Nobody ever wants to think about having a fire in their home, losing all of your possessions and treasured memories is unthinkable. Unfortunately house fires are still all too common and it’s something that families are dealing with everyday.  On top of the trauma of the fire itself you are faced with the huge task of going through your home to see what you can save or starting over completely.  Even if you were fortunate enough to have everyone safe and only suffer minimal damage you are still going to need to get someone in to help you with the damage.

 What to do if your house has extensive fire damage

Most of the work involved in cleaning up after a fire is spent cleaning up smoke and water damage.  The smoke and soot needs to come off the walls and be removed from your house.  Soot sticks to absolutely everything and you can find it in rooms that didn’t have a fire.  To get rid of the soot you’re going to need at the very least a heavy duty vacuum and this soot needs to be gone before you can even think about trying to get the smell of smoke out.  You will want to open all the windows and let some air in.  Here is a look at how soot is removed.

Getting the smell out

Getting the smell of smoke out of a fire damaged home is no easy task.  The smell of smoke will stay in carpets, furniture, clothes and your draperies all around your home.  They are all going to need to be cleaned and sanitized.  In order to fully get the smoke smell out you are going to need to use chemicals that breakdown the smoke molecules allowing for the odors to be removed.  A professional restoration company will bring in an ozone generator to take care of this for you.

It’s not just your furniture and carpet that can hold the odor of smoke it can also hide in your walls and if the smoke damage has penetrated the walls a restoration company may need to use a process called “thermal fogging”.  This process gets into your walls the same way the smoke does and it will then remove any trapped odors that are in there.  If you’re restoration company doesn’t use thermal fogging you could end up smelling smoke in your house for months after the fire has been cleaned up.

After your fire call a fire restoration company as soon as you can, the faster you act on the damage the more of your house you will be able to save.