Document freeze drying comes in as an effective solution when there has been a fire or flood damage incurred by some of your belongings. This process helps restore and renew your documents, eliminating the pain of losing your irreplaceable documents, old pictures, or rare books. There are however, other situations where freeze drying comes in handy even when there is no emergency like fire or flood damage. I recently inherited a few boxes of old books. Upon closer inspection, I realized that I had in my possession some very valuable old books - couple of first editions and out of print books. Any book collector would find these new possessions a gem.

However, the books had not been properly stored and while they were dry, they were dusty and a lot of the pages were yellowed. Not all of these books were valuable and I had to choose the ones I needed to be restored. I ended up having to take the books to two separate places. One company focused on flood damage freeze drying, apparently there was some flood damage to a few of the books and the other company focused on the actual restoration. I had the books freeze dried, rebound, and was able to have some of the torn pages repaired also. Like I said, some of the books weren't worth much as far as collections go, but some of them were. It was important that I have them restored for me and so they could be passed on to future generations in my family. We all have a love of books.

Tucked inside one of the books that went through some flood damage was an old will from a great, great, great, great family member - honestly I think it was more greats than those. The will was handwritten and very informal. The woman who had written it made no bones about dividing her land between her daughters and leaving her sons to fend for themselves. It has no real great value; my family was not of famous influential people. But it was interesting for me and the family history. The flood damage company that handled this document was able to restore it, removed the yellowing quite a bit, fixed the tears, and sealed it to prevent further damage. I don't know if they freeze dried that particular document, I didn't bother to ask. I do know that they were able to restore and save every document and book I brought to them.

There are times when we come across documents that we want to preserve and freeze dry. In the event of flood damage, it comes as a great way to resolve the problem. It can be costly however, so we need to choose which ones we should have restored by professionals. Most companies deal with large quantities but there are also flood damage companies willing to work with just a few items here or there as it happened in my situation.