Rebuilding After A Home Fire
If you’ve never experienced it, it can truly be a devastating experience. The “it” I’m talking about, is the loss of your home due to fire. While I’ve never experienced it personally myself, and hope that I never do, my wife did. Fire damage restoration is not a fun activity. While a young child in her early teens, her entire family was away on a family vacation down in Florida. Burglars broke into their home, and either on purpose, or by accident set it on fire. Apart from losing many irreplaceable family possessions the also lost the family pet cat. Not to mention, their vacation was totally ruined, and for the next few months their lives were completely disrupted. They had to return home and live in a hotel for weeks, while their home was restored.
The restoration process was not handled all that well, and technologies back then for rebuilding and restoring a burned home weren’t quite as advanced as they are today. Instead of replacing much of the structure, they left a lot of it in place, and applied a chemical sealant over large sections. For years later, the house never seemed to be totally free of the smell of burned wood. I think they would have rather the insurance company just knocked the entire place down and started from scratch. It would have been more expensive, and insurance really didn’t want to spend that much money.
To this day, my wife is still paranoid about leaving certain appliances on in the house. Hair curlers, and clothes drying machines in particular. One lesson her family learned from the experience was to have adequate insurance for fire damage restoration when shopping for insurance. Make sure you read the fine print here, and make sure you have some say in how any possible restorations of your home will be handled. As well, they learned how a fire damaged home can also include substantial smoke, heat and water damage. The long term effects have to be considered here. You don’t want just a band-aid to be applied to your home. It is likely your single largest investment. Sections of the home that have been damaged should really be replaced, and not salvaged or repaired. While it may be hard to resist the temptation, don’t try to do any repairs until your insurance company has had a good look first. Or, at the very least, talk to your insurance company to get permission first.
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