The damage caused by a fire in the home often goes far beyond burned belongings. Even a minor blaze can leave water damage due to the methods used to put out the fire, smoke damage, and strong odors.
At Biodynamic, we understand that a return to normalcy depends on restoring your home to its pre-loss condition as quickly as possible. Our job isn’t just to make your home livable again; it’s to help you reclaim its original purpose as a safe space for you and your loved ones.
Below, we’ll discuss some of the essential steps taken during the fire damage recovery process, including repairing the damage and eliminating all traces of the fire. Let’s get your life back on track as soon as possible.
1. Call Your Insurance Provider
The first, and most important, step to take after a house fire is to ensure that all the residents of the building are accounted for. Make sure everyone is safe and has been given any necessary medical attention. Only after doing so can you focus on starting the process of restoring your property.
Begin by calling your insurance provider and submitting your claim. You’ll need to provide them with as much information as possible so that you can determine what is covered and how much the repairs are likely to cost. Request a report from the fire department as well. Your insurance company will need one for your insurance claim.
You can then contact Biodynamic so that we can get to work protecting and restoring your property.
2. Emergency Preservation
Typically, the repair and restoration process after a fire should be left in the hands of the professionals. While you may be tempted to comb through damaged areas yourself, attempting to save what you can, it can be very dangerous to do so. The structure could be compromised and at risk of collapsing, and the soot, smoke damage, and dirty water (from putting out the flames) could make you ill. Entering the home may also violate the terms of your homeowners’ insurance. Wait until the experts arrive. We’ll do everything in our power to save as many of your possessions as possible.
When we come to assess the extent of the damage, we begin with emergency preservation. This involves removing standing water to prevent further water damage. It also includes boarding up and tarping off affected areas to prevent the damage from spreading any further than it already has. This will also protect your home from potential theft, unauthorized access, and the environment.
We’ll also take an inventory of the contents of your home, taking note of what needs to be cleaned, what needs more extensive repair, and what isn’t salvageable. Your insurance company will need a copy of this information as well.
3. Assess Structural Integrity
During a fire, it’s not just the flames that are doing damage. The smoke that is generated can be just as destructive, superheating everything it touches and penetrating it with soot. The water that the fire department uses to battle a blaze can devastate the building nearly as much as the flames themselves. As a result of all of this, the area where a fire has taken place is often extremely fragile. For safety reasons, it’s necessary to address structural integrity problems as quickly as possible.
An important early step in the restoration process is to assess the structural integrity of the home, particularly the damaged areas. We’ll determine if anything is at risk of collapse. We may find that it’s necessary to replace some of the inner blocks of the walls if they have been damaged beyond repair.
4. Clean Up the Damage
After addressing the most immediate concerns, we’ll begin the process of returning everything to the way it was before the blaze. There is likely to be a great deal of cosmetic damage, such as burn marks, soot, smoke damage, and water stains. We’ll carefully remove signs of the fire from your home and personal items and apply new paint to the walls, as needed.
We work to ensure the process of cleaning is as non-invasive as possible. That’s why we use the most effective but gentle methods. Dry ice blasting is a state-of-the-art cleaning technique used by Biodynamic. Using solid carbon dioxide, which turns directly back into a gas at room temperature, we can effectively remove surface contaminants without affecting the original medium.
The cleaning process includes everything that has been affected by the fire, including particularly fragile items, such as clothing, pictures, and artwork. We utilize only the gentlest methods to remove ash, soot, and grime from these items to make them appear as good as new.
5. Odor Removal
One of the most challenging parts of fire damage recovery is odor removal. Smoke, of course, has an extremely strong, acrid odor that suffuses everything it comes into contact with. The particles get into every crack and crevice, and they are absorbed deeply by carpets, fabrics, wood, walls, and other porous hard surfaces. Removing this odor is an important but difficult step in restoring your home to its pre-loss condition.
We’ll use the necessary techniques to remove the smell of smoke from your home, including advanced technology that has only recently become available for restoring homes after fires. One of these is BioSweep, a process that utilizes photocatalytic oxidation to penetrate deeply into affected areas. It then generates hydrogen peroxide in vapor form, which destroys the source of the odors, eliminating them completely.
6. Rebuild
Of course, removing the obvious signs of fire damage is vital, but it’s not all that needs to be done. As we’ve mentioned, our goal is to restore your home to its pre-loss state, which means putting everything back to how it originally was, as much as possible. Anything that we have had to move to make repairs will be carefully returned to its original spot. After being cleaned, items will be meticulously placed exactly where you’d like them to be.
We understand how important this is to the restoration process because it’s crucial to your future peace of mind that all signs of the fire are erased. That’s why we’ll work closely with you to ensure you are satisfied with the end result. If you have questions or to ask for a quote on a restoration project, contact Biodynamic today.
