Water, fire and mold damage restoration in Eads, Tennessee

Work at Eads falls under Shelby County, which is where the codes and licensing questions get settled. Unincorporated community in Shelby County; ZIP 38028 covers about 59 square miles and reaches across the line into Fayette County.

Twenty road miles east of downtown by US-64 or by Macon Road, out past the last of the subdivisions into large-lot country. The drive is easy; the last hundred yards frequently are not. Drives here run several hundred feet, are often gravel, are unlit, and after heavy rain will not carry a loaded truck without leaving ruts an owner will notice. Turning space near a house or a barn is the real limit rather than the width of the drive, and a photograph or a description on the first call decides which vehicle gets sent.

There is no dense area for losses to concentrate in, so they concentrate by building type instead. A main house, a detached garage or shop, a barn and sometimes a guest building all sit on one parcel, and the ones nobody enters daily are where a problem runs longest. Well houses and pump rooms are the specific case: a small enclosure with plumbing in it, no heat and no reason to open the door for months. On the ground itself, the low corner of a large lot near a creek bottom is where the crawl spaces read highest.

The ground here is loess, the same wind-blown silt that runs under the whole county, less than a tenth sand and less than a tenth clay, well drained and moderately permeable. That is why septic works at all on these lots, and why a drain field that begins to fail does so slowly rather than suddenly. Two consequences follow for an owner out here. There is no municipal sewer to blame and no utility to call about it, and while a building question goes to the joint county construction code office that serves unincorporated Shelby, septic and electrical permits come from the state, as they do everywhere in Tennessee.

Eads is large-lot rural residential and the numbers are unlike anywhere else in Shelby County: about 94.7 percent owner-occupied, a median age of 51.3, and a median home value around $463,600 across roughly 2,693 households. Big houses on big lots, often with private water or septic, long drives, and outbuildings that are worth as much as some houses elsewhere on this site.