TN-385, the second of which is faster for anything east of the loop. Access into the subdivisions is straightforward and the streets are wide. The constraint is the historic square, where buildings front directly onto the street, loading is on-street and metered, and a truck with a trailer has nowhere obvious to sit for two days. Work on the square is normally planned around when the street can be occupied rather than around when a crew is free.

Two very different concentrations sit within three miles of each other. Around the square the losses come from age and from alteration, in old buildings that have been converted, subdivided and re-plumbed by several owners, with services running through walls nobody has opened in decades. In the subdivisions the losses come from cohort: a town that went from under eight thousand people to over fifty thousand in forty years has whole neighborhoods reaching the same wear points in the same season. The bonus room over a garage is the single most common location in the second group.

The useful jurisdictional fact here is that the town supplies water and wastewater and nothing else. Electricity and gas belong to MLGW, so the account paying for the dehumidifiers is not the account that would show the leak. The town also runs its own building department rather than using the county's, and on the square there is a further review for anything that changes the exterior of a listed building. Owners there are better served asking about that review before ordering materials than afterward.

Collierville went from 7,839 people in 1980 to 31,872 in 2000 to 51,324 in 2020, so the housing is overwhelmingly 1985 to 2010 with a small nineteenth-century core around the square. The town square itself is a listed historic district, which changes what can be done to a building on it after a loss and how quickly.