How Tidemark Water Damage Tampa Was Born in Tampa
We first saw the real cost of water damage in a house off Bayshore Boulevard, where a family had been living with a slow leak behind their kitchen wall for months. The restoration company they’d hired brought in fans, handed them a bill, and left a week later. The wall still smelled. The baseboard stayed swollen. The invoice stayed paid.
Rick Sumner walked that job with us and kept coming back to the same thing: the line on the drywall. The tide mark. The company that left had dried the visible damage and stopped exactly at that water line. This is the failure that made us bring Tidemark Water Damage Restoration to Tampa. We’re built by the Cedarwell family, a name that has carried the damage restoration trade for years, and our whole approach comes from one promise: we find the tide mark and dry past it.
Opening a Tampa location wasn’t about planting a flag. It was about putting a team here that would treat a flooded house on Davis Islands the same way they’d treat their own. That means a written price before any work starts, shoe covers at the door, and nobody leaving until the moisture meter says the job is actually done. Tampa gets humid, houses hold water in strange places, and too many families have learned the difference between a fan and a real dry-out only after the mold showed up. We wanted to change that here.
Rick Sumner’s Personal Connection to the Damage Restoration Trade
Rick Sumner came to this work through the trades, the way a lot of people do, by carrying tools and asking questions. Early on, he spent his days in attics and crawlspaces around the Tampa Bay area, moving supply lines and checking joists in houses that were older than his grandparents. The first time he walked into a water loss that had been sitting for three days, the smell hit him before the door was fully open. Wet cellulose, damp drywall, the sweet-sour note that means mold is already thinking about starting. The homeowner was standing in her living room in socks, holding a mop, still trying to clean up water that had already gone somewhere else, into the slab, up the sheetrock, behind the trim.
That image stayed. What got him out of bed the next morning, and every morning since, is the knowledge that most water damage is already worse than it looks by the time anyone calls. A leak under a kitchen sink in Lutz can travel through the subfloor and into the joists before a single drop hits the tile. A supply line that bursts in Seminole Heights at 2 a.m. is not a puddle problem; it’s a humidity problem, an air-quality problem, a family-displaced problem. Rick learned to look for the tide mark, the line water leaves behind, because that line tells you where the visible damage ends and the hidden damage begins. Most crews stop at the line. That’s the whole difference.
What this work means to him personally is simpler than the technical side. He likes walking out of a house knowing a family can go back to normal, that the air is clean, that the floors aren’t quietly rotting. If he weren’t doing this, he’d probably still be in a trade, fixing something with his hands. Woodworking, maybe. Something where you can see the result at the end of the day. That’s what restoration gives him, on the good days: a finished job, a dry house, a homeowner who doesn’t have to think about water anymore. The bad days are the ones where someone waited too long to call. Those are the jobs that taught him to be honest about cost upfront, because waiting never makes it cheaper.
Meet Rick Sumner – The Person Behind Every Job
Rick Sumner is the Owner & Founder of Tidemark Water Damage Tampa. His background is in the building trades, with hands-on field experience in moisture mapping, structural drying, and the quiet detail work that separates a real restoration from a cosmetic one. He’s spent years learning what water does in Florida houses: how humidity moves through a chase, why stucco holds moisture differently than siding, why a tile floor can be bone dry while the mud bed underneath is saturated. That training comes from the field, from working under the standards the industry expects, and from watching what happens when corners get cut.
What makes Rick different from a franchise technician is that he’s not passing through. This is his home market. He knows that a house in Palma Ceia deals with water differently than a house in Westchase, that block construction and frame construction dry on different schedules, and that a family with kids and dogs cares just as much about how the crew leaves the house as whether the meter reads dry. He’s the one who set the local expectations: clean floors before we leave, quiet tools when the kids are asleep, pet-safe products where there’s a choice. That’s personal, not policy. Every job we do in Tampa carries his name, and he treats that like it means something.
Our Promise to Tampa Homeowners
The Cedarwell Care Promise is the spine of everything we do, and it’s not a slogan we came up with for a website. It’s a set of actions: shoe covers and drop cloths inside the house, quiet tools when the kids are asleep, pet-safe products where there is a choice, a photo of the clean-up before we leave, and a written price before any work starts. That last part matters most to Rick. No homeowner should ever be standing in their own flooded kitchen wondering what the bill is going to be. We tell you what we’ll protect in the house and how, we give you the price range in dollars, and we don’t start until you’ve agreed. That’s the whole contract between us and the family standing in wet socks.
Our Credentials
When a crew walks into your house after a water loss, you’re not just hiring a service. You’re inviting people into your home at its worst moment. Here’s what we hold ourselves to:
- Licensed and insured: Every pro working under our name is required to hold the license and insurance their state requires. We don’t cut corners on this, because you shouldn’t have to wonder whether the person drying your walls is qualified to touch them.
- Industry-standard training: Our team follows the standards set by organizations like the IICRC and RIA. We use equipment from Dri-Eaz and other proven names in the field. That means the moisture readings we give you are real numbers, not guesses.
- Local accountability: This is a Tampa branch, independently owned and operated, led by Rick Sumner. When you call, you reach a live coordinator who connects you with the local team. When we make a promise, it’s a promise from people who live here.
- Strong local reputation: We’ve built trust in Tampa the slow way, one house at a time. We’d rather show you our work than quote you a review count.
Here’s why each of those matters. A license means the person in your house met a minimum standard of competence. Insurance means if something goes wrong, you’re not left holding the bill alone. Training means the meter that says your wall is dry is a meter being read by someone who knows what the number means. And local accountability means you can find us again if you need to. That’s the one that keeps us honest.
Rooted in Tampa
We work across Tampa, St. Petersburg, Riverview, Plant City, Wesley Chapel, Palm Harbor, Tarpon Springs, Lutz, New Port Richey, Pinellas Park, Dunedin, and Lake Magdalene. Those aren’t just service areas on a map. They’re places where we know the houses, the soil, the way afternoon thunderstorms roll through in the summer and leave standing water where it shouldn’t be. We don’t pretend to be from every town. This location is an independent local business that agreed to work to the Cedarwell Care Promise. That’s what rooted means here, showing up for the people who live around us, doing the work like we’re going to see them at the grocery store afterward. Because we probably will.
Written by Rick Sumner, Owner & Founder at Tidemark Water Damage Tampa, serving Tampa and the surrounding communities.