It only takes a wayward spark from an innocent little electrical strip to start a house fire. It was an electrical strip that started a fire in the basement of this $800,000 home in Idaho Falls. Luckily, the entire house wasn’t destroyed, but the basement was hammered and the two other floors of the house suffered soot and smoke damage.
Surveying the Disaster Zone
Walking down the scorched steps down into the basement, there was no place that hadn’t been at least darkened by the effects of the fire. The banister that used to line the stairs could no longer stand to support any weight. Most of the supports were now too short to even connect to the railing to be effective and in some places they were completely gone.
The painted walls were stripped, the concrete foundations of the house readily evident in places where they weren’t so obvious before. Where the walls of the hallway once stood there were only the wooden studs left. Darkened by the soot and charred by the fire, the basement was nothing short of a complete mess.
Soot covered the entire scene in a hideous black blanket, as if trying to bury away the disaster slightly hidden beneath its thin layer. White rectangular spaces peered out of the blackness, marking the places where pictures and decorations once hung on the still surviving walls.
What used to be carpet was now an obscure and singed mess of melted fibers, encrusted with the ever-present darkness covering the room. Burned couches and crumbling exercise equipment only served to remind everyone of what used to be. There’s no longer furniture, decorations, electronics and appliances down here. Now its only debris to be cleaned up, moved out, and taken away to a dump.
The bricks and the cement seem to be the only true survivors of the fire, unyielding but darkened nonetheless. Even upstairs, though the signs of the fire aren’t as drastic as the basement, it still needs fixing from the damaging smoke.
Yet this is not the end of this poor basement and house. Tobin Cleaning and Restoration was called.
Local Idaho Falls Redemption and Renewal
After the Tobin crew spent hours upon hours for 4 and a 1/2 months working on this expensive house, it looked better than it ever had before. The basement took on a crisp newness with such vitality as if to show the world that not even a fire could bring it low. There are fresh cabinets in the upstairs kitchen just the way the owners had always wanted and wide open space in their basement instead of the enclosed and unneeded hallways that were originally there.
From painted trim to bright white banisters, from the brand new basement kitchenette to the custom stair handrails; this house had been beaten down to sooty, dirty bareness and rose from disaster to become fresh and revitalized to perfection.
Idaho Fall’s own Tobin Cleaning and Restoration was able to meet with the owners pre-reconstruction to get an idea of what they wanted to see happen. Then members of the Tobin crew drew up blueprints and sketches to show what they were going to do with the mess and replace it with. As work progressed, as carpets were laid, and walls coated, the Tobin crew were involved in some very high-end carpentry work and custom designed features.
In the end, the owners of this beautiful house were able to get what they had always wanted, coming out on top in a ‘could-have-been-more-disastrous’ fire. Tobin Cleaning and Restoration not only cleaned, painted, re-carpeted, and swept away all signs of disaster, they did the minor remodeling that the owners were wanting in order to transform their home into their dream home.
Qualified Beyond Expectation
Certified in Inspection, Cleaning, and Restoration as well as in Applied Structural Drawing, Tobin Cleaning and Restoration was able to completely provide all that was wanted to make this house a marvel.