A restoration company can be a huge blessing or a giant curse. After a disaster, you might not feel equipped or even know what to do with your property. If you experience a large disaster, one of the first things that needs to happen is to secure your property. Queue the restoration company! They are one call away from securing your property and the added benefit is they are generally a 24/7 operation for a crisis.
We were faced with several large holes. Our garage door was gone and the front window was broken. The metal front door was so warped from the heat that it wouldn’t close. The door leading from the garage to the house was relocated to the back patio by the firefighters. Even my back patio door had been dismantled. Huge problems. Even though my things were destroyed, I wasn’t okay walking away from my sad home without securing it.
Honestly, the morning of the fire, that wasn’t even on my mind until someone brought it up. What are you going to do with the house? Cry over it…I’m going to cry over it today. I just lost everything I own. My world as I knew it just hit an ugly black pause button. What are you going to do with the house today? We are going to get someone over here to board it up. Step 1: Secure your property, because all the other steps you will go through after to reclaim your life are going to be hard.
When To Ditch The Restoration Company
Knowing how much of a restoration company’s services to use can be a challenge. After our house fire, we worked with two different companies. They both ended up being thieves in more ways than one and we ended up firing both of them. Yes, the first company was great and came right out to board up all our large holes and secure the house. The week following they started to box up our belongings and move them to be cleaned. Our upstairs was a total loss and all of the upholstered items in the basement were ruined. It will never cease to amaze me how well smoke and soot pumped through our house that morning.
After the first week, I wanted to go back into the house to retrieve documents and my jewelry since I knew I wasn’t going to claim them on the insurance. I don’t own expensive pieces of jewelry, but it is all sentimental to me. My husband and I went into our master bedroom only to find that it had already been gone through. A necklace my grandmother had given me was gone. Many other items were missing, but nothing stung as badly as the necklace. I was barely holding myself together at that point and it felt like a slap in the face.
A couple days earlier, we had been in the room to retrieve some cash we had. One of the workers for the restoration company followed us up and was acting like they were taking photos, a task that had already been done. We suspect he was watching to see where we were looking for items. I loudly said that I was never coming back in the house again because I was really upset that day. I think they thought it was a green light to take what they wanted.
Things To Think About
It’s hard to let strangers into your home, even if it is completely black and broken, but to have a trust violated is a tough pill to swallow. Make sure you take the time to decide how much you really need a restoration company. One thing that happened is the company had a strong urgency to help us fix our house and had a way of making us feel like we could trust them. You don’t necessarily need to use a restoration company for the whole thing and honestly, I’m glad we fired both companies and found an amazing contractor to help us right what happened.
There are other options out there and if I could go back, I would have hired a professional moving company to pack up the house and move it to my own storage unit. I also would have started right away with a local reputable contractor to do the rebuild.
