How Wendell Water Damage Restoration Was Born
Wendell Water Damage Restoration started in 2006, and the name itself tells you a lot about what we were after. Wendell is a friendly, old-fashioned first name. It sounds like a company that actually answers the phone. That was the point.
Blake Sorensen had spent enough time in the restoration trade to see a pattern that bothered him. Homeowners would come home to a flooded basement, call a company in a panic, and get a vague quote over the phone that doubled once a crew walked through the door. Or they’d sit through a four-hour arrival window, missing work, staring at a spreading water stain, with no idea when anyone would show up. The work itself was often fine. The experience around it was broken.
So the promise from day one was different: put the price in writing before any work starts. Send photos of the work, before and after. Give people a live arrival time they can actually trust. Nobody should have to wonder who’s coming, when they’ll get there, or what it’s going to cost. That idea became the backbone of everything we’ve built since, and it’s still how every Wendell Water Damage Restoration location operates today.
Blake Sorensen’s Personal Connection to the Damage Restoration Trade
Blake Sorensen didn’t grow up dreaming about water damage. Nobody does. He came into this work the way most people do: through someone else’s bad day.
The tradesman who trained him had a way of walking into a flooded house and calming the room down before touching a single piece of equipment. He’d kneel by the wet carpet, run his hand along the baseboard, and explain what was happening in plain words. The homeowner would stop pacing. That moment, the shift from panic to a plan, stuck with Blake more than any tool or technique. He realized the job wasn’t just about drying things out. It was about giving someone their home back when it felt like the ground had shifted under them.
He also remembers the smell. It’s the same in every water-damaged home, a damp, sour odor that gets into your clothes and stays there. For Blake, it stopped being unpleasant and became familiar. Almost a signal. The sooner you address it, the sooner a family gets to sleep in their own bed without that smell in the air.
What gets him out of bed is the phone-first homeowner who doesn’t want to play phone tag with a contractor. They want to tap a button, book the visit, track the tech to their door, and see photos of the work as it happens. That’s the customer Blake built this company for, and it’s the customer every location still serves. If he weren’t doing this, he’d probably be building something else with his hands. But he’d miss the moment when a homeowner sees their dried-out living room and realizes the worst is over. That part never gets old.
Meet Blake Sorensen – The Person Behind Every Job
Blake Sorensen is the Owner & Founder of Wendell Water Damage Restoration. He’s spent his entire career in the damage restoration trade, learning the work from the ground up. He’s been on the wet carpet. He’s run the equipment. He’s stood in crawlspaces that most people will never see and made them dry again.
What separates Blake from a corporate franchise technician is that he built the standard himself. Every location that carries the Wendell name works to The Relay Standard, a set of values Blake put in writing because he was tired of watching homeowners get treated like an inconvenience. He likes things that work properly, whether it’s a dehumidifier or a customer experience. When he’s not working, he’s usually fixing something or taking something apart to see why it failed. That curiosity is probably why he ended up in restoration in the first place.
Blake’s commitment is simple: every homeowner who calls Wendell Water Damage Restoration deserves to know exactly what’s happening in their home, what it will cost, and who’s doing the work. He holds the company to that every single day.
Our Promise to Homeowners
The Relay Standard isn’t a slogan. It’s five rules every Wendell Water Damage Restoration location works by.
Book in a tap, no phone tag. Give a live arrival time, not a four-hour window. Send photos of the work, before and after. Put the price in writing before we start. Text a digital invoice you can pay from the link.
Each of those rules came from a real frustration. The written price came after watching too many homeowners get a number on the phone and a different number at the door. The photo updates came from a customer who simply wanted proof that the drying equipment was actually running while she was at work. None of this is complicated. It’s just respect for the person whose home has been turned upside down.
Our Credentials
Every Wendell Water Damage Restoration location operates to the same baseline:
- State-licensed. Every pro working under our name is required to hold the license their state requires. No exceptions.
- Insured and bonded. Every location carries the coverage their state mandates, so homeowners are protected while work happens in their home.
- Multi-region experience. Our locations serve communities from Los Angeles to Miami, San Diego to Brooklyn, and the teams bring that accumulated experience to every job.
- A reputation rooted in visibility. We built our name on photo documentation, written pricing, and live arrival times. That’s what homeowners remember.
Why does this matter when you’re hiring someone to work in your home? Because the person standing in your living room with wet drywall and a moisture meter should be someone you can verify. Licensing means they’ve met the state’s bar. Insurance means you’re not on the hook if something goes wrong. And the visibility promises mean you’ll have a paper trail of everything that happened, from the first photo to the final invoice.
Rooted in the Communities We Serve
Wendell Water Damage Restoration is part of the Relay Home Co. family, but no two locations feel identical. The team serving Los Angeles knows how coastal moisture behaves differently from the team handling a burst pipe in Brooklyn. The crew responding in Miami understands hurricane-season humidity in a way the Oakland team doesn’t need to. Each location is an independent local business that agreed to work to The Relay Visibility Guarantee. That’s the connection: local knowledge, held to one consistent standard, everywhere from Queens to Long Beach to San Jose.
Written by Blake Sorensen, Owner & Founder at Wendell Water Damage Restoration, serving homeowners across the Relay Home Co. network since 2006.