How To Clean Severe Fire & Smoke Damage

Do you have a fire damaged house and have no idea how and where to start cleaning?

We will show you how we do it, but first you must understand....

It is important to call a professional restorer to do the job otherwise you may be wasting your time and causing more damage to your property. Also It may be unsafe for you to do it yourself, especially if it is severe fire damage like the property below. Visit the clean trust website to find your local professional restorer. 

Ok thats out of the way, this is how we do it:

Let me use an example. We completed this job this week, and the owner was extemely happy with the job.

These are before and after pictures of a fire damage property we cleaned out.

The first step was to remove all the damaged contents and clean the walls as well as remove the non-recoverable plasterboard (dry wall) on the ceiling.

Here is the cleaning of the ceiling in progress. We generally use a dry chem sponge (pictured right) to clean the soot from the ceilings. Ceilings are more porous than walls, so it can stain if cleaned with water. We purchase our chem sponges from Prochem Australia.

Walls (see picture below) are generally cleaned with a high alkaline cleaner such as Prochem Renovate also purchased from Prochem Australia. Recoverable plaster walls will be bleed sealed and repainted after they have been cleaned.

Here is the cleaning of the bathroom in progess:

Cleaning of the soot from the tiles is usually completed using a high pressure hot water extraction machine. These days, more restoration companies use a process called dry ice blasting to clean bathrooms. In this case we applied the chemical, scrubbed the tiles and used a a Prochem Legend machine high pressure water and extraction to finish the cleaning.

It some cases it can be impossible to remove the smoke odour from ceiling insulation. So we removed all insulation from the property.

This is a before and after picture of a garage which was the source of the fire. Notice how we have completely stripped out non-recoverable building components.

The work remaining involves work carried out by trades including builders, plasterers, and painters. Which is work best left to the professionals.

In future we will explore the different technologies used in removing odour from properties as well as how to packout and clean the affected contents from the property. 

Further Reading:
Removing Odour from Clothing - http://extension.missouri.edu/p/GH145
Handling Smoke Damage after a Fire - http://disaster.ifas.ufl.edu/PDFS/CHAP13/D13-17.PDF 

More Before and After Pictures