A household disaster can be devastating, and in some cases traumatizing. A fire in your home, no matter how big or how small, can be good reason to “take a break” and “stay away” for a few days until you are recovered from this experience.
When you are ready to return home, there will be a mess waiting for you. Understanding this will help ease the frustration of all the work involved. (It is not safe to re-enter your home until you have permission from the local Fire Marshall.)
When there is a fire in your home, you will want to take pictures of the damage for your insurance company. It is helpful to have before and after pictures for comparison purposes. If your family has a disaster preparedness plan, one of the things you should do is store pictures of your house (inside and out and from all perspectives of each of the rooms) stored in a fire proof safe with other important documents and valuable items.
The before pictures aren’t too important, but will make an insurance report go through with less effort.
In a few ‘lucky cases’, a fire has caused minimal damage. However, restoration from a fire (whether it is a large fire that has destroyed nearly everything or a small fire that has destroyed little enough that your home is “worth restoring”) takes a lot of hard work and is best performed by experienced professionals.
Smoke and soot damage cleaning professionals will use a heavy duty vacuum cleaner to remove any soot from carpets, furniture, and draperies. Soot is a very oily substance, and should be removed from the ‘fabric-like’ textiles in your home first.
After cleaning your carpet, you should cover your floors with plastic to protect them from having any further soil tracked in. This is also under the assumption that your carpets and furniture can be saved. Smoke and soot damage cleaning includes ‘getting rid of’ anything that is damaged and may contain mold.
This is another reason why using a certified smoke and soot damage cleaning technician is a good idea. Not only may you not know what type of damage to look for, and an untrained individual may keep too many of their possessions, or get rid of things that don’t need to be disposed of.
Smoke and soot damage cleaning also involves removing the odor. If you are attempting a fire and soot damage cleaning without a professional, you should contact a technician for information on using “counteractants” (chemicals that break up smoke molecules to eliminate the odor of smoke).
Removing the odor of smoke and soot is not as simple as washing a load of laundry. The odor of smoke is embedded deep into a material, and different counteractants are needed for different types of material.
When a professional smoke and soot damage cleaning is taken place, removing the odor is usually done by placing items under a tent with an ozone generator.
Smoke can penetrate through walls, so a complete smoke and soot damage cleaning involves the cleaning of household ducts, where the odors can be trapped. A professional smoke and soot damage cleaning team will use a system known as thermal fogging to cleanse your ducts to remove the odor.
You may also need to replace insulation in your attic. The best way to find out what needs to be done, and how to do it, is to consult with a smoke and soot damage cleaning technician even if you plan on doing it yourself.
