Cleaning Fire Damage

If you have ever been involved in a fire you will have the memories for the rest of your life. If it is your home that has been burned in any way, your feelings of loss are distinct. When the fire first became apparent, did you grab what you could and leave the building? Did you just get out without being able to salvage anything? Or was the fire localized and confined to a small area and put out before the fire department arrived. So what do you know about cleaning fire damage?

It is imperative that you have smoke alarms in all bedrooms and on every floor around the house. Make it a point to put on your calendar a notation to change the smoke alarm batteries every six months when it is Daylight Savings Time. This will help you with a greater amount of time in the event of a fire in your home. Make sure that you have your junction box inspected by an electrician on a regular basis to make sure that your circuits are not overloaded and your circuit breakers are functioning properly.

Some dear friends of ours recently went through a devastating fire at their grandmother’s home. She was living alone and while she should have been in an assisted living facility she refused to leave her home in Bedford Heights. As the elderly are subject to issues with their memory, she neglected to turn off an appliance during the day and because of some faulty wiring with too many things plugged into a regular extension cord.

So it overheated and started a fire that burned inside the kitchen walls creating noxious fumes that eventually killed our friend’s grandmother. The autopsy showed little smoke inhalation, but she suffered second and third degree burns on over forty percent of her body. It must have been a horrible way to go. Because the fire was in the kitchen, neighbors did not see the smoke until it was too late for Grandma Mueller.

Once the firefighters arrived they quickly were able to extinguish the fire, but because it had been burning inside the walls, a great deal of plastic also burned creating a disgusting burnt plastic and petroleum based smell with a great deal of black soot covering a great number of things in adjacent rooms. Our friend and her father made the trip up to the Cleveland area to salvage what was most valuable prior to the home being boarded up for the insurance adjuster.

Because the home’s value was relatively low due to its age and size compared to other homes in the area, the insurance payout to return the home to usefulness was not enough to make the home able to be sold as a primary residence for immediate occupancy. They would have had to spend more than the insurance claim covered to make sure that cleaning the fire damage was complete.

Because much of the fire damage was confined to the kitchen, they had all the wiring, outlets and switches replaced. Cabinets were replaced with base level contractor cabinets so that the eventual buyer could either buy it as a rental and make some upgrades or eventually tear the house down as the lot was worth more to a new builder than the house was as is. Our friend and her father salvaged what pictures, household items and furniture they wanted and offered anything else in the house to our family.

We went up with a Suburban and enclosed trailer and brought back a glass china cabinet, an ornate buffet table, a large beveled mirror and another hutch cabinet. All were encased in oily black soot that had a heavy burnt plastic smell to it. We were not well versed in cleaning fire damage so we made some research into the subject and found that there are a number of commercial chemicals for cleaning fire damage, but they are not readily available to the average consumer.

The nice thing was that there are two readily available cleaners that work well in solution with water. Regular chlorine bleach and non scented ammonia in solution work very well in removing the visible traces of fire damage. The real issue over time is that with any wood product no matter how good the original finish was will retain some measure of the smoke smell for a long time after the product is cleaned.

It's all about fire restoration services folks in case you don't have the necessary time to do it yourself.